Nichols College provides dynamic, career-focused business education programs to support the individual and professional needs of undergraduate and graduate level students. A small college with a main campus in Dudley, MA, and three satellite locations in Worcester, Auburn, and Devens, Nichols needed to update its brand to emphasize its business focus and set it apart from other colleges in the area.
The College wanted to develop a marketing campaign that would reflect its new branding strategy and broaden its reach to prospective students. It was also getting ready to redesign its website and wanted to increase qualified traffic to the site from Google and other search engines, directories, and higher education portals such as Peterson’s.
Bergeron Creative decided to develop two advertising campaigns—one geared to undergraduates, and the other to graduate students and working professionals interested in an MBA program—that featured Nichols’ new branding. We conducted several focus groups that helped the College understand what prospective students were looking for in a business program, and what they responded to in terms of branding and messaging.
We used the results to create a humorous, edgy ad campaign for undergraduates that ran for a year. The series of ads translated business phrases and jargon students often hear into the undergraduate programs and experience Nichols provides. To maximize the campaign’s reach and frequency, we rotated a variety of headlines throughout the year. This also kept the campaign fresh with the target audience. The second campaign had a different tone that blended the goals of graduate students and working professionals with the MBA programs Nichols offers.
When the College was ready to redesign its website, we analyzed existing Internet search traffic to get a better sense of its online rankings and competitive positioning. We then developed a list of targeted keywords that served as the foundation of the search engine optimization strategy, and used the competitive information to create a web positioning strategy.
By linking humor to the institution’s identity, the award-winning advertising campaign increased enrollments and strengthened the College’s brand image. It also had an overwhelmingly positive response from current and prospective students at all levels. “Everyone thinks the ads are great and that we spent a fortune on them,” says our client, the Director of the Evening Division. “Of course, we didn’t.”
The SEO campaign gave Nichols the information the College needed to strengthen its presence on the Web. We provided the College with a complete report that showed it how to incorporate search engine-friendly tactics into its website redesign. The report outlined the keywords, category opportunities on directories, and link development strategies that would drive the qualified traffic Nichols wanted. We also identified links from higher education portal sites that contained incorrect information about the College. Left unchecked, this oversight may have deterred students from visiting the site.
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