Student Recruitment Program Background

Using affinity-specific content, Storylift gave Education Corporation of America (“ECA”) one of the largest for-profit colleges in the U.S., a jolt in their enrollment numbers at over 60 campuses nationwide.

The for-profit education industry in the U.S. enrolled almost 2.5 million students in the U.S. every year. With over 2,800 for-profit colleges competing both with each other and with some 4,000 additional not-forprofit institutions, the competition for these students was intense. Like many such industries, for-profit schools rely heavily on traditional Paid Search and third-party Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) vendors —many of whom sell leads to multiple schools. This lead generation model results in a self-defeating cycle of institutions essentially bidding against themselves because their Paid Search and digital budgets are being deployed on the same intent markers and in the same markets that their Pay-per-Lead (“PPL”) vendors are also bidding.

APPROACH

Storylift utilized its proprietary technology to create content and target potential enrollees at a higher point in the consideration funnel generally without cannibalizing clients’ current Search and PPL volumes. Storylift’s patented technology allowed them to create and target content that is relevant to people’s aspirations and affinities. By engaging with prospective students at their pain points rather than when they have already made the decision to look for a post secondary education, Storylift was able to create a generally exclusive potential student list for ECA that results in lower cost enrollments than some of their established channels.

Impact

When Storylift began working with the ECA, the client was generating minimal enrollments through their social channels. While working with ECA, Storylift drove over 11% of the client’s total enrollment volume through this channel. This incremental volume helped ECA outpace general industry trends for enrollment while maintaining competitive cost per acquisition rates.

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