The project: a paid social media awareness campaign (with custom landing page) for the Diploma in Canadian Studies program offered through UVic Continuing Studies.
The problem: not enough people know that UVic offers a Diploma in Canadian Studies. This has led to low application numbers. People may know about individual courses in the program, but in order to take more than one course, you have to apply to the program. Also: at the moment, the majority of the courses in this program are offered exclusively on-campus, which means the target market for the program needs to live within driving distance of the UVic campus.
The goal: raise awareness of the Canadian Studies program among people within driving distance of the UVic campus.
Target audience: current UVic undergraduate students, new Canadians and people who just want to learn more about Canada. Since the program is offered on-campus, our target market for the campaign was primarily local (Vancouver Island). The Creative Brief noted that the unique selling proposition of this program is: become a better Canadian citizen.
• Content creation/copywriting of the ads and the landing page
• Landing page creation (in conjunction with the web designer)
• Facebook ad campaign (ad creation and campaign management)
This campaign ran from the beginning of July to the beginning of August 2015.
The Facebook ads generated nearly 1,000 visits to the landing page, which is very good considering the small geographic area we were targeting.
The most popular ad, targeting expats and new Canadians living in Victoria, generated 500 clicks to the landing page and had a Facebook relevance score of 9. It also had more than 50 “likes”, 20 “shares” and numerous comments about how great (or not great) it is to live in Canada.
This campaign performed much better than the client expected. It’s still too soon to tell if the new awareness translated into program applications, but the goal of the campaign was to generate awareness, which it definitely did.
