The mission
Every year, private schools jump into the race to recruit new students. Major institutions may have waiting lists that can reach ten times the number of available places, but for smaller establishments like Westmount’s La Villa Sainte-Marcelline school for girls from kindergarten to grade eleven, recruitment can be quite a challenge. Our mandate was clear: to get the word out about La Villa and its advantages as a small school, to attract families to the open house day, and to maximize admission requests.
The solution
The objective of our strategic approach was not only to work at every level of the conversion funnel, but also to implement perennial tactics to make the media investments pay off, as the decision cycle for choosing a school lasts two years or more. Thus, we developed a communication axis around the “human size” of the school, then we rolled it out in radio, geo targeted out-of-home and targeted placements (TikTok and LinkedIn) to raise awareness. To inspire prospects to sign up for the open house, we made online placements (SEM, Facebook and Instagram) that led to an optimized destination page to capture contact information on prospects. Then we topped off this integrated campaign with a newsletter that appealed to the different prospect segments with the goal of recommendation, engagement or recruitment. Finally, with our strategy of complete traceability, we were able to follow each initiative’s impact closely. This multichannel campaign reached not only families already familiar with La Villa, but also those likely to be interested in the girls’ school’s values and unique environment.
The result
The awareness placements caught the attention of target audiences and intrigued them to drive a large number of qualified visitors to the site despite the very limited potentially interested audience, and the destination pages with value-added content per grade level maximized prospect acquisition. Various optimizations were also implemented over the course of the campaign to get the most out of the communication opportunities.
« By collaborating with clients like La Villa Sainte-Marcelline over the long term – nearly 10 years now – we’ve developed an expertise in their field, learned from past campaigns and come up with much more relevant strategic recommendations. It’s a pleasure to work with so much data and insights on our clients, and extremely gratifying to know that we greatly contribute to their success and receive their complete trust in return. »
Marie-Doulce Corby
Marketing Communications Strategist
Over nearly 10 years of recruitment campaigns for La Villa Sainte-Marcelline, plenty of messages and creatives have been tested to understand the impact of the texts, visuals and colours. A great variety of online placements (Google Search, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Demand Gen) and offline placements (radio, newspapers, urban out-of-home) have also been tested to discover the most effective marketing mix. The most recent campaign’s messages were warmly welcomed not only by the potential prospects but also by the parents of current students, thus amplifying the sense of belonging at the school.
An effective and measurable newsletter strategy boosted La Villa Sainte-Marcelline’s engagement and prospect conversion for this last campaign, dramatically multiplying the performance of its lead generation investments. The newsletter open rate - between 58% and 100% depending on the mail-outs – testifies to the relevance of the recruited prospects, while the click-through rate of up to 20% demonstrates the relevance of the message personalization and fine prospect segmentation when it came to addressing the different grade levels’ considerations.
