The Background

CollegiateParent creates essential parent guides in partnership with college admission, alumni and parent-program offices. They also manage their own independent content site, which features helpful articles and editorials for parents of students from high school through college graduation.

CollegiateParent approached BK about strengthening their digital marketing. They had years of experience creating print publications for colleges and parents but had recently launched a new site, www.collegiateparent.com, to reach their audience digitally. One main area of focus was growing their email list of subscribers.

The Execution

We used a data-driven approach to create detailed audience personas to guide our content strategy. These personas gave us a clearer picture of the parents we were speaking to, their primary questions and concerns, and their position on the buyer funnel.

We used our persona findings to draft content assets that spoke directly to these questions and concerns, specific to key high school/college milestones.

To promote the content assets, we created dedicated landing pages on the site and switched many general signup forms throughout the site to point to them.

We also targeted specific audiences on Facebook with Lead Ads. These ads promoted the content assets and allowed users to download them in exchange for basic contact information, which was entered without ever leaving the Facebook platform.

Objective

• To attract new readers to the site.
• To grow the email list through signups.

The Result

The parent personas gave us accurate information about our audience and as a result, our content was laser-focused on what mattered most to them. After a 6-month period, we saw the number of on-site users who visited multiple pages in per session jump by 71.82%.

After the same period, our average Cost Per Click for Facebook ads fell by 68.57%. Our Lead Ads, which ran for about 4.5 of the 6 month period, generated 3,622 leads at an average cost of just $1.30 per lead.

Combined with our on-site forms, CollegiateParent’s email list nearly tripled in 6 months—from 3,366 to 9,669 (+187.25%).