Cranefield College & Academy

• THE CHALLENGE

  Cranefield’s courses are designed to equip working professionals with knowledge and skills relevant to careers in the Industry 4.0 economy. The business environment continuously changes and Cranefield’s courses adapt to the rapidly moving industry. This means that the leadership and management education provided by Cranefield has a high price point in comparison to numerous other educational institutions. 

  When we began working with Cranefield College, we focused on social and digital advertising for the post-grad courses. Our organic and paid advertising competed with widely-known establishments offering remote post-grad courses.

• THE SOLUTION

  It was imperative to get the USP across clearly: Cranefield College continuously improves the quality of all its learning programs and services to meet both the industry and students’ evolving needs, to add maximum economic and social value to society. 

   

  At a later stage, we worked with our client to split Cranefield College (undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctorate courses) from Cranefield Academy (short courses) on social media platforms. The Academy is targeted at an entirely different market, requiring a more vibrant, approachable, and less formal strategy.

• THE DELIVERY

  For Cranefield College, we focused design and copy on the target market. The tone of voice is professional and clean, but compelling. We redesigned their print advertising, incorporated display campaign banner Ads, and managed the social media across multiple channels. We have modernised their prospectuses, keeping an executive look that appeals to prospective employers looking to upskill their staff.

  We then designed a completely new CI, website, and social platforms for Cranefield Academy. We incorporated certain design aspects, making sure the Academy was still recognisable as part of the Cranefield College brand, but with a fresher look, aimed at the younger market. The focus was showcasing short courses for those with a matric diploma. This market required a vibrant, approachable, and less formal brand than College. After creating the branding, we built and integrated a brand new website for the Academy into the existing College website. It was designed to be fully mobile and user-friendly for the target audience of mainly mobile browsers. We then designed an advertising strategy across social media and Google Adwords to push more visits to the new website and encourage online sign-ups for courses.

• THE RESULT

  Since we took over the advertising of Cranefield College, newsletter sign-ups and the database of registered students have increased by 21%. We introduced Reel content to the social media campaigns at the end of 2022 and these have earned an average viewing of (+-200). Organic engagement on LinkedIn, our main audience platform, sits high above the benchmark of 1.2% for the education industry, and at its lowest, hits 3.7%, reaching a high of 16.8%. The CTR rarely drops below 1.5% and mostly reaches above 2%, where the education industry benchmark sits at 0.65%.

   

  The goal for Cranefield Academy was simple; to gain more online course sign-ups. It was imperative that our advertising content resonated with young adults stepping into the professional world, and looking to gain a head start in their chosen industry. Compared to all businesses in the same category on Instagram and Facebook, our content interactions sit above the 75th percentile for this metric. Our post-interactions for Facebook sit at 749, whereas the average for the industry is 34.