Chippewa Valley Schools
School of Choice Recruitment
Awareness & Enrollment Campaign
The Objective
With the uncertainty of schools starting in the fall of 2020, including parent concerns about student safety and quality of learning (either face-to-face or remote learning) during the pandemic, we wanted to make parents in Macomb County aware of Chippewa Valley Schools (CVS) as a good option. The campaign was focused on creating and raising awareness for school of choice and the value behind choosing CVS.
Initial Social Media Campaign
This was a short time frame campaign that needed to get traction fast. We determined that a Facebook and Twitter campaign would reach the optimum audience in a way that meet our time and budget parameters.
Our initial push used dynamic ads, pairing multiple creative image designs with different message options, mixing and matching them to determine which combinations resonated best with our audiences.
Phase 2: Retargeting
Once we narrowed down which options drove the most engagement and traffic to the CVS website, we turned our focus to the audience that interacted with our ads. We retargeted everyone who had engagement with our social ads or visited our targeted pages on the CVS website: the home page, the school of choice page and the enrollment pages.
At this point the campaign was split into two groups. Group 1 received additional dynamic ads continuing to mix together more design and message options to further test what worked best. Group 2 targeted specific audiences with the winning ads from phase one.
Adding Video into the Mix
During Phase 2 of the campaign, we created video Facebook and Twitter ads. We had two campaigns using video about Chippewa Valley Schools paired with the messaging that performed the best during phase one. These campaigns also utilized dynamic messaging to further refine the messaging that drove the best results.
We targeted two different audiences with our video ads. The first audience was a general audience targeting voters in the Macomb County zip codes, ages 25 – 65. The second audience was retargeting those who had either visited the website pages or had watched the videos. The goal for the retargeted group was to further raise awareness of CVS and school of choice, while providing the deadline to enroll, creating some urgency for parents who had to yet to make the decision.
The Results
Through all our A/B testing, we found that the dynamic ads and video ads performed the best. The messaging that resonated best in the initial campaign was messaging that combined a quality message, a reassurance message and an urgency message together: “Premier academics. Elite athletics. Safe and welcoming neighborhood schools. Registration deadline approaching fast!”
Retargeting the same audience with new dynamic content to keep CVS top of mind, while engaging them with new messaging and images to reengage them performed the best by a large margin.
When retargeting people who came to the enrollment pages or school of choice page, the images that pulled the best were related to the current situation – one showed students in class wearing masks and the other showed a student remote learning at home. The message that performed the best related to the key grades when a student is entering a new school: “Is your child entering Kindergarten, 6th or 9th grade? Now is the time to choose Chippewa!”
The campaign engaged our key audiences, raising awareness and driving traffic to key pages on the CVS website. By continuously testing dynamic creative, we were able to continuously adjust images and messaging to keep a high level of engagement. The results also provide us with good insights into what works best with our target audience, giving the next campaign a stronger starting point, knowing what types of ad creative gets the best results.
