St. Mary’s University

A Marketing Story by Snaptech Marketing about St. Mary's University

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St. Mary's University

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Challenge

Where They Were St. Mary’s University is on route to becoming and branding themselves as one of the finest private universities in the Southwest. As an institution, they strike a powerful balance between traditional values and innovative education that sets up their students to thrive in the modern workplace. Goals in hand, St. Mary’s turned to developing a complementary messaging strategy for the public announcement of their comprehensive campaign. After crunching the numbers, St. Mary’s knew that they would need to raise a substantial amount to fund their advancements. Their team developed “The Defining Moment” campaign, which focuses on showcasing how educational opportunity allows students to reach turning points in their life. In other words, their defining moment. With their campaign theme finalized, St. Mary’s realized that they did not have the in-house capability to effectively showcase and broadcast their campaign online. In order to raise awareness of The Defining Moment campaign and its comprehensive scope, they would have to hire a strategic digital partner to help them reach their marketing goals.

Solution

Where They Are Now St. Mary’s has nearly reached their funding goal through The Defining Moment campaign. Using Snaptech as their digital partner, they were able to strategically broadcast their message across the web, reaching target audiences and raising brand visibility. The Defining Moment campaign as a whole was nominated for an American Marketing Association Award in San Antonio. St. Mary’s continues to work with Snaptech on the digital front to raise program awareness and acquire new students. We knew that we would have to target stakeholders holistically across the web to meet them where they may be. After working with St. Mary’s to hone in on the demographics of people who were most likely to contribute, we put together a campaign strategy using YouTube advertising, the Display Network and Facebook. These campaigns were built to maximize impressions, reaching as much of our segmented audience as possible.

Online Advertising

Results

We utilized Google’s new BrandLift campaigns to measure St. Mary’s effectiveness on YouTube. BrandLift campaigns follow a two-step process: 1. YouTube cuts an audience into two groups, a control, and an experimental audience. They then show the experimental audience the ad. 2. Days later, YouTube serves a survey pre-video to both audiences and measures the brand awareness lift in the experimental group. The result? Snaptech was able to design data-driven campaigns that exceeded St. Mary’s branding goals, achieving over 23% BrandLift. Their ads displayed over 3 million times on display and 2.3 million times on Facebook while driving over 25,000 video views.