Leveraging LinkedIn for Retargeting and Nurturing

Improving Application Rates with LinkedIn

A graduate law school established in 1989 and has been a beacon of excellence in higher education. The school offers a range of part-time and full-time programs, empowering students to immerse themselves in specific areas of legal study with flexibility. This approach ensures that students acquire a comprehensive and directly applicable legal education, preparing them for successful careers.

“ EducationDynamics is always seeking optimization opportunities and driving for the best results for their clients. The EDDY team understands that marketing is not just about finding and creating leads, and that LinkedIn is a platform that offers an opportunity for engagement across the student journey. Once leads are captured, either through LinkedIn or other platforms, it is critical to continue the conversation. With the help of EducationDynamics and LinkedIn, the graduate law school has been able to continue the conversation with LinkedIn’s Conversation Ads product, allowing the school to speak directly to prospective students who were yet to begin the application process. Our happiest clients install this prospecting and nurture process to drive the best results. The end result has been better engagement and more enrollments with the help of EducationDynamics and the LinkedIn Ads platform.“

Matt Loonam

Senior Account Executive – Education Vertical
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

The Challenge

The graduate law school has been working with EducationDynamics for several years, successfully helping the school rapidly grow enrollment through digital marketing and enrollment management services. While both performance marketing efforts and enrollment coaching efforts have been consistently overperforming goals, the EDDY team recognized there was a greater opportunity for engaging prospective students who were already considering the school’s masters programs.

LinkedIn is widely recognized as the leading professional social media platform, and the school already enjoyed a positive presence on the platform. As an advertising platform, LinkedIn was being leveraged to identify and engage with prospective students. Through EDDY’s long-term strategic relationship with LinkedIn, a collaborative initiative was launched to test new strategies for increasing program applications while maintaining existing budgets.

The Objective

• Reevaluate LinkedIn’s role in the student engagement strategy and regain the platform’s status as a high-performing channel for engagement and inquiries.
• Optimize budget allocation that aligns with performance goals by evaluating ROI across the platform’s various advertising ad types.
• Improve the school’s cost-per-application on LinkedIn.
• Increase overall applications and enrollments.

The Solution

To address the immediate challenge, EducationDynamics reallocated budget from LinkedIn and other platforms, and implemented a multi-faceted solution that leveraged the power of retargeting and diversified ad types. Within the first three months, EducationDynamics initiated a series of campaign tests with differing ad types utilizing known prospective students who had previously interacted with the university’s website.

At the conclusion of the initial campaign period, the results spoke for themselves. By leveraging conversation ads targeted at strategically identified audiences, EducationDynamics was able to significantly increase the number of applications while also improving the school’s cost-per-application. EDDY further expanded the targeted audience to leverage LinkedIn’s conversation ads as a nurturing platform; re-engaging potential applicants and guiding them to application and enrollment.

EducationDynamics’ multi-faceted approach, including targeted campaigns and audience expansion on LinkedIn, proved instrumental in addressing the graduate law school challenge. These initiatives not only exceeded expectations, but also paved the way for future growth and success in student inquiry generation and enrollment.

The Results

Within the first three months of launching the new campaigns, there was a substantial 38% improvement in the cost-per-application. In months five and six, the school achieved an even more impressive 48% improvement in the cost-per-application while maintaining a steady application volume. Between months five and eight of the testing period, a notable 45% of the generated application volume came from LinkedIn’s conversation ads. Overall, the school saw a 48% improvement in cost-per-application for conversation ads vs. LinkedIn’s overall cost-per-application.