Office of College Advancement

In May 2020, the Office of College Advancement shared that our new way of marketing was exceeding our expectations. And, guess what? It continues to excel one year later!

We continue to use our three personas to reach and connect with future students based on their demographics and needs.

During the winter/spring 2020-21 future student campaign, our assessment showed the following results by the phases in which we market. Please note the advertising definitions are available on myHACC.

General Awareness Phase: The goals are to build awareness among future students and have high impressions during this phase.

• By incorporating more advertising activities and increased spend year-over-year, we increased impressions 108% overall since the winter/spring 2019-20 campaign.

• The impressions from Facebook and Instagram advertising increased 780% year-over-year.

Consideration Phase: The goals are to encourage individuals to click on the ad to learn more about HACC and take an action to learn more (ex: sign up for an event).

• The click-through rate from our digital ads was .87%, which is higher than the industry average. The industry average is .53%.

• During this campaign, the digital click-through rate increased from .26% to .87% when moving from the general awareness phase to the consideration phase. This demonstrates how the goal to drive people to click the ad in the consideration phase worked.

Application Phase: The goal is to get individuals to click on the ad to apply to HACC.

• The click-through rate for our digital advertising was .71%, which is higher than the .53% industry average.

• The total number of times a webpage is viewed (pageviews) increased from the consideration phase to the application phase for all of our persona landing pages. This includes:

  • • • Nontraditional landing page (increased by 19%)

      • Traditional landing page (increased by 19%)

      • Workforce landing page (increased 18%)

Registration Phase: The goal is to get individuals to click on the ad to register for classes.

• The click-through rate for our digital advertising was .78%, which is higher than the .53% industry average.

• Pageviews and the percentage of those who chose a student type from the drop-down menu on a landing page (mentioned above) was at its highest during this phase. Of those who chose a student type, 2,384 were for the first-time student.

• The percentage of those who chose a student type from the drop-down menu on the landing page increased 237% from the application phase to the registration phase.

Persona marketing is about meeting the student where they are in their journey. We look forward to continuing the success of these campaigns.

Because of the promising results of our summer and fall 2020 marketing campaigns and the continued impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, HACC continued our “enhanced” marketing campaigns for the winter 2020-21 and spring 2021 semesters.

Between Sept. 7, 2020, and Jan. 30, 2021, the College launched enhanced marketing campaigns to the following audiences:

Continuing/Current Students

• Career-program students (These are students enrolled in a career program. This type of program provides concentrated, in-depth study in a specific field. These are a minimum of 60 credits.)

• Transfer-program students (These are students enrolled in a transfer program. In this type of program, students receive the first two years of education and plan to transfer credits to earn their bachelor’s degree.)

• Dual-enrolled and College in the High School (CHS) students

• Guest students (enrolled at a four-year school but have taken summer classes at HACC)

• Stop-out students (attended HACC and stopped attending before finishing their credential)

Future Students

• High school students

• Individuals who are unemployed with only a high school education

• Nontraditional students (ages 24 and above)

• Parents of high school juniors and seniors

• Traditional students (ages 18-23)

• Workforce students (interested in trades and technology programs)

Here are some top results from those campaigns. Please visit myHACC for a list of definitions.

• Google ads performed very successfully with parents of high school students. The average click-through rate for this tactic in the education industry is 0.53%, and our campaign blew that away with a click-through rate of 1.22%.

• We have learned that high school seniors love our Snapchat ads! For our winter and spring campaigns, we netted 774,856 impressions on just our Snapchat ads with this audience.

• Dual enrolled and College in the High School students were drawn to our targeted email blasts. The average open rate for emails sent during this campaign was 28.72%. This is higher than the national average.

• Positive results were received as the winter/spring 2021 campaign was the first time we segmented audiences by career-program and transfer-program students, instead of traditional and nontraditional students. The transfer student Snapchat ads received 128,340 impressions, and the career program student Snapchat ads had a swipe-up rate of 0.62%! The email blast open rates for both campaigns exceeded 30%!

• During the registration phase (Nov. 9, 2020-Jan. 17, 2021) of the persona campaign, the goal is to get individuals to click on the HACC ad. We received almost 40,000 clicks to our responsive display ads distributed to the future workforce, nontraditional and traditional audiences. This resulted in a click-through rate of .75%, which beats the national average of .53%.

• To reach individuals in our 11-county region who are unemployed with only a high school education, we included ads on Twitter (called Twitter cards) in our campaign. The click-through rate for those ads was 6.25%. There is currently no national average for this type of advertising.

The Office of College Advancement (OCA) and Office of Academic Affairs have worked together since 2017 to develop and implement program marketing strategies that effectively promote some of our fantastic, in-demand, low-enrolled academic programs. Thanks to the One-College reorganization, we were able to significantly improve our process.

When it came time to identify programs to market for the fall 2021 semester, our two divisions came together and made improvements to our existing process based on the relatively new roles of the academic school deans. School deans were instrumental in sharing data and insight that helped select the appropriate programs. They also assisted with connecting members of the OCA team to department chairs and other faculty who assisted with research and messaging.

We found that this collaborative approach resulted in a much more efficient and effective process across the board.

The program marketing campaigns for our Addiction and Recovery Services, Biology, Electrical Technology, Environmental Science and Human Services programs will continue through August 2021. Some of the early campaign measurements demonstrate that this approach to program marketing works.

The campaigns launched on Feb. 22, 2021. From Feb. 22-May 6, there were 19,039 unique pageviews to the biology, electrical technology and human services webpages. This represents a 455% increase in pageviews over the same time period in 2020.

We thank our colleagues in the Office of Academic Affairs for continually improving this process, and we look forward to sharing more promising results this fall!