Leading the Way in Recruitment

Brescia University (Brescia) is a Canadian Women’s University, affiliated with Western University. Brescia offers a distinctive education and empowering environment with limitless opportunities to encourage their students to learn how to become leaders. Brescia values their students’ unique experiences and appreciates diversity on campus. Brescia celebrates students from all backgrounds and faiths.

In the highly competitive educational arena (especially a declining enrollment in the all-female school space) they lacked a strong digital media strategy to increase student engagement and applications and turned to Shout to develop a plan that would make it easy for Brescia to increase overall applications both for domestic and international students.

Shout provided excellent client onboarding documentation, a thorough Scope of Work, and structured change order documentation. This documentation and process resulted in educating the Brescia team on all the required logins and assets. It also provided an understanding of the terms and approach so that the Brescia team could collaborate with the Shout team and make informed decisions.

When developing the marketing plan for Brescia, it was first essential to assess the existing data, evaluate internal research documents, and conduct research on similar universities and the winning tactics they were using. Shout also used Brescia’s internal five-year strategic plan as a guideline. It was essential to understand the University brand when developing briefs and determining goals.

Throughout the project, Shout utilized a phased management approach that included research, strategy development, project management tasks, milestones, client surveys, team responsibilities, schedules, content calendars, software integrations, web edits, creative storyboards and collaboration. Briefs and roadmaps were completed outlining monthly tasks so that Brescia was always aware of the status of tasks and milestones

When developing the marketing plan for Brescia, it was first essential to assess the existing data, evaluate internal research documents, and conduct research on similar universities and their winning tactics. Shout also used Brescia’s internal five-year strategic plan as a guideline. It was essential to understand the University brand when developing briefs and determining goals.

The marketing plan was developed by providing innovative solutions and the best use of the budget. A complete re-design of all images and messaging took place. Brescia traditionally used basic imagery showing little diversity and non-existent design or graphic elements. Shout completely re-visited the art direction and updated the brand voice to resonate with newer and younger audiences.

Shout also introduced Brescia to new online platforms but still balanced and supported some traditional marketing, like ongoing events at the university and traditional viewbooks, ensuring that marketing materials could be used for both digital and traditional purposes. In our research, we determined several primary and secondary audiences. Students were our primary with several segments, including high school, returning to education and mature students with a domestic and international division. Our secondary audience consisted mainly of parents.

• Student Journey Mapping
• Persona & Audience Development
• Location Targets
• Competitor Analysis
• Brand Guideline & Brand Voice edits
• Goals
• Design and Content Direction
• Messaging
• Partnerships
• Influencers
• Web Edits (AODA, form edits, first-party data, content development, landing page development)
• SEO
• Platforms and Media Buy

The content was the key to the success of the campaign, with promoted user-generated content, stories, reels, animations, videos, shorts, and carousel posts targeted to various audiences. We also worked with the Brescia team to ensure the content calendar demonstrated when Shout would post and when Brescia would post to create a fluid social media presence for users and avoid overlap.

We also realized that organic search result rankings required substantial improvement and launched a very detailed SEO strategy. Our approach was on and off-page SEO throughout the project.

• Competitors’ analysis & keyword research
• Content development targeting the right keywords
• Optimize existing content on the site
• Creating a consistent link-building campaign

The improved keyword rankings were another successful result of the campaign.

The approach for the digital and social campaigns also included ensuring all contentwas branded consistently, and a/b testing occurred continually. The media buy, and ad management was adjusted daily to maximize ad spending and minimise click-through costs. The marketing and advertising plan was flexible. Data was key, and ads that didn’t obtain results were turned off or edited. The budget was often shifted to ensure ads obtained the highest possible return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS).

The ultimate goal was to increase applicants; the call-to-action was actual applicant form completions.

Shout produced all assets in-house, including graphic design, copywriting, video editing, and animation. Shout also managed the media buy and all ads internally and developed all email funnels in-house. Shout did source out voice-over and provided creative direction to Brescia for photography. Our marketing management included analysis, goal setting and reporting and analytics for all of the above.

Shout built out innovative and industry-leading creative and copy that increased post-secondary intake and maximized conversions into acceptance, including different messaging for different target audiences, both domestic and international.

• Asana for project management
• Loomly for proofing and scheduling
• Slack and Google Docs for client communication
• Ahrefs and SemRush for ongoing page health and keyword analysis

• Klavyio for email funnels
• Google Analytics 4 and Facebook Pixel and Ads Manager data
• Whatagraph for reporting