WGU Marketing Campaign

The Team: Brett Monson, Eric Weiss, and Quinn Nisson

Below is documented each of the process’s for this project.

For our project to help Western Governor’s University reach their enrollment goals, we came up with a couple personas characterizing the type of people WGU want to be enrolling. There are a few different methods you can use to create a good persona, we used one produced by Adobe called Developing Provisional Personas. This method consists of coming up with a general groups of people you are trying to market to and then eventually narrowing it down to only two groups which will become your primary and secondary personas.

Below you can see the two personas we came up with. Under the photos I will explain our process in more detail.

The first step in the Adobe persona process is Identification and Segmentation. This is the part where we had to determine who will be using our ‘product’ and divide them into groups. In order to place them in appropriate groups, we meditated upon the people who currently use (are enrolled in) or will use (become enrolled in) WGU. Next we identified them by simple traits like gender, age, and education.

In order to create more specific and focused groups of personas, we completed these three sentences for each of the three persona groups we had come up with. The sentences are: “I have to…” , “I need to….” , “I want to…”. Writing these sentences helped us see what was most important to our persona. Knowing what your target audience’s priorities are will help you know how to get them interested in using your product if they believe it will give them what they are looking for.

Another improvement we found could be made by optimizing for Google’s featured snippets. Feature snippets are essentially a summary of an answer to the user’s question (A.K.A. ‘answer box’) Why is this important? It seems that Google tends to favor websites in the rankings that optimize for this feature, although by how much depends on what and how many keywords you optimize for. It’s important to keep preview metadata descriptions between 70–160 characters. As of now, WGU descriptions are too long and therefore do not fall under the parameters of what’s required to be a featured snippet.

Lastly, and most importantly, is optimizing your site so it can be found by searching relevant keywords. Relevant keywords in WGU’s case would be “online university”, “affordable college”, “online MBA degree”, etc. Unfortunately, when Googling these keywords, WGU doesn’t show up anywhere near the top of the results. This is a problem when trying to bring awareness to the brand.

There are many ways to go about improving WGU’s page rankings, but the most effective remedy in our case would be to improve internal linking. Internal linking is essentially going from one page of the site to another page on the same site. Why is this relevant? The more internal links, the more authority your site has in the eyes of Google (there are some limitations to this). Using relevant keywords in anchor text of your content that links to other pages on the site, can give you a big bump in the rankings. In the case of WGU, there are very few internal links at the moment which is likely the cause of very low page rankings.

The next step in our marketing strategy was to make funnels specific to our personas. These allow us to address our persona’s problem/desire in a very direct way. We planned theoretical events and social media posts to get Rachel and Neleighy’s attention and then further steps to get both of them more invested. Below are images of funnels we made.

We imagined that Rachel would be interested in a workshop hosted by WGU for women who are looking to return to the workforce. A workshop would be a great way to get Rachel excited about refreshing her skills and creating a career for herself. Being on online college, WGU would be a good option for Rachel if she’s wanting to gain more education before getting back into the workforce. While at the workshop, Rachel will be able to talk with WGU mentor’s and get more information about how to sign up for classes.

Neleighy is a busy nurse so she will more likely be scrolling through her phone than attending a workshop. She has been interested in advancing her career and she knows the way to do that is by pursuing a master’s degree. An article on LinkedIn about online college will grab her interest and then once she reads it, she will research online colleges, including WGU.

As well as bringing brand awareness to our target audience, we also need to nurture the audience that is currently aware of WGU. For our ‘help’ piece we will be creating a youtube video series (only available to subscribers of the channel) that feature WGU students telling their stories of why WGU was the right fit for them. These videos will be used as an inexpensive way to reinforce our brand to those already aware by showing real students advocating for WGU. This will ultimately lend credibility to the brand name.

We also want to curate content to those that are possibly just outside of the WGU bubble. In order to accomplish this we will need to create content that is applicable to a wider audience. After considering various strategies, we ultimately decided to create a youtube video series showing helpful study tips that will be released on a weekly basis. This will be available to everyone, not just the subscribers. We believe that by offering useful content to a broader Youtube audience, it will bring additional attention to the WGU name.

Finally, we re-visited our funnels and decided that the workshop hosted by WGU would be the most appropriate event as the hero piece to our marketing strategy. The workshop will be hosted by those already in the medical field, and will show potential students who are on the fence, that furthering their education is the best chance they have for successfully returning to the workforce. On-site mentors will be available to answer any questions and to help facilitate the WGU enrollment process to those interested. As a requisite for attending the workshop, attendees will sign up via email. This part is crucial for our email marketing strategy as it will provide our mentors the emails of the attendees who are still on the fence even after they’ve attended the workshop.

This event will likely be the most expensive installment to our marketing strategy, but we believe that the number of new enrollees it will bring in will offset the cost and bring additional revenue to the University. It’s also the key piece in making our other marketing efforts successful.

Email is still one of the most popular platforms for advertisement. There is a fine line between a good email and a bad email though so it takes smart and cautious planning to prevent your email campaign from being a bust. A few of the most important parts of an email are: your friendly name, your subject line, and most important is your copy. Below are examples of a good email and a bad email.

Our team was tasked to write a 3 part email series. We wanted our email seires to feel more like a conversation with a friend so we decided to create an email conversation between a career workshop attendee and the WGU mentor, Carol, whom the attendee has already met.

We think that these emails will help people like Neleigh and Rachel take the first steps of enrolling in WGU’s programs because they have a knowledgable friend leading them through the whole process and who is also available to answer questsions.

In today’s day and age, even with all the technology and knowledge of marketing strategies and analytics, people prove to be the most influencial when it comes to getting others to buy into a product. For the most part it’s been celebrities, people want to have Kim Kardashian’s shoes, Joe Jonas’s jacket, and even all the contents of Beyonce’s purse. The best way to get people to buy something is to have someone they idolize tell them to buy it. This is how we can use influencers on social media to market our product.

There is much more to influencer marketing than to have a popular influencer create a 30-second video telling viewers that they should buy Cheerios. People are smart enough, they can see right through hidden agendas. They are not here to buy goods and services, they are here to buy relations, stories, and magic. Just think of Disneyland, we all know its just a big plot of land filled with lines, rides, and overpriced food, but it is presented as a land of magic and nostalgia and it gets millions of visitors every year. Influencers have to sell you a story.

We had to find already existing influencers that we think would speak to those who would potentially be interested in WGU. Below is a photo of our first influencer, Nacole. She is a critical care nurse with a little boy and she is enrolled in an MBA program through the online university, Capella University.

The other influencer we found is Lauren Dinh. She is a UCLA graduate and is currently attending medical school. She posts study tutorial vidoes on her YouTube channel.

While coming up with a strategy for how to best reach our audience, we wanted to consider how we could best make use of our social media platforms. After discussing various ideas, we realized that the students of WGU are going to be the biggest advocates for our brand. We also wanted to emphasize one of the biggest draws to WGU; Freedom to study from where you want. With this in mind, we came up with a plan for fun organic social media posts that will continually generate its own content.

The first part of this plan is a weekly post on primarily Twitter and Instagram. These posts would be targeted toward new and upcoming students. The content of the initial post would be that of a student studying from a very comfy and relaxed location. Something like an image of a student lounging in their apartment while “attending class” with the caption of “This is our classroom today. What’s yours?“. This post shows the freedom and flexibility offered by online colleges such as WGU. It allows the viewer to feel a sense of FOMO. They remember their own schooling experience. Being stuck in a classroom for several hours a day listening to a teach drone on and they realize that there is an alternative.

This also gives the current students of WGU to engage with the post and show off their own “classroom” for the day turning WGU’s current user base into advocates for the brand. They get the chance to show off how nice it is to do college from home. This also allows WGU to showcase different students. Rather than having to worry about creating a social media post every week, They can just retweet one of their students who posted an image. A sense of community is felt through this type of social media usage and it encourages more and more participation.

The second type of social media post also focuses on the habits of students. We want to allow more students to interact with WGU on social media. We can accomplish this by having a different student each week film a day of their own life. The video would be an unscripted video that simply shows them living their life as they want to.

This post works by, again, showing the freedom that WGU offers with schooling by showing that the student never has to go to a classroom and can make their own schedule that works for them. With these types of social media posts, we believe that WGU will not only increase its social media presence but they will see an increase in followers and engagement with their posts.

The social media strategies and workshop will help people like Neleighy and Rachel return to school by helping them see that returning to school, specifically through WGU, can be fun, flexible, and inexpensive. This will ultimately increase enrollment in the Healthcare MBA program and expand social media influence.

Related posts:

As studies increasingly tally the death toll of climate change, the recent stalemate over voting rights legislation in the Senate puts the United States at a grave crossroads. The Republican Party…

They already have software for managing their core tasks of tracking revenue and expenses. They’re not an IT team. Technically, they’re not a service team. So why would we be recommending JIRA…