University of Phoenix (2011-2016)

The Situation

Back in the 2010s, University of Phoenix wanted to take advantage of a new marketing channel – social media – for demand generation. But unlike legacy advertising channels such as TV, radio or even search and display, social media networks had a unique user experience that affected ad performance. For the larger marketing team, paid social was the Wild West: a big opportunity with a lot of risk. That’s where I stepped in.

Biggest Risks

The team needed an expert to wrangle their $4M social advertising budget and generate leads efficiently. As a large, highly-matrixed organization with many stakeholders involved in campaign execution, they also needed someone to train the rest of the team on best practices for this new channel.

My Response

The most immediate risk was wasted ad spend, so that’s what I tackled first. My key collaborator on this project was the paid social agency team that I managed, as well as our in-house creative team.

• I set up a cyclical creative testing system. We would run a few ads at a time, and I’d take the results from our weekly agency meetings back to the creative team to iterate on and prepare an improved new batch of ads to test.
• I also tested audiences and platforms. Would Facebook be a more efficient leads channel than LinkedIn? Would Twitter or YouTube be the best place for top-of-funnel brand awareness? We wouldn’t know until we experimented.

In addition to overseeing the 6-person social media team, paid social agency and ad budget, I also led a large, cross-functional team of brand marketers, copywriters and graphic designers. I needed to share the insights from our creative testing across the team so we could improve together.

• First, I set up one day workshop for that larger, cross-functional team where experts from our ad agency and our platform partners presented data-backed best practices for social media advertising.
• Next, I provided monthly campaign reports for the larger team and integrated social media into the University’s data strategy so teams could understand how this channel worked in tandem with other campaigns.

My Results

All of the testing and iteration certainly paid off. In one year, I had reduced our CPL by 26%. We also grew the University’s social presence to a 2M+ audience, connecting more alumni, current and potential students in one place to increase brand affinity and purchase intent. And, finally, we saw a 36% MoM lift in branded search interest as a result of our content marketing campaigns, demonstrating that our growing social media community enhanced the efficiency of more than one marketing channel.