Northern made improvements in the following areas:
- Identified leads and drove their enrollment.
The team’s strategy leveraged a mix of first-party data and lookalike audiences for the precision targeting of social campaigns. They also implemented email automation to engage potential students early in their search, with timely triggers to steer prospects through their enrollment journey.
For Ivey’s MBA Direct program, Northern implemented a three-phase marketing strategy to boost enrollment from HBA graduates.
In the first phase, the team redesigned the institution’s creative and combined it with Northern’s proven Performance Advertising strategies, leading to an overall increase in conversions.
In the second phase, the team conducted user research surveys and user experience focus groups with current, future, and past students to develop baseline recommendations.
In phase three, they executed an email campaign based on their learnings from the previous phases.
- Improved website competitiveness in organic search.
Northern conducted a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit, with a technical evaluation of the MBA and MSc sections of the Ivey website.
The audit identified opportunities to enhance key rankings that search engines like Google use to evaluate the competitiveness of websites within organic search results. The team also conducted keyword research to leverage high-value keywords and inform all downstream optimizations.
This research was then leveraged to surface topic recommendations for net-new content and suggest updates to content that already exists, further diversifying Ivey’s rankings with associations to new organic search keywords.
To expand the program’s reach and refine its targeting precision, Northern also utilized Artificial Intelligence (AI) to introduce broad match keywords.
- Enhanced reporting and improved user experiences.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking was updated to better align the school’s website experience with prospective students’ needs.
To enable richer reporting results, Northern created five custom reports. They also improved the existing tracking configuration in Google Tag Manager, enabling more detailed event tracking, such as header, body, and footer clicks or FAQ engagements.
Additionally, they conducted a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit with analysis and recommendations to help improve conversion rates by making site improvements to areas including search features, forms, and drop-down menus.
This included the creation and testing of program-specific landing pages.
