RANKEN TECHNICAL COLLEGE
Ranken Technical College, offering a robust vocational education across various trades, is so much more than textbooks, lecture halls and general education. It’s a lab, a training facility and a workshop designed to get students to work.
Like most technical colleges, Ranken is perceived by some as being an inferior educational route compared to a traditional four-year university. While they wanted to overcome that perception, UPBrand decided to dig into that hands-on training that separates Ranken from traditional educational routes.
Discovery
A thorough discovery revealed a need for a more integrated marketing strategy that clearly communicated Ranken’s why in a consistent way. Through market research, an unmet need was identified. Ranken had the opportunity to not only reverse the negative trade school perceptions but to also combat the declining trend of higher education enrollment in general.
Graduating high school students are no longer seeing the value of paying for any type of higher education and the creative needed to remind target audiences why Ranken is worth the investment through value and demand.
Campaign
Our creative campaign stemmed from the insight that Ranken’s students don’t want to go to school — at least, not the school they’ve been attending. They prefer demos to lectures and workshops to workbooks. And so we started with a bold line: This Is Not a School.
From that line came creative work that positioned Ranken as a haven for doers, makers and crafters. Photography focused on showing Ranken in action — no students sitting behind desks, no instructors pointing aimlessly at a blackboard. That’s all school — and this is Ranken. We paired our visuals with empowering copy that told our audience: you’re ready for this.
Omni-Channel Media Strategy
With varying unique audience focuses like potential students, parents, campus locations, specialized programs and more, all digital ads had custom messaging and images specifically targeted to those demographics and geographics of the viewer. By having an integrated, channel-agnostic strategy, Ranken could deliver seamless, consistent experiences that effectively guided potential students along their preferred paths to conversion.
Programmatic Media
Given Ranken’s unique audiences and limited geographic reach, we used programmatic media channels to ensure Ranken’s message met users at the most relevant point of their higher education research journey.
Programmatic video and interactive display spots allowed us to further expand on the story, demonstrating “students” in active learning environments, earning a degree and earning a living. We wanted to capture and demonstrate hands-on learning to show what truly makes Ranken unique. In addition to the overall awareness messaging video here, we also created versions specifically targeted to women–one of Ranken’s desired targets.
Combining display, video and CTV advertising, our campaign drove over 2,055 conversions in 2023 alone.
Social
Social media plays a large role in how high schoolers evaluate colleges. When they look at a school’s page, they want to see a realistic depiction of what it’s like to go there — but Ranken’s presence on traditional platforms like Facebook and up-and-coming ones like TikTok was lacking. We came in with detailed strategies and campaigns to build awareness on platforms like Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
And they worked — our social campaigns increased conversions by 33% from 2022 to 2023.
Search
Search is one of the most important channels for prospective students. Using paid search allowed us to target prospective students at precisely the moment they are actively researching schools online. Through optimizing Google Search campaigns, keyword and ad copy, we were able to improve Ranken’s click-through rate (CTR) by 224%, resulting in an overall of 8.24% CTR, well above the education benchmark of 3.27%.
By the end of our first year together, UPBrand helped drive a 277% increase in website sessions on the website and paid search accounted for 34% of the overall web sessions that year.
Offline Support
While the marketing strategy skewed toward digital platforms, we also continued our campaign message through more tangible tactics to reinforce its power. We developed a graphic truck wrap and matching catalogs that spoke to Ranken’s unique educational offerings. We also designed shirts, posters, tumblers and other promotional materials to build awareness and pride for all things Ranken.
Video
Video spots allowed us to further expand on the story, demonstrating “students” in active learning environments, earning a degree in earning a living. We wanted to capture and demonstrate that hands-on learning to show what truly makes Ranken unique. In addition to the overall awareness messaging video here, we also created versions specifically targeted to women–one of Ranken’s desired targets.