Inspire - Geek Design

Inspire Education Group is a successful further and higher education provider with two main campuses in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. The Group has thousands of students enrolled across its campuses and offers a wide range of courses, including A-Levels, vocational training, undergraduate degrees, and postgraduate degrees.

The Group also delivers specialist commercial training for employers locally, regionally and nationally through its Anglia Professional Training (APT) division. Courses offered include accountancy, legal and management.

Inspire came to Geek looking to generate more interest from potential students. They wanted to encourage more sign-ups for their courses and also build greater brand awareness, especially for their accountancy, legal and management classes run through APT.

After discussing Inspire’s goals, Geek proposed a paid social media advertising strategy to target prospective students. The objectives were to build a marketing list of leads for Inspire to follow up with, increase brand awareness and reach, and ultimately drive more course sign-ups.

Geek developed custom audiences interested in accountancy careers or expanding their business skills. We then ran several paid social media campaigns across platforms like Facebook and Instagram (Meta). This was an effective strategy as rather than traditional open days, trends indicate to us that people would instead research online, discover information themselves and make contact when they are ready. We took advantage of this by introducing ads across platforms where we knew APT branded imagery would interrupt their scrolling.

Recorded
Reach of Over

78000

Impressions

318970

So, let’s delve into what this graph means. When an ad goes live, Meta pushes the campaign to the audience demographics you define. So, for our campaign, we set this to target people aged between 18 and 54 within the Peterborough and Stamford areas. The largest circle represents this audience.

While the ad is running, Facebook begins to share the campaign with a small section of the large audience and learns based on how they act.

For those who interact with the ad, such as like, comment or complete an action, Meta views these people as “interested” in the ad topic as they are giving out all the right signals. The smaller circle represents this interested audience. Once the algorithm has discovered this audience, Facebook will begin to show this ad to these people more frequently whilst widening who sees the ads to people similar to those interested.

In this campaign, the interested audience was approximately 10% of the total audience.

During the campaign’s lifetime, this defined audience can grow in size. But, usually, this will remain consistent, and the frequency will start to increase. For example, once we know the frequency has gone over a particular mark, we know the audience has been defined. Prior to hitting the mark, the campaign is still in what we internally refer to as the discovery stage.

To hit our goal, we want to ensure the audience sees the ad in the sweet spot between it grabbing their attention and them becoming disinterested as they have seen it too many times, which is defined as creative fatigue. This varies based on the audience and the product. We want to generate more awareness. However, we want to avoid creative fatigue. We want to remain within this sweet spot to encourage users to take action – for us, this was to complete a form. If the campaign goes above our sweet spot, the cost per lead will increase and trigger a need to be reviewed to resolve the creative fatigue issue – which means the audience has seen the ad too many times they will ignore the ad.

Throughout the campaign, enrolments increased across Inspire’s venues for various courses, including accountancy, law and management. Once the campaign concluded, Inspire decided to bring future social media advertising in-house under their internal marketing team.

A few months later, Inspire contacted Geek again for help. Their internal team had set up a new campaign targeting similar audiences to Geek’s original ads. However, Inspire found lead costs from their internal campaign exceeding £25 per lead, which was too high. Unhappy with these metrics, they wanted Geek to take over and improve ROI by lowering the average cost per lead.

Geek successfully set up a new optimised lead generation campaign for Inspire. By refining targeting and creatives, we reduced the cost per lead by 50% compared to Inspire’s previous ads. The new campaign also increased the overall number of leads generated within their budget. This enabled Inspire to pre-qualify leads more cost-effectively and make the most of their marketing investment.

Client Campaign

• Talked about the course with little reference to who would benefit
(no audience call-out)
• Busy creative with lots of text, which confused the user
• Meta unable to find the target audience
• £29 cost per lead

Geek Campaign

• Content called out the target audience directly straightaway
• Clean, clearer and simple creative to aid the user journey
• Meta can find the target audience in our frequency sweet spot
• £10 cost per lead

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PSPA (Marketing)