With a multitude of options available to students, figuring out life after high school has become quite a challenge. To reach and engage with prospective students, universities are increasingly aware of the value of effective digital communications strategies.

Working with the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries, we created a suite of social media campaigns that reflected the Faculty’s outstanding reputation and captured the true value of their creative programmes.

To produce the video content for the recruitment marketing campaigns, we required a deeper understanding of how students experience the programmes, so we took our fieldwork into the classroom. Our chats with students validated teachers’ perceptions that surfaced throughout the workshop process — giving us what we needed to craft the user personas that spoke to aspiring artists.

The more we engaged with each of the schools, the clearer things became — helping us communicate, for example, that Dance Studies embraces the diversity of all body shapes, is inclusive like a family, celebrates laughter and promotes the exploration of play; a shift from the current misconception that a dance degree is only for the best formally trained dancers.

By turning our insights into genuine, clear and engaging stories that connected with and built trust for our audience, the videos responded to a young creative’s need for an environment where they can learn, unlearn, fail, and grow as their true self.

The results from these marketing campaigns reassured our Schools that they could trust us to tell their story in a clear way. The tools available to us through social media advertising enabled us to build accurate target audiences using data from our user personas — ensuring we were reaching the right eyes and ears. Acting upon Facebook’s targeting opportunities, we paved the way for a new type of interaction between the school and their prospective students, and working directly with current students enabled us to humanise and shape the campaigns to fit our audiences’ values, needs and beliefs.

With the client, teachers, and students contributing to the creative direction, the Schools worked with us to craft uniquely engaging campaigns to communicate each programmes true value. The response was strong — supporting the need for tertiary education providers to lead-nurture using honest, human-centered and memorable storytelling.

This project was created in collaboration with the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland, and Chillbox Creative.