Client
Year
Deliverables
Creative
Situation
As birth rates decline and school of choice options create high competition for students among local school districts, many districts have seen declines in their student populations and the corresponding state funding.
Heading into the 2024-25 school year, South Lake Schools forecasted a loss of 65 students compared to the previous year based on trends in the district’s enrollment data. South Lake Schools partnered with Franco to promote their school of choice enrollment period to stop the declining enrollment trend.
Approach
Franco coordinated with South Lake Schools to develop and execute an integrated communications strategy to raise awareness of South Lake Schools and encourage enrollment for the 2024-25 school year. We project managed photography and videography to develop creative concepts to support the enrollment marketing efforts and implemented advertising on streaming radio, as well as Google, Facebook and YouTube, targeted by zip codes of communities identified as “feeder schools” using MISchoolData.
The goal of the advertising campaign was to drive brand awareness and web traffic to the enrollment page, while organic social media supported the campaign and positioned the district positively during the enrollment period.
Results
The campaign achieved impressive advertising and social media metrics:
- Streaming radio ads delivered more than 147,000 impressions, pointing listeners to the solake.org home page, which received 7,810 sessions (up 59% from the baseline) from 3,838 users (up 51%) as a result of the campaign.
- Digital ads pointed users to the enrollment page, which was the top web page for site traffic during the campaign period. It received 11,649 sessions (up 456% from the baseline) from 9,032 users (up 449%).
- Facebook ads achieved a click-through rate (CTR) of 1.46%, which is 62% above the platform average of 0.90%, along with 380 social actions.
- The skippable YouTube ads earned more than 4,000 views and a 23% halfway completion rate – which was significant because users had the opportunity to skip the ads at the 5-second mark.
- Google campaigns generated more than 700,000 impressions, helping to expand the reach of ad content to targeted users.
- Key organic social media metrics of reach, impressions, engagements and engagement rate all garnered triple digit percentage increases over the baseline – 380%, 379%, 269% and 268% respectively.
Most importantly, as a result of the campaign, South Lake Schools received 190 School of Choice applications for the 2024-25 school year, up more than 23% from 154 applications the previous year.
School of Choice enrollments totaled 114, an increase of ~3% from 111 the previous year and ~148% more than the district originally forecasted providing an estimated return on investment of more than 1,000%.
