Centre for Arts and Technology: Case Study

• Creative Design
• Content Management System
• Information Architecture
• Search Engine Marketing
• Rich Media

• www.digitalartschool.com

Executive Summary

The Centre for Arts and Technology's challenge: attract and engage prospective digital arts students, better than every other institution in the competitive private education sector. Naturally, since the target market lives online, Acro Media's solution is nearly all Web-centric, melding edgy yet appealing Web development with multi-pronged, carefully monitored marketing. The outcome is measurable success in terms of higher conversion rates & great ROI. And the bottom line…seats filled.

   

Setting

Immersive, engaging and interactive characterize the vocational training at the Centre for Arts and Technology (CAT). Encompassing three state-of-the-art Canadian campuses in Kelowna BC, Halifax NS and Fredericton NB, CAT offers hands-on project experience within accredited Certificate and Diploma programs, preparing graduates for careers in the emergent, digital entertainment world (e.g. 3D and Game Animation, Audio Engineering, Filmmaking, Media Design) and elsewhere. CAT’s instructors—including some pioneers of digital-specific educational programs—provide students with the opportunity to pursue their creative passion and gain the competence and confidence to embark upon rewarding careers.

Challenge: Attract & Engage Creative, Tech-Loving Students

CAT faced several challenges. In general, it sought to increase its market visibility and quickly establish itself as a distinguished institution in the highly competitive, constantly evolving education industry. With its three campuses spread out over 4,000 kilometers, the Centre lacked a unifying, instantly recognizable brand suited to both its online and offline presence, and an effective channel to promote that brand.

As it stood, the Centre’s former Web site was not an effective recruitment tool for prospective students—a young, media-savvy demographic. Though its raison d’etre was to attract people passionate about digital creation—and to impress upon them the features and benefits of study at the Centre—lackluster looks and limited functionality undermined its ability to recruit. The site neither conveyed the reputability of the school nor the value in choosing to study there—necessary, considering the substantial costs of an accredited education. In addition, the portfolio of student work—potentially, CAT’s greatest asset—did not effectively showcase the student body’s impressive talent. Compounding all the above was the site’s poor performance in the search engines, attributable in large part to a lack of onsite optimization—and limited online marketing. The Web site attracted far too little traffic, and—owing to a lack of well-planned user paths and calls to action—those who did manage to stumble across the site typically abandoned it without converting (i.e. establishing contact with CAT).

To connect to its main target demographic of creative, college-age youth, the CAT Web site needed an “extreme makeover” that placed innovative and interactive design up front and center.

Solution: Melding KAPOW Web Development with Multi-Pronged Marketing

To attract the target demographic—and advance prospective students (and their parents) towards a substantial and life-changing investment—Acro Media provided the Centre with a new Web site featuring, eye-catching design, interactivity, and radically enhanced functionality.

The overall site design addresses two main points: 1) why prospective students should choose the Centre for Arts and Technology for specialized technical training, and 2) how graduates of the Centre can embark on exciting careers once they complete their programs. The spot lit tagline sums it up: Illuminate your Future.

In addition, a password-protected intranet leads to a personalized student home page, community forums and classifieds. This intranet/portal is the foundation for more Web 2.0 functionality in the future, extending to grades, alumni communication and engaging student lifestyle/employment features.

Critical to the new Web site’s success is a well-structured information architecture—a crystal clear overview of site pages and elements, organized by content theme and purpose. It ensures users’ quick access to information and smooth paths toward site conversion goals. A powerful internal site-wide search system further enhances information findability.

CAT’s new homepage showcases a Gothic-inspired ‘mash-up’ appealing to the video-game-playing target demographic, composed of an richly cinematic motion graphic presentation, followed by a “floating” interactive menu of 3-D site links that move in relation to the user’s mouse position to create a unique “feel.”

Importantly, the entire site is built upon the open source Drupal platform, a full-featured content management system (CMS) boasting an extraordinary range of functionality, search engine friendliness and ability to be uniquely branded and customized. (Drupal—winner of Packt Publishing’s Open Source CMS Award in 2007 and 2008—powers many of the world’s best sites, including ones for NATO, IBM, Sony Music, Warner Brothers, NASA, Popular Science, Google, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo! Research.) Drupal’s comprehensive CMS enables CAT’s site administrators to easily keep their Web content up-to-the-minute fresh and accurate, by allowing them to create, edit and immediately publish a huge variety of content including FAQs, campus-specific program information and event calendars, school/industry news items, video and still images.

Importantly, CAT’s CMS capabilities include editing and publishing Web forms: applicants can complete and submit an application form online rather than faxing it to a campus (though that option is still available).

Unlike a pure Flash page, the Flash/HTML hybrid homepage does not compromise the search engines’ ability to index it. Plus, to enhance search engine performance, Drupal enables administrators to handily optimize new content by adding and editing page titles and meta descriptions themselves. Additionally, Drupal’s plain English path names help search engines index the page easier, while ensuring that page URLs—visible to search engines, users and administrators alike—are clear and logical.

To engage and motivate the youthful target audience, major calls to action (CTAs) appear in the form of animated doorways rendered in a “fantasy game” aesthetic that is undoubtedly familiar to members of that particular audience group. When moused-over, the door swings open to let fly directive text, e.g. "Inquire Now." Other CTAs motivate visitors to view student work, submit an inquiry form, download an application, email the Centre or communicate with a school representative by telephone, email or via live online support.

To showcase student work, CAT administrators can load and manage student-produced video clips and hundreds of still images into categorized areas within the Student Gallery. Viewers can choose to play all presentations sequentially, or drill down into the areas of most interest to them.

Site visitors can also subscribe to the Centre’s RSS news feed that automatically emails them information regarding recently added news items, keeping interested persons “in the loop” and, in effect, constantly reachable by the Centre. Tell a Friend links lets a visitor submit the email address of a prospective student who may be interested in pursuing an education at CAT, who then receives CAT information via email. This is a cost-effective and persuasive channel for word-of-mouth marketing.

Marketing for Ever-Higher Conversion Rates & Great ROI

When the site launched, it was necessary that online searches for “digital arts schools” and related terms generate good traffic from the major search engines. With a renewed brand and Web presence, a multi-pronged marketing approach was undertaken to quickly increase CAT’s online visibility. 

Months prior to the completion and launch of the new Web site, Acro Media business strategists took the first steps in a year-long marketing program based both on CAT’s short- and longer term business goals and budget. The primary objectives: to balance paid campaigns with longer term marketing tactics, generate steady traffic and enhance CAT’s natural search rankings over time.

Keyword and market research focused on improving the new site’s positioning in the search engine results—35 search engine optimization (SEO) guides ensured that site content was properly written, organized, titled, tagged and implemented to produce immediate results. Optimized press releases received the same level of attention, and helped to to boost the Center’s online presence.

Prior to launch, Acro Media promoted CAT’s new site through Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, that displayed ads in the paid sections of search results pages. At each month’s end, an Acro Media report detailed changes made in that month’s PPC campaign, and highlighted crucial metrics including number of clicks, clickthrough rates, costs per click, and total campaign costs. 

To generate increasingly greater returns on CAT’s investment, Acro Media marketers continuously monitored and modified the ads, campaigns and keywords. Often, this necessitated editing CAT’s landing pages, and quantifying the results of each change to ensure growth in relevant traffic and conversion statistics—and importantly, to generate higher ROI.

In addition, the marketers ran geo-targeted PPC ads (only display for a targetted city), placed ads in Google maps and created Google banner ads that displayed optimized copy and the CAT logo on relevant sites within Google’s vast content network.

The strategy to build brand, drive qualified traffic and promote user conversions also included link building and social networking initiatives.

Because search engines’ ranking algorithms take into account the number and quality of inbound links, the link building campaign sought to connect the CAT Web site with other relevant, quality sites on three distinct three levels: nationally, within art school and university directories; regionally, with sites related to the cities and provinces where the three campuses are located; and with niche sites directly related to graphic, interior, or fashion design.

Given the target market’s age range, online habits and corresponding affinity for social networking, Acro Media created a Centre for Arts and Technology Facebook page, and advertised it through cost-effective Facebook ads (similar to Google AdWords). These ads direct users to CAT’s Facebook page—which in turn prompts viewers to join the CAT ‘network’ and visit the CAT Web site.

Benefits & Growth

From the get-go, Acro Media’s solid understanding of the Centre’s business cycle and goals assisted the Centre for Arts and Technology in aligning its online marketing goals with its overall business plans and budget. The most tangible result of the collaboration was the strongly branded, richly textured, and highly functional Web site—launched on time and within budget.

The money saved and the value added by these marketing initiatives is considerable. Drupal spares CAT the need to pay for licensing fees, and the need to rely on outsourced resources for site maintenance. Also, scarce internal resources do not need to be diverted to time-consuming updating and publishing processes. The biggest time and cost savings however, come from the site’s ability to drive student enrolment and enquiries. Prospective students are well-informed and better qualified by the time they make contact with program and financial advisors via the live online support service or by email, phone or in person.

A multi-pronged, closely measured 12-month marketing plan that aligned with CAT’s corporate goals helped to get their new site “up to speed” in an impressively short time. Harnessing the synergy of onsite SEO, press releases, pay per click, linking campaigns, and social networking rendered impressive results: three months after the site’s debut, page views grew more than 40%, the average number of pages viewed shot up more than 50%; and 40 inbound links increased to 225. As a result, Google's PageRank score rose from 3 to 5, earning impressive natural search rankings for many popular search terms.

A partnership with Acro Media brings value to a client’s organization. For example, when Acro Media marketers noted that visitors arriving via organic searches stayed on the site longer and viewed more pages than those arriving from paid ads, Acro Media instantly shifted more of CAT’s budgeted marketing funds to onsite SEO and link building tactics—thereby generating a higher return on investment. By retaining Acro Media’s expertise as its marketing partner, CAT continues to enjoys peace of mind in the knowledge that a vigilant partner is earnestly working on a daily basis to earn it higher ROI from every budgeted marketing dollar. 

In summary, Acro Media listened, collaborated and created—delivering a strongly branded, highly visible and effective Web presence with advanced functionality, rich texture and irresistible appeal. Passed with flying colors.