Developing a full-funnel digital marketing ecosystem with international creative campaigns to return a nineteen-fold ROI

Recently, our role with Education New Zealand has evolved to be the strategic ‘glue’ that mobilises partners like Special, OMD, Speak Data, and MBM Media, ensuring integrated activities across key offshore markets.

To grow New Zealand's share of the international education market, ENZ needed to shift from volume to value. We stepped in, working closely with the ENZ team to create a sophisticated, integrated, data-driven marketing approach, reframing New Zealand as a premier education destination.

Within two years, we linked digital and real-world engagement points, moving prospects through a marketing funnel from initial engagement to visa-verified students for New Zealand's institutions.

This full-funnel solution included developing nuanced and translated content for different countries, with a dedicated platform for China. We consolidated study options from the Hotcourse database and various tertiary institutions. We also integrated with Visa Processing systems to align prospects with visa stages, managed course enquiries from studyinnz.com, and handled registrations from over 100 real-world expo fairs. We integrated return registrations via major western digital social platforms and nuanced Chinese Weibo and WeChat initiatives, compliant with local regulations and supported by in-market social expertise.

Our platform used smart models and algorithms to deliver a personalised digital experience through My StudyNZ, enabling us to develop a Dream, Discover, and Decide marketing funnel aligned with ENZ’s strategy. Enhancing these stages with real-time data, we created targeted, year-round marketing campaigns based on user engagement.

Once the ecosystem was created, we tested it with a global campaign, challenging prospects to Future Proof themselves in New Zealand. Leveraging the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recognition of New Zealand as number one for educating for the future, we used the new ecosystem and channels to capture high-value students and drive them through an EDM lead-nurturing programme.

This first campaign engaged over 16 million high-quality prospects and captured over 34,000 database sign-ups. It delivered nearly $29 million in student value, achieving a nineteen-fold ROI.

Education New Zealand made history with a clean sweep at New Zealand’s 2018 Direct Marketing Awards with The Future Proof campaign, Database Marketing programme, and the My StudyNZ Website.

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Ghost continues to work with ENZ across multiple projects and programmes:

• Supporting ENZ with digital campaigns, often mobilising supplier partners to integrate the right capabilities at the right time.
• Mapping current and future state student experience scenarios for the Naumai platform, ensuring students have a positive in-country experience as they return to New Zealand.
• Working with ENZ executives to facilitate future state adaptation scenarios, considering the government's new budget.
• Conducting research and prototyping new learning products and delivery modes to explore and validate alternative experiences given the increasing demand for traditional education products, competition from former customer countries (like China), and significant upheaval due to emerging tech like GenAi.
• Supporting the establishment of a Treasury-funded Innovation programme that funds institutions to explore new ways of learning and new products, making New Zealand’s offshore education sector more resilient to future events like COVID-19. We helped create the business case, articulate the sector’s needs, and facilitated engagement workshops to drive sector participation in the fund.

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