Unprecedented growth for the Asia Pacific's leading public policy school

Crawford’s audience is very niched: prospective postgraduate students who meet strict enrolment criteria, spread across a competitive market. A one-size-fits-all campaign would have wasted spend on prospects who could never enrol, so the targeting complexity had to be solved up front, with a data strategy strong enough to let each platform’s AI identify, connect and convert the right people.

A multi-channel strategy used each channel to its strengths: Google delivering high-intent traffic, with a wider prospecting pool through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. An audience-segmented creative strategy built a personalised experience from first ad impression through to conversion-optimised landing pages, with ad variants produced natively for each channel, from direct-response Facebook lead ads to long-form LinkedIn newsfeed ads.

Lead profiling captured intent, education history and demographic data, integrated seamlessly so the Crawford School Future Students team received an automated handover for every lead, matched to course preferences. Continuous split testing kept lowering cost per lead and fed insights back into Crawford’s wider communications strategy: course-specific messaging, tested calls to action and student-led social content.

Every course promoted saw applications rise year on year: a 64% uplift in domestic applications, a 24% uplift in offers and a 15% uplift in acceptances, with leads delivered at an increasingly lower cost per lead than previous campaigns. Attribution reporting tied the growth directly to the campaign, paving the way for a direct-response approach to student recruitment.