Reaching students where O-Week emails never could

The Australian National University's Student Experience team had always promoted its services through Orientation Week and email, and neither was capturing student attention. ANU partnered with The Garden to take the message to TikTok instead, with authentic user-generated content made by ANU students themselves.

Client: Australian National University
Industry: Education
Solutions: Media & Performance
Services: Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing, Facebook Ads
Region: Australia

Website views across the campaign

1,712

Of industry benchmarks for traffic generation

Top 25%

Industry performance ranking for every campaign video

Top 50%

The challenge

ANU’s student services are genuinely valuable, but the traditional channels promoting them, O-Week stalls and email communications, weren’t landing. The brief: make current students, especially those living on campus, actually notice the support and opportunities available to them, on the platform where they already spend their time.

Our solution

A kick-off with ANU stakeholders and our creative team unpacked the brand, the services and the audience. From there we built a targeted TikTok advertising strategy aimed at current and prospective students, and worked collaboratively with ANU students to create authentic content showcasing real campus life, shared across ANU’s website, video platforms and social media.

The results

Across the five-month campaign, every video ranked in the top 50% of industry performance and the ads sat in the top 25% of industry benchmarks for traffic generation, driving 1,712 website views. The standout ad, for ANU sports, attracted 1,499 views on its own, and the campaign reached a diverse audience of 18-34s interested in sports, culture, art and food.

From the team

I really enjoyed planning and executing this campaign for ANU. ANU knew that their target audience (students) were on TikTok, so it was great to get their trust in using the platform. This campaign was a great success, using a mixture of authentic content and strategic targeting alignment, whilst piggybacking on the power of TikTok. Can't wait to do further content like this with the wider ANU family.