UC Irvine uses digital assets to measure marketing success

The challenge

The University of California Irvine has a lot going for it. One of the top ten public universities in the USA, located in California's beautiful Orange County, it's no wonder that more than 37,000 international students choose to study there each year.

With so much to offer prospective students, and several upcoming recruitment events on the horizon, UCI needed a quick way to communicate all the key information about their institution.

Recruitment fairs and expos are almost synonymous with flyers. They're great for that quick first impression during the early stage of the recruitment journey. But with printed materials, it can be hard to know for sure what works for a particular market, and what doesn't. How do you gauge whether your recruitment materials are actually leading to conversions, or just sitting crumpled in the bottom of a backpack?

About University of California, Irvine

• California, USA

• 37,350 students

• Division of Continuing Education

• 1 brochure

• 8 snapshots

UCI's Division of Continuing Education had already collaborated with eduKUDU in 2021 to create their partnerships brochure and their international prospectus. When we rolled out snapshots in 2022, they saw an ideal opportunity to optimise their event marketing with us.

The solution

Like flyers, snapshots provide a bite-sized summary of your institution's key offerings, making them the ideal tool for recruitment events. Unlike flyers, snapshots can be changed at short notice, or turned into new versions. Our customisable framework allowed UCI to quickly create multiple publications containing the best-performing information or imagery for a given market.

And when we say "best performing", that isn't just sales bluster: we provide the data to back it up. Our clients want to know not only which publications are being read, and by whom, but which pages and sections are being clicked on the most. That's something that you just can't get with a PDF.

Rather than expecting UCI's busy marketing team to take time out of their day to wade through the depths of Google Analytics in order to see how their publications are performing, we extracted their publication data into a clean, user-friendly Looker Studio dashboard that allows them to review key engagement metrics at a glance. This means that both content and strategy can be dynamically updated and adapted throughout the year, instead of having to wait for next year's enrolments to see results.

The results

From our previous collaboration, we'd already worked with UCI to translate their bright, modern branding into fresh publications. The university's brand colours of blue, orange and yellow run throughout the images of clear skies, outdoors campus shots and beaches to really show off the appeal of the location.

So far, eight different snapshot versions have been developed and used at events throughout the year across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Each snapshot is tailored to its audience, whether that is through a change in the imagery used or through the inclusion of market-specific scholarships, internship opportunities, or targeted sign-up sheets.

With each snapshot utilising its own QR code, campaigns can be tracked not only during the event but on an ongoing basis, helping the Division of Continuing Education to strategise accordingly.

Inside the brochure