A four-month awareness program built for a school that needed to stand out locally while enrollment nationally was declining.
Grand Valley State University, a long-time MPP client, needed to boost regional brand awareness over a four-month program. The work had to align with GVSU's brand focus on community engagement and its role as a regional hub, all while higher education nationally experienced a downward trend in enrollment.
The challenge was about visibility, and also staying true to GVSU's voice and reputation. The audience was local prospective students and student influencers who'd actually consider applying.
MPP ran competitive and audience research to build a media plan targeted at local prospective students and the student influencers around them, the peers and voices that shape where a high schooler applies.
Messaging was tuned to that audience, and landing pages were adjusted to cut friction and push application completion forward.
Campaigns ran across display, search, and out-of-home, with digital accessibility built in from the start, including alt-text and screen-reader compatibility.
Daily monitoring and optimization kept channels and spending adjusted for performance throughout the flight, watching for repetition and resonance in the messaging while protecting GVSU's reputation.
The campaign ran on the same logic Orbit and Hi-5 formalize today: know the audience, connect the pieces, and watch the numbers that predict enrollment instead of the ones that are easiest to report.
Across a higher education market with fewer students and more ROI pressure, GVSU is one of the only state universities in Michigan to grow for five years straight.
