Enter the East Ridge path.
Two enrollment decisions. One connected strategy. A guided experience from awareness to enrollment.
One institutional brand.Two different enrollment decisions.
A connected media strategy designed to make East Ridge familiar, relevant, and easier to choose—across two fundamentally different student journeys.
East Ridge is not trying to win one decision. It is trying to guide two.
Traditional undergraduate prospects are evaluating belonging, affordability, campus experience, parents, and outcomes. Online MBA prospects are evaluating credibility, flexibility, career value, and whether a newly online program fits their life.
Same university. Different fears, influences, timelines, and proof points.
“Will I belong here, succeed here, and afford this?”
They need campus stories, academic fit, outcome proof, parent reassurance, visit momentum, and confidence that East Ridge feels like a place they can picture themselves.
“Is this credible, flexible, and worth the investment?”
They need relevance, career value, faculty credibility, online flexibility, advisor access, and a clear reason to reconsider East Ridge now that the program is fully online.
The media plan should make the decision feel less scattered.
Discover
Make East Ridge familiar before prospects enter active search.
Understand fit
Connect programs, place, outcomes, and real-life context.
Build confidence
Answer questions about belonging, affordability, credibility, and ROI.
Take action
Guide the next meaningful step: visit, inquiry, advisor conversation, or application.
Progress to enrollment
Optimize toward deposits and enrolled students—not simply inexpensive leads.
Each channel has a primary job—while the system works together across the decision.
Shape future demand
Meet active demand
Turn interest into movement
A $500K working-media portfolio built around decision complexity.
Undergraduate receives more investment because the journey is longer, seasonal, parent-influenced, and more dependent on early brand building. MBA investment is more concentrated around intent, repositioning, and cohort timing.
Build familiarity early. Turn confidence into visits, applications, and deposits.
Awareness
Introduce East Ridge before the student has narrowed the list.
Belonging + fit
Show campus life, academic options, outcomes, and reasons families can believe.
Visit + inquiry
Convert growing interest into a campus visit, event registration, or qualified inquiry.
Application
Support program consideration, application starts, and completion.
Yield
Reinforce belonging, affordability, outcomes, and confidence after admission.
For MBA prospects, the plan has to reposition the program and remove friction fast.
Meet active demand
Capture people already researching online MBA options, regional programs, career advancement, and specific fields of study.
Prove the degree is worth it
Use faculty expertise, accreditation, curriculum depth, alumni outcomes, and employer relevance to reduce perceived risk.
Make the format feel workable
Clarify the fully online experience, time commitment, support model, and how the program fits around an existing career.
Create a human next step
Move prospects toward advisor conversations, webinars, and re-engagement paths that answer individual questions.
Help qualified prospects finish
Use deadline pulses, incomplete-application campaigns, and cohort-specific messaging to turn confidence into action.
The question is not just what runs. It is when we activate, when we ramp, and what evidence changes the plan.
Open the year with awareness
Launch paid social, YouTube, CTV, parent education, and programmatic reach for juniors and families.
Keep undergraduate search active for brand, program, visit, and early inquiry demand.
Ramp visits and inquiry
Increase social, search, retargeting, and visit/event promotion as rising seniors move from exploration to action.
Use video proof and campus-life creative to turn awareness into confidence.
Accelerate applications
Protect search coverage, increase retargeting, and rotate creative toward programs, open houses, deadlines, and application starts.
Separate application starters from general website visitors.
Finish and yield
Shift messaging toward affordability, financial aid, belonging, admitted-student confidence, outcomes, and deposit urgency.
Retarget admits and high-intent families differently than early-stage prospects.
Run foundation, pulse around cohorts
Keep high-intent search live every month; layer LinkedIn, paid social, video, and native to reposition the fully online MBA.
Ramp 6–8 weeks before cohort and application deadlines, then re-engage incomplete applications.
The CRM should become the feedback system that tells media what quality actually looks like.
Enrollment signals
Inquiries, applicants, admits, deposits, enrolled students, campus visitors, event registrants, program interest, and geography.
Quality modeling
Build lookalikes from enrolled students and strong downstream converters—not from every person who submits a form.
Media activation
Suppress irrelevant stages, retarget meaningful behaviors, separate incomplete applicants, and re-engage prior MBA inquiries.
Budget optimization
Move investment toward the markets, channels, audiences, and messages producing stronger downstream conversion.
Clicks and impressions help diagnose performance. They do not define success.
Is the message reaching and engaging the right people?
Qualified reach, frequency, video completion, branded search growth, engaged visits, program-page engagement, cost per qualified visitor, and retargeting response.
Are prospects taking meaningful enrollment steps?
Qualified inquiries, campus visit registrations, advisor conversations, webinars, application starts, application completions, stage conversion, and speed to lead.
Is media contributing to enrollment value?
Applications, admits, deposits, enrollments, cost per enrolled student, and tuition or enrollment value where reliable data is available.
Optimization is a decision system: learn for 30 days, validate for 60, then scale what moves enrollment quality.
What starts immediately
Always-on paid search for brand, program, online MBA, visit, and application intent.
Paid social for undergraduate awareness, parent reassurance, MBA flexibility, and proof points.
YouTube/video to build familiarity and credibility before prospects are ready to convert.
What ramps after signal
Retargeting once audiences are large enough and behavior is meaningful: program views, visit interest, video engagement, application starts, and prior inquiries.
CRM re-engagement once stages are clean: incomplete applications, old MBA inquiries, admits, and event registrants.
What triggers budget movement
Move dollars toward markets, channels, and messages showing downstream quality: qualified inquiry rate, visit registration, advisor conversation, application start, application completion, admit, deposit.
Use the $25K reserve for geography, creative, landing-path, and measurement validation.
Build one connected enrollment system around two distinct journeys.
Use brand media to make East Ridge familiar before active search, use search to capture explicit intent, use retargeting and CRM to advance known prospects, and use first-party data to optimize toward students who actually progress.
Questions
I’m happy to go deeper on the audience strategy, channel roles, budget allocation, CRM data, measurement model, or phasing.
Budget detail
| Audience | Channel / use | Budget | Primary role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate | Paid social | $85,000 | Stories, belonging, outcomes, parent-relevant proof |
| Undergraduate | YouTube / online video | $60,000 | Familiarity, testimonials, campus and outcome proof |
| Undergraduate | Paid search | $65,000 | Intent capture for program, brand, visit and application moments |
| Undergraduate | Programmatic display/native | $35,000 | Reach, reinforcement, contextual targeting, retargeting inputs |
| Undergraduate | Retargeting | $35,000 | Advance engaged users toward visits, inquiries, applications |
| Undergraduate | Parent/influencer media | $20,000 | Affordability, reassurance, outcomes, family decision influence |
| Undergraduate | Testing allocation | $25,000 | Audience, geography, creative, landing path tests |
| Online MBA | Paid search | $60,000 | Capture high-intent online MBA demand |
| Online MBA | $25,000 | Professional targeting and credibility | |
| Online MBA | Paid social | $25,000 | Repositioning, flexibility, career messaging |
| Online MBA | YouTube / online video | $15,000 | Faculty, alumni, format and credibility proof |
| Online MBA | Programmatic display/native | $10,000 | Reinforcement and contextual reach |
| Online MBA | Retargeting | $15,000 | Advisor, webinar, application completion |
| Shared | Reserve and validation | $25,000 | Seasonal shifts, measurement validation, emerging opportunities |
KPI definitions
Institutional
Enrollment, deposit, application, cost per enrolled student, tuition or enrollment value.
Pipeline
Qualified inquiry, visit registration, advisor conversation, webinar registration, application start and completion, stage-conversion rate, speed to lead.
Media
Qualified reach, frequency, VCR, branded search growth, engaged visit, program-page engagement, cost per qualified visitor, cost per lead, retargeting response.
Media metrics explain what happened inside platforms. Pipeline and institutional metrics decide whether the plan is creating the right enrollment movement.
Planning assumptions
The $500,000 is treated as working media unless East Ridge confirms that creative production, agency fees, platform fees, landing-page work, or technology costs must be included.
Budget should be validated against enrollment goals, historical conversion rates, geography, tuition economics, CRM data quality, and previous media performance.
The online MBA requires repositioning because the program has recently moved from on-campus to fully online.
The final plan should separate undergraduate and MBA reporting while keeping a shared institutional measurement view.
Data requirements
CRM stages
Historical inquiries, application starts, applicants, admits, deposits, enrolled students, incomplete applications.
Behavioral signals
Campus visitors, event registrants, program interest, geography, lead source, time between stages.
Value and quality
Inquiry-to-application, application-to-admit, admit-to-enrollment, tuition/enrollment value, MBA career-stage and industry data where available.
Memorable principle
We should not build lookalikes from everyone who fills out a form. We should build them from the students East Ridge actually enrolls.
Testing roadmap
| Area | What to test | Decision rule |
|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate creative | Belonging vs outcomes vs affordability vs campus experience | Shift toward messages that increase qualified visits and applications |
| Parent media | Affordability, safety, outcomes, value, regional proximity | Protect if assisted conversions and visit influence improve |
| MBA repositioning | Fully online flexibility vs career advancement vs credibility | Prioritize advisor conversations and application-start quality |
| Search | Brand, nonbrand category, competitor, program-specific groups | Reallocate from volume to qualified pipeline movement |
| Geography | Central PA, regional expansion, selected national pockets | Scale markets with stronger downstream conversion |
| CRM audiences | Prior inquiries, incomplete apps, visit registrants, deposited suppressions | Separate stage intent and avoid wasting acquisition dollars |
Potential discovery questions
What are the undergraduate enrollment targets by market, program, and stage?
Which geographies historically produce the strongest inquiry-to-enrollment rates?
How does East Ridge currently define a qualified inquiry?
What changed in positioning, pricing, curriculum, or student support when the MBA moved fully online?
Which CRM fields are reliable enough to use for suppression, retargeting, and lookalikes?
What downstream outcomes can be shared back into platform reporting?