HGA Creative Communications

Understand

We had been working with Zenos, the UK's largest provider of IT Apprenticeships for over a decade when they asked Michael Henderson, MD of HGA Creative and Zenos Account Director, to take the reins as their Interim Marketing Director. They entrusted him to appoint us to deliver more than 95% of their marketing and communications requirements ahead of their next intake.

So in order to attract learners, this year we took a fully integrated approach with a mix of both on and offline media resources. Taking into account the significant growth Zenos had seen, the changes within the education sector, along with the location and demographic of the target audience (16 to 24 year olds), we developed a strategy tailored to meet their objectives having a greater impact on ROI.

Engage

With a vibrant new creative designed as the identity for the campaign we began to employ a number of tools and resources to deliver Zenos’s message. The first was a video, shot and produced entirely by our Video Team, which brought the creative to life and encapsulated Zenos with a snappy script in just 30 seconds. The video played a key role in the digital element of the campaign which saw content generation, mixed mobile banner ads, SMS geo-advertising, targeted Facebook ads, bespoke Apps & Spotify audio ads all being utilised to drive applications. Coupled with time spent engaging with both new and potential students across social media platforms, this enabled us to get the message out there more powerfully than ever before – but without any significant increase in overall spend.

As the campaign progressed, print materials were also developed in the form of brochures, leaflets and posters. Again, all adorned with the newly designed striking creative.

We also delivered the Zenos Staff Conference and Awards Dinner, held at the Birmingham NEC. the event is an inspirational conference and awards ceremony celebrating the company’s progress and awarding its outstanding learners.

The theme for the event focused upon progression and evolution, hence its title - Evolve: The Next Generation.  With a presentation from the esteemed Vice President of CompTIA, Matthew Poyadgi and over 400 members of staff in attendance the event was a huge success and really highlighted the company’s progress over the last 12 months.

Deliver

The results achieved were exactly what was needed,  with more than 6,000 applications from young people coming in to the Zenos website from all the different online activities, and feeding straight into the Zenos recruitment department’s database. SEO activity over the last year has resulted in Zenos going from nowhere (not on the first 100 pages of Google) to appearing in the top five positions on page one for all six key search terms agreed.

The results of the social media activity combined with the overall strategy show a dramatic increase in response compared to the channels used previously. In just four weeks the number of active users on Zenos's Facebook profile by grew by 104%, comments shot up by 260% and visits increased by 114%.

Year on year traffic to the website has grown by 400%. What's more is that over the course of the most recent campaign we've seen traffic grow by over 70%, with 78% of referral traffic coming from social media.

All in all the campaign was a huge success with 99.9% of course spaces being filled. Needless to say Zenos were more than happy with the results.