Rochester Institute of Technology’s online Executive MBA program ranks consistently in the top ten nationally. The college of business at RIT has always held up its EMBA as a tremendous success and driver for college enrollment, but they believed there was a greater potential for growth than they were experiencing with their previous agency. The college partnered with Linden Digital to identify ways to further the program’s impact.

Our work spanned the marketing spectrum, writing, designing, and strategizing across platforms, including directly managing Google search and display advertising, LinkedIn advertising, Meta advertising and Email marketing, and working holistically with their team managing organic social media, advertising, SEO, TV spots, and outdoor advertising. We worked with the college’s marketing team to identify and implement key areas of improvement for their advertising approaches, as well as to develop an integrated results dashboard that tracked campaign clicks through to enrolled students.

The primary challenge the program faced was in differentiating itself from online competitors. Like many competing in the online space, it faced a constantly shifting and increasingly competitive market. We worked to differentiate the program by segmenting its promotion into key areas of interest, such as life sciences. In promoting concentrations to focused audience groups, we were able to establish the program in a deeper and more impactful way than as the broader program itself.

Our efforts resulted in impressive improvements to the program’s conversions, including nearly doubling the number of paid leads acquired year over year and leading to enrolled students directly attributed to our campaign efforts. Seven students enrolled in the EMBA directly from advertising—this does not include the impact of general awareness built from the campaign. The program has been so successful that the EMBA program earns a direct 2.9x return for every dollar spent when including Linden’s management fees and advertising spend, and a 3.5x gross return. The strategic approach we took to social media and website content also led to a noticeable increase in leads that came to the college organically, proving the potential for exponential growth that can be achieved through lasting evergreen efforts.