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EPBC

INTRODUCTION

Championing Access: Empowering Education for All with Education Planner BC

Access to knowledge and education is fundamental to each individual’s personal growth. It’s how we realize our potential and achieve success and stability in our lives. As an office full of lifelong learners, these are values that everyone at Takt holds dear.

And Education Planner BC is working toward keeping education as accessible as possible to all students across our province. So when they approached us to help them better understand and reach the young people and students who face the most significant barriers to education, we were up on our feet and ready to hit the ground running!

Finding Balance in Education

Education Planner BC is a government program created to serve as a “one-stop-shop” for potential students across British Columbia. The post-secondary education options across our province are numerous. Yet, many schools, especially those in smaller cities, can be eclipsed by the marketing budgets of the top universities and colleges.

This information gap can be detrimental to British Columbians who live in remote areas and don’t have the desire or the means to relocate for school.

That’s why Education Planner BC exists;. T to democratize access to education by providing resources that guide students toward the schools and programs that meet their needs and career aspirations.

After our first meeting with the Education Planner team, we knew what we needed to do to help:

  • Provide them with a foundation of insights into their industry landscape to inform a marketing roadmap and future recommendations.
  • Understand where students are learning about post-secondary education choices and determine where they consume information.
  • Learn more about audiences to be able to target students more accurately. 
  • Understand the current perception of EPBC and where it should be positioned within the landscape.

Time was of the essence, so with the project objectives clearly defined, we got to work with our research, discovery, and focus groups!

RESEARCH + DISCOVERY

A 360° Research Approach for Deep Audience Understanding

To gain the broadest audience insight possible, our research approach was comprehensive, holistic, and data-driven. By conducting research through various methods, we gleaned a 360-degree view of EPBC as an organization, its audiences and customers, and the cultural landscape and market it operates within.

In our most extensive market research project to date, we used the following methods to achieve our in-depth knowledge:

  • Design Audit, including digital and print collateral, typography, imagery, and logo
  • Content + Channel Audit, which included analyzing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube content
  • Analytics + SEO Audit, including website metrics, user journeys, and search engine performance
  • Focus Groups focused on students, parents, and recent applicants, balanced across BC’s regions as well as gender, age, and cultural background.

Through our research process, we established a series of Persona Spectrums to encapsulate Education Planner BC’s users. In contrast to traditional personas–which create fictionalized versions of customers–Persona Spectrums aim to represent human motivations based on specific contexts. Paired with an Empathy Map that highlights a user’s emotions as they move through EPBC’s system, the result was an understanding of their audience that was both flexible and specific, arming EPBC with the knowledge they needed to speak to their audience and swiftly adapt their messaging as required.

STRATEGY

Crafting a Data-Driven Strategy for EPBC’s Growth

More than motivations and emotions, the personas we developed for EPBC provided them with insights directly from the mouths of the people they serve.

Beginning with social media, we uncovered through our focus groups the channels most used by the various demographics EPBC seeks to address and the type of content they would most likely seek out, enjoy, or find engaging.

From a design and branding standpoint, we explored our participants’ perspectives on colour palettes, typography, and slogans to better understand their audience’s impressions of the current brand and what would be considered appropriate moving forward.

As a best practice, we conducted an SEO and Google Analytics review to see how EPBC displays on search engines, how users move through their site, and what keywords they are most associated with.

Last but not least, we conducted a design and content review across a selection of EPBC’s competitors to identify what user pain points may exist across the industry and how EPBC’s digital engagement compares with the competition.

The final report we delivered to EPBC was a package of extensive research that laid out exactly what they were doing right, their greatest opportunities to improve, and the best way forward to achieve their goals.

They were so impressed with our report that they broadened the scope of their original contract by enlisting us to help them develop a kick-ass fall marketing campaign to boost post-secondary enrollment across the province.


Transforming Research into a Clear Path Forward for EPBC


CREATIVE DIRECTION

One Fall Campaign to Rule Them All

Armed with extensive knowledge of what information students and their parents needed and where and how they wanted to receive it, we knew we were primed to over-deliver on our promise to EPBC.

Employing a retro yet youthful design and feel, the aesthetic of the marketing collateral drew both young people and parents into the campaign.

The copy addressed the most important questions young people and prospective students ask: “what should my career be?” and “where do I go to school?”

We designed the marketing assets for a variety of mediums, including bus and SkyTrain ads, billboards, banner ads for online, animated video ads, ads for cinema screens, and social media content.

We designed all of this content to be “evergreen,” meaning adaptable and reusable as enrollment cycles continue each year.


“We’ve been engaged with Takt for the past several months and have been so impressed with their level of engagement and true interest in the work that we do and the goals we want to achieve. They were responsive, energetic and enthusiastic throughout the project. We hope to work with them again soon and wished we’d turned to them earlier for other projects. Great team!”

Karen Mccready, Executive Director @ Education Planner BC

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