Duke of Ed – Social Media

Objective

The prestigious Duke of Edinburgh (Duke of Ed) International Award, a global youth development program empowering young people to reach beyond their goals, engaged Traffic to develop a social media strategy and paid advertising campaign that would drive awareness and attract new students to its program. The strategy needed to be twofold – driving both awareness and engagement to students, in addition to parents. It was of extreme importance that Traffic took into account the nature of online student acquisition, particularly concerning minors, and what this meant from a social media perspective. In other words, how do we communicate our offering to prospective students between the ages of 14-17 while providing content of value to parents.

Strategy

We commenced with a global social media audit that not only took into account what was happening across Duke of Ed’s national channels, but also looked at what they were doing at a global level. The challenge was that global strategies for the program were synonymous, and Australian practices were far more conservative than their European affiliates. We presented this audit to all internal interested parties and we had a brainstorming session in which we mapped out the student journey and what messaging was most effective at each stage and on what platform. We knew TikTok and Instagram were going to be the best way of targeting youth, however we needed to incorporate paid Facebook campaigns as well to target their parents. From here, we developed a social media strategy based on video and motion content introducing the campaign “World Ready” that looked at the cadence and weighting of messaging, creative and paid media opportunities.

Results 

Despite being their first paid TikTok and Instagram youth campaigns, our approach resulted in the most successful recruitment effort that Duke of Ed has done yet in Australia and have embedded this approach in their ongoing marketing efforts to supplement middle-funnel marketing activity. The results speak for themselves: high conversions (applicants) at a very low cost, a huge increase in brand awareness and engagement, in addition to a huge amount of enquiry from parents regarding enrolments. We’re proud to see the work we’ve done with Duke of Ed in Australia popping up in other territories as well so they too can become #WorldReady.