21 January 2015 at 9:00 am
Student stories go social
The Day in the Life campaign saw five international students in New Zealand filmed to show a typical day in their lives as international students.
The films were promoted on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo, Wechat and the blogging platform Naffnang. Students were encouraged to watch the films, ask questions about life in New Zealand, get in touch and join our social community.
While the videos provided a slice of student life that could be anywhere in the country, the stars themselves come from Onslow College in Wellington (Yang Xiao from China), Yoobee Design School in Christchurch (Anaiss Ramirez from Chile) and Canterbury, Auckland and Waikato universities (featuring Hannah Vu from Viet Nam, Alicia Jauhari from Indonesia and Lucas Castro Oliveira from Brazil).
The campaign was designed to show prospective students that New Zealand is a fun and welcoming place to live and study so that, when they’re ready to choose a place to study in a couple of years’ time, New Zealand will already be on their short list.
The videos were viewed by close to 250,000 people around the world and proved most popular in Viet Nam, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and India in that order. The videos also saw impressive engagement with more than 111,000 ‘likes’, 1,100 ‘shares’ and almost 1,500 questions or comments about the videos and related content posts.
Topics the students were most interested in included study subjects, living costs, food options and making new friends. Overall, the campaign saw an increase of 32,000 new followers to our social media channels.
As well as activity on social media, a campaign landing page on studyinnewzealand.com was developed to further engage with prospective students. The landing page has so far seen more than 63,000 unique visitors who have spent an average of 2 minutes 20 seconds on the site watching further videos and learning more about our five campaign heroes.
There were many learnings from this campaign, not the least of which was gleaning valuable insights in to the social and digital behaviours of our target audiences in each market.
It is clear from this campaign that social media is both a cost efficient and effective way to reach prospective students and drive awareness of New Zealand as a study destination.
A reminder that the ‘Day in the Life’ videos are also are available for download from The Brand Lab. You might find them a useful addition to your marketing activities!
