Cutting enrolment costs for London's largest creative college

Google Ads (PPC)
SEO & content
Web design & UX
Site speed
Brand

Taking cost per enrolment from £294 to £7.74, and growing enrolments by 305% in a year

Big Creative Education is one of the largest creative colleges in London, creating opportunities for more than 1,000 students every year. The wider BCE group includes Big Creative Training, Big Creative Academy, Big Creative Apprenticeships and BCE Adult Learning.

In the highly competitive post-16 education space, BCE needed its marketing to fill courses efficiently and help prospective students find the right course.

The Big Creative Academy building, with its coloured panel facade, on a sunny day

“Darwin have really helped us stay ahead as a market leader in the highly competitive post-16 education space. Through short-term PPC campaigns and longer-term strategic work around the development of the BCE brand, website and SEO strategy, this is all now paying dividends and is a great return on investment for us. They really do get it!”

Alexis Michaelides, Founder, Big Creative Education

Challenge

BCE's PPC campaigns were poorly configured, wasting a significant share of the ad budget. Ad copy wasn't optimised, keywords were irrelevant and targeting was wrong. When BCE asked Darwin to step in, it was costing close to £300 to enrol each student.

The content strategy had gaps too. There was little course-specific content, copy wasn't optimised and there were no SEO-driven blog posts, so the college struggled to rank for the searches prospective students were making.

Big Creative Education website homepage: London's largest creative college

Solution

We started with paid search, completely refreshing the campaigns' copy and creative and fixing the keywords and targeting. That drove the cost per enrolment down from £294 to £7.74, and some campaigns went even further, reaching just £3.88 per conversion.

To build a solid foundation for search, we cut page load time from 10 seconds to 2.5 seconds and overhauled the UX of the website's key areas to help conversion. We designed and developed a range of new course pages, helping BCE establish a clear and consistent brand identity across the site.

Finally, we put a content marketing strategy in place to grow keyword coverage and search rankings, increasing organic traffic by 60% in a single quarter and the number of keywords the college ranks for by 133%.