The London School of Marketing (LSM) is a privately owned university based in central London and offering a range of business qualifications and degrees to a mostly international community of students.

LSM asked Motive to help boost their profile, both on and offline, and to increase their website's performance in search through a digital PR campaign.

Given the college's international student profile the management team wanted to win media attention across the world, particularly in Asia, as well as in the UK.

The Challenge

LSM had a very low profile when they came to us with only very limited media attention. The activity which had been carried out historically had focused on the qualifications and courses on offer and had failed to differentiate the college from the many others offering similar qualifications.

Our Strategy

We recognised we had a fantastic resource in LSM's academic team of marketing experts and so we set about establishing LSM as the media's go to experts on all things marketing.

Tactics

Working with LSM's team of expert researchers we created a series of Marketing Power Indexes which focused on high profile individuals in the worlds of sport and celebrity culture. We then summarised each of the power lists into media releases and pitched these hard to our media contacts.

Results

The Sports Power Index made headlines around the world and gathered more than 1,000 backlinks from high authority sites including Follow links from FoxSports.com (Domain rating 84), People.com (Domain Rating 90) and TDG.ch (Domain rating 79).

The inclusion of Indian cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni helped to boost results across that part of the world with coverage in India TV News , The Hindu, The Hindustan Times and many other titles.

Our Celebrity Power Index also did the business, earning around 400 high quality backlinks from sites with coverage in The Daily Telegraph, USmagazine.com (DR84), and InfoBae.com (DR84).

We also secured a number of broadcast slots for the client within the UK national broadcast media including BBC Breakfast, Sky News and Channel 4 News.

Outcomes

Web traffic increased by more than 500% as a result of our campaign. The total number of student applicants increased by more than 90% over the three years of the campaign, with applications from Asia going up by more than 130%.