For international students, a degree from an English-speaking university can do more than boost their marketability. It can change the trajectory of their lives. The incentive to alter students' life situations by studying abroad is a tremendous one, and the numbers prove it—about 700,000 students from China and 360,000 students from India studied abroad last year.* To seize this opportunity, international students must take an English- language proficiency test as part of the admissions process. The big question then becomes which test do they choose?
Our main competitor has been growing very rapidly. The brand has been gaining market share, particularly in the U.S., which was historically TOEFL® turf. We needed to find a way to more effectively engage with our audience. And our Facebook community became the perfect platform to do it.
Our objective for this campaign was to create an indelible and authentic connection with our Facebook fans by speaking to them in their own voice and supporting them through all phases of their journey. From awareness, consideration and preparation to test registration, we served up aspirational content to meet test takers where they were and inspire them to want more. Awareness focused on reaching qualified fans, while growing familiarity with TOEFL®. In the consideration phase, we strove to drive preference for the TOEFL® test through important differentiators. During preparation, we gave our fans interesting ways to prepare for the test. When the audience was ready, we drove them to register on our website.
With home countries spanning the globe and evolving definitions of success, today's test taker is intent on following his or her own path. Achievement is truly a personalized experience that's defined by each test taker's own take on success. This campaign celebrates the diversity of our vibrant and varied Facebook fans. Instead of telling a single story through the brand's eyes, we created audience personas to tell first-person stories from test takers around the world. This enabled us to break through in localized key markets with tailored messages to get the right message to the right people at the right time.
Through deep analysis of our audience, we arrived at a well-differentiated group of personas from diverse home countries—India, Mexico, Nigeria, China and Japan. We explored the mind-set, motivations, social usage, test considerations, study abroad concerns and cultural nuances for each. We also created a social decision map to help us prioritize messages to move the audience through the journey to registration.
Creatively, we centered our campaign on this idea: Every study abroad journey starts with a dream. We used our personas to define this dream in a unique way for each of our test taker representatives, starting with videos that introduced them to our Facebook fans. To motivate our audience to fulfill these study abroad dreams we created #TOEFLGO, a hashtag that served as an anthem and tagline for the campaign. TOEFLGO enticed our fans to take action. It generated energy and enthusiasm and encouraged test takers through all phases of their journey.
Through the lens of the TOEFLGO campaign— prominently featuring "GO" language whenever possible—we engaged with our fans in the following ways:
TOEFLGO creates a Facebook experience that is essentially a call to action for test take. Their dreams, their potential, their journeys are just waiting to be fulfilled!
On March 15, 2016 the TOEFLGO campaign made its debut to Facebook fans around the world and the impact was worthy of its global nature. The campaign resulted in an engagement score that was 15 times higher than our primary competitor's. The TOEFLGO announcement video gained 1.2M views and garnered 49K Facebook engagements. When compared to announcement videos for previous campaign launches, the video drove a 252% increase in impressions.
The campaign continued its expansion across our Facebook landscape with the TOEFL® Stories. These videos achieved a 53% completion rate, 3% higher than the average video completion rate.
Market-specific content reached 2.5M fans and acquired 2.5K new Facebook fans. When looking at prep content, we achieved 83K engagements and averaged 14K engagements per message. This is 180% higher than average engagements per prep message served up in 2015 (average engagements per prep message in 2015 was 5K.).
In the 3rd quarter, the campaign content expanded across all channels and gained 1M engagements, 43M impressions, and 27M clicks to our website, www.toeflgoanywhere.org.
We reached our objective of connecting with our global audience by engaging them with content that spoke to where they were on their journey—and inspiring them to GO pursue their dreams. When looking year over year, we continue to dominate share of voice with total volume of conversation growing 368% as reported by Crimson Hexagon. This has contributed greatly to our goal of increasing market share for the brand.
