The European Scholarships for Journalists are an educational programme that is designed to encourage and facilitate the professional development of journalists in Romania who wish to specialise on European issues. 

 

This programme helps its participants truly understand all EU specific areas of interest, policies and regulations, the roles and functions of its institutions, the relationships between member states as well as the western media’s approach to the EU in general. Even with a new website and a dedicated Facebook page, organic search engine rankings were low because not many people knew about this programme and there was an urgent need to raise awareness of it, bring up a steady flow of candidates despite the rankings, analyse user behaviour & responses, and put together a nice and tidy SEO implementation to gain the trust of search engines.

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The Objectives

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The goal was to increase the number of online applications on the new site and on Facebook and target the relevant Romanian journalists market. We decided a PPC campaign and a well-written ad with a good call-to-action instruction were in order.

The campaign would increase national traffic to the website and split-test conversion

pages and would help us establish our re-marketing plan of attack. The methods that

were undertaken included separating local and national traffic, interests, job and

workplace-specific segments as well as bounce rates and normal traffic. This allowed

full control over budget allocation.

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Campaigns were set up to help us identify the best marketing message and see how 

various groups of people responded to different adverts. Landing page split tests were

done while tracking the various stages of the buying process to see where drop-offs

occurred. 

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Based on the insight that we gathered, the final ad read 'Are you eager to gain

professional expertise in European issues through a series of specialised training

sessions in Romania, a study trip in Brussels and a three week industrial placement 

within a prestigious European media organisation? 

Apply here, until the 10th of October.'

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Outcome

- This campaign generated an 82.5% increase in leads and application rates, as well as 15 net new applications from qualified candidates, compared to only 8 in the previous year (obtained organically).