CyberFirst
CyberFirst is a student bursary scheme which prepares students for a career in cyber security. Run by GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) they offer students interested in STEM subjects a comprehensive package of financial support and cyber skills.
Understanding sentiment and influencing behaviour
CyberFirst needed a way to make their offering known to students, increase their brand awareness and boost registrations for the bursary.
Recognising The Student Room’s mass reach and high-volume, Stafford Long approached us on behalf of CyberFirst. We helped them spread the word and drive sign-ups by targeting year 13’s and current university students interested in or studying STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), delivering an impressive 351 registrations.
To achieve these results, we combined our traditional strengths and cutting-edge ad tech. We put the CyberFirst brand in front of highly relevant contextual audiences; specifically STEM subject forums, study help and relevant university areas of the site. This represents the traditional approach of putting the right brands in front of the right audiences.
However contextual is only half the story, to deliver results we needed to increase the inventory volume and deliver more opportunities to increase visibility. Our Data Management Platform (DMP) allowed us to identify users in year 13 with an interest in STEM; then using performance marketing best practice, we followed them around the site optimising the users most likely to click.
We applied this same logic to an email campaign of our users whose behaviour on-site demonstrated the right demographic profile (year 13) and interests (tech savvy students with an interest in STEM). We further refined the audience by only targeting the highest performing email addresses, those who are most active, engaged and inclined to open and click.
This unique subject specific segmentation led to an effective campaign, allowing CyberFirst to deliver on registrations and meet key objectives.
“Promoting our client’s bursary scheme for STEM students on The Student Room proved very successful – it delivered 351 registrations in total, the second highest number generated by a media partner. One of the other main considerations of the campaign was to achieve a balanced representation within the candidate pool of gender and ethnicity, and The Student Room also performed strongly in this respect. Overall, the team at The Student Room were a pleasure to deal with and were very responsive – they really partnered with us to ensure that everything worked as well as it could.”– Account Manager, Stafford Long