Social Media

The top social media platforms now boast larger audiences than traditional channels. When used creatively and strategically, they can greatly increase your brand’s reach, awareness, and engagement, and aid the conversion of potential customers into actual customers.

Launching a New Strategic Channel

Brand: China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

By mid-2021, CEIBS faced numerous challenges when it came to reaching our non-Chinese audience. China’s COVID-related border restrictions, for example, meant we were forced to deepen our domestic student recruitment efforts.

At the same time, there was growing uncertainty around the future of LinkedIn, which Microsoft had announced they were ‘sunsetting’ in China.

It was time to launch an English-language CEIBS WeChat account.

Outside China, of course, not everyone uses WeChat. Those who do, however, often have a connection with China and, as such, are more likely to fit our target audience.

The account grew to nearly 3,000 followers in 24 months after launch, far outpacing the benchmark for English-language accounts in a market with only 1.5 million non-Chinese users.

#SeeYouAtCEIBS

Brand: China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

Ahead of our MBA Class of 2023 intake we launched a #SeeYouAtCEIBS campaign (I personally came up with the alliterative hashtag), where we encouraged in-coming students to share a message about their new journey along with a banner and the hashtag (see example from LinkedIn below).

The campaign was effective in boosting engagement with the school on social media, helping students connect with their batchmates before landing in Shanghai, and getting students to start making CEIBS a part of their own personal brand.

CEIBS Global EMBA Ranked #2 in the World

Brand: China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

When CEIBS reached the #2 spot in the Financial Times’ global ranking of Executive MBA programs in 2020, we wanted to share the moment with everyone who had helped us get there. Looking for creative ways to engage with the school’s community, I proposed we put out a call for testimonials from students and alumni to post on our social media channels.

The project not only gave our customers a stake in our content creation, it also motivated them to share the news across their own wider networks. The series ran for about two months following the ranking release and was such as hit that we were specifically asked to do it again when CEIBS repeated at #2 in 2021.

CEIBS Knowledge Explainer Videos

Brand: China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

If you want to reach your desired customers, you have to meet them where they are. In today’s world, that increasingly means building a presence on video (especially short-form video) platforms.

In early-2020, I proposed an on-going series of explainer videos to help promote our thought leadership content. With the help of AI, we were able to efficiently recycle content from our website and combine it with footage from our stock video library to produce dozens of videos, some of which gained more than 200,000 impressions.