Overview
King’s College London is a Russell Group university ranked in the global top 40. In 2025, their international recruitment team needed to generate qualified student enquiries for a portfolio of online master’s degrees across the competitive Hong Kong market.
With no prior campaign data or regional benchmarks, Tell Your Friends was commissioned via Madder Consulting to build a bilingual paid search and intent capture programme from scratch.
The Challenge
Specialist postgraduate programmes — such as Digital Economies MSc or Global Political Economy MA — require capturing professionals at the edges of awareness. Prospective students rarely search by formal degree titles; they search for career advancement, specific professional accreditations, or industry shifts.
The system had to operate across three distinct linguistic search patterns (English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese) while expanding across ten degree programmes.
Strategy & System Design
- Bilingual Intent Architecture: Built detailed career-context keyword clusters matching how working professionals search in Hong Kong and Macau.
- Dynamic Portfolio Expansion: Scaled from an initial single-programme trial into an active multi-programme operation managing ten master’s degrees concurrently.
- Iterative Yield Optimisation: Continuously concentrated media spend into top-converting degree tracks and highest-intent search terms.
Results & Impact
- 48 verified enquiries in Month 1 for the pilot programme without historical benchmarks.
- 39% improvement in CPA within 72 hours following the final portfolio optimisation push.
- 15 conversions in the peak campaign week, with 5 distinct master’s programmes converting simultaneously.
- ~£26k in ad spend efficiently deployed across ten programmes over five months.
