Calian is a large B2B/B2G professional services company, publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. When I started with Calian in early 2019, they had a Drupal 7 website that had been somewhat neglected and had technical issues, and the design and content were overall unimpressive, and not representative of a strong brand with an umbrella of highly specialized solutions. They were also lacking a social media strategy, appropriate analytics tracking, marketing automation and a modern CRM solution.

Beyond the overarching objectives, our main focus was with undergraduate and postgraduate student recruitment through ongoing campaigns, as well as advertising university courses, open days, postgraduate open evenings and Clearing.

Specific examples of objectives set by Leeds Beckett also included:

1) Supporting the university’s growth plans through targeted and effective campaigns

2) Growing the number of applications

3) Improving efficiencies and reducing costs in all paid channels

Please read the Process overview first.

Olivela went against the expert opinions of not only myself, but our paid social lead and their Facebook rep. They wanted to set up their ad sets in a very niche way by targeting each celebrity and their charity. For example, one ad set for Jennifer Anniston and one ad set for St. Jude. Not only did I struggle with targeting challenges, but creative issues as well. The celebrities and charity's representation were later seeing the creative live on their feeds and telling Olivela they were not approved, so I had to pause ads and/or launch new ones. The algorithm was consistently being reset almost on a daily basis due to unforeseen circumstances on Olivela's side.

It's a newly launched service for a very small niche, ran entirely solo. The biggest difficulty is how to maintain the service relevant, so that it will gather a big enough volume of customers, while also staying true to the purpose of the product.