Social search with iQ Students

CLIENT

iQ Students

PROJECT OVERVIEW

We made the one of the largest financial decisions of young adult lives easier by making their social search easier.

CHALLENGE

We needed to make iQ Student Accommodation the most visible and trusted brand in student accommodation, in the cities where it operates, then convert that attention into action AKA booking the accommodation.

SOLUTION

The primary channels used are TikTok, Instagram and YouTube by UK students for this social search behaviour. We began by auditing iQ Student’s visibility and favourability across 10 priority cities, benchmarking against competitor offerings, and looking at both initial discovery, and subsequent consideration stages. This comprehensive audit involved benchmarking over a 1,000 individual search prompts. From this we identified the ‘recipe’ for success: the content formats and creators who secured ranking videos in those cities. We utilised these insights to develop a six month programme to drive social search visibility for iQ. There were three core elements: - Third party student creators - iQ Residents creating owned content - Optimising existing owned content to drive greater visibility

OUTCOME & RESULTS

The results were significant: iQ Student became the most visible student accommodation provider with 28% increase in absolute visibility in social search and X3 the visibility of the nearest competitor. Through the programme an incremental 400,000 views of iQ accommodation were generated on relevant searches. This stream of activity achieved the best like-for-like trading performance by that stage in the academic year, with social search the major variable in marketing activity. This is what commercially-focussed cutting edge digital discoverability looks like.

Example of the work