Driving “Open House” Registration Growth in Post-Secondary Education

"Strong Coffee has been a strong digital advertising partner for NorQuest, supporting our student recruitment campaigns with thoughtful strategy, clear reporting, and responsive optimization. Their team understands the post-secondary space and has been easy to work with, especially when we need to shift quickly based on campaign performance, priorities, or timelines." Kylie McConnell - Manager, Digital Marketing

The Client: NorQuest College

Post-secondary enrolment has been under a lot pressure the past few years. International student pipelines have narrowed, cost-of-living concerns are keeping domestic learners on the sidelines, and competition has been growing in an increasing AI-focused world, where traditional digital mediums are seeing a seismic shift in usage behaviour.

It was in this environment that NorQuest College challenged Strong Coffee to find ways through the noise to drive incremental awareness and increased registrations to their key enrolment events of the season: Open House. NorQuest hosts two Open Houses per year, one in Fall and one in Spring. Registrations were largely driven by email, ads and organic channels.

Key Challenge

Each of the six Open House campaigns began with a formal strategy document that carried forward documented learnings from the prior cycle. Tactics that worked were scaled. Tactics that didn't were cut. Three pillars shaped the approach across every campaign:

Audience segmentation built around NorQuest College's actual prospect types: mature domestic learners, high school students, parents of prospective students, newcomers and Indigenous audiences, rural Albertans, and job seekers — each with tailored creative and messaging.
Competitive targeting to improve market-share on high-value keywords, audiences derived from competitor landing pages, lookalike audiences and more to find new enrolments in a crowded marketplace.
Channel diversification that expanded only when performance justified it. New platforms were tested at modest spends, and only scaled when they proved their value. By Fall 2025, the active channel mix included Google Search, PMAX, YouTube, Meta (newsfeed, stories, lead forms, carousels), Bing & Snapchat.
Created urgency through a campaign architecture designed to scale interest and awareness initially, build audiences from that interest and re-engagement ads to drive registrations later in the campaign.

Our Approach

We deployed the tactics and targeting that worked, and scaled up spends to take advantage. We monitored results closely, and mirrored winning tactics in the next iteration of the Open House events. Not all successful tactics remained successful, which often warranted further testing. Here's four specific tactics that help deliver the biggest impact to registrations and quality leads for NorQuest College.

Competitor-focused PMAX campaigns: We built audiences from competitor Open House visitors, including key website pages, and layered over intent signals and lookalikes to find new audiences to promote to. This became the single highest-converting Google tactic.
1st Party Data Audiences We built audiences from past registrants, and built out a series of lookalike audiences to amplify our reach across new geographic regions. As we expanded ruraly, our campaigns were well optimized to drive registrations.
Facebook lead form ads: These ads captured registrations and interest that never touched the website. Combined with 2FA to confirm intent, this produced high-quality, vetted registrations, that were quick, and never took the user off the platform they were scrolling. Automation then took these leads and synced directly into a CRM with e-mail drips.
Parent-focused ads: A key insight to post-secondary enrolment is the impact parents make in the decision. We leveraged this by building ad campaigns and video speaking directly to parents. This helped us get into the home of prospective students and helped drive additional registrations.

The Results

+0%

Fall Registrations (2023-2025)

Spring Registrations (2023-2025)

-0%

Cost Per Registration

Avg. Cost Per Registration

The Conclusion

The NorQuest Open House program is a good example of what a long-term agency relationship should produce: not a single campaign win, but a system that gets measurably better every cycle. Strategy documents that carry learnings forward. Creative decisions grounded in data. Tactics that earn their place before they get budget.

If you're a post-secondary institution navigating enrolment pressure, competing for domestic students, or looking to build a paid media program that improves over time, we'd like to talk.