A complete digital marketing operation for Liverpool Media Academy — strategy, creative, four paid channels and custom attribution, all pointed at one conversion: open day bookings. It ran from independent academy through to acquisition by Galileo Education.
Liverpool Media Academy trains the next generation of performers and creators — music, musical theatre, game design, film and TV — from campuses in Liverpool and London, and ranks among the UK's leading specialist media education providers.
What LMA asked for went well beyond a campaign: a complete digital operation covering strategy, creative, multi-channel paid media and the measurement infrastructure to know what was working. Get prospective students through the door, and LMA's own people would do the rest.
The audience made it interesting — 16-to-18-year-olds and their parents, split across entirely different platforms with entirely different creative expectations. Winning a student on TikTok and reassuring a parent on Facebook are different crafts, and both journeys had to converge on the same booking page.
Activity also had to flex with the academic calendar — clearing windows, UCAS deadlines and open day dates each demanded their own approach and budget weighting.
Paid search ran in four categories — brand, location, course and events — with budget moving between them as students moved through their decision. In clearing, course-led searches produced 81% of paid search leads; by open day season, brand searches took over. The structure adapted continuously instead of running fixed.
Social ran across Meta, TikTok and YouTube in parallel, each with its own creative demands. Instagram Stories peaked at a 19.78% click-through rate. TikTok activity lifted brand search 20% whenever it ran. And a video burst fronted by a well-known ambassador sent brand searches up 370% — the cross-channel amplification that strong social creative produces in search.
Beneath the campaigns, we built custom attribution dashboards giving LMA's leadership true sight of what drove bookings — the full journey from exposure to confirmed open day attendance, not a wall of clicks and impressions.
Open days filled, consistently, across both campus and virtual formats — with reach concentrated in the five geographies that produced most enquiries: London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Slough and the North East.
When Galileo Education acquired LMA, the dashboards, systems and channel frameworks we'd built were absorbed straight into Galileo's own stack — the plainest possible endorsement of how the infrastructure was engineered. One of the rare agency engagements that materially contributed to what made the business worth buying.