Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes
Taylor’s University is the No. 1 private university in Southeast Asia, ranked #284 in the QS World University Rankings 2023. This ranking places the university among the top 1% of global universities. Taylor’s University is always looking for avenues to address the shift in the education and work landscapes contributing to the introduction of the Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes, a programme catered for busy professionals looking to upskill in a changing world.
The Challenge:
To promote this particular programme, we needed to generate publicity via traditional and digital media. Unfortunately, the education media landscape in Malaysia is niche and dwindling.
Taylor’s recognised that there was an urgency to provide the workforce of today with avenues to upskill and reskill themselves with accelerated digital transformation, impacting the way we work, live, and learn. Therefore, it was crucial to launch its ‘Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes’. However, the challenges faced were trying to ensure the courses catered to the needs of working individuals who have to juggle a work-life-study balance.
The challenge for us from a PR standpoint was trying to ensure that our new offering stood out in what is already a very saturated and competitive market – not just against online platform providers, but also other local universities who are also democratising the learning by making courses available online.
The current era sees the burgeoning of multiple other online learning providers who are vying for attention from a vast number of prospective students. Additionally, the long-standing presence of some platforms and the affordability of others were unique selling points of the competition out there, and we had to figure out a solution that allowed our new offering to stand out against the rest.
The Solution:
The education industry is highly competitive, so getting the story out was a challenge as media prioritised paying customers. Therefore Taylor’s University required support for ways to extend PR mileage.
The trends noticed in the industry were technological advancements such as AI impacting the workforce and requiring the workforce to have a new set of skills. Other trends also included shifts in learning behaviours such as shorter attention spans and reduced time to pursue education.
With technological advancement, there was an urgency for the workforce to upskill and reskill themselves to stay relevant. Another insight found was that along with this very advancement, the workforce of today have various opportunities to juggle and required and education option that gave them the opportunity to find work-life-study-balance.
We looked into ways to spread the word and generate interest about our newest online offering. To do that, we decided to look at the programme from a more holistic approach by focusing on the key differentiation factor of nano-learning. The programmes offer what was traditionally taught in over an hour of lectures now broken down into 25 to 30 bite-sized videos and interactive content with no more than five minutes for each nano-learning topic.
To put this into action, we knew it was crucial to create awareness regionally through a multi-market media launch. From September 2022 to February 2023, we focused our PR efforts on launching Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes in three regional markets – Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam – seeing a resonating target audience with burgeoning interest to reskill and upskill.
Leveraging the key unique selling point of the programme – the nano-learning aspect – we knew that it was important for media to not just hear about the uniqueness of Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes, but to also experience and see it for themselves. That paved the way for us to transform what was originally supposed to just be a usual media launch to one that was experiential, a session which we knew would help add more weight and depth to the stories that would be churned out by both local and regional media.
While it is standard for universities to launch such programmes regularly, we knew that this offering was one of a kind. As such, we highlighted the nano-learning component of the programme to anchor the launch, storytelling how courses are available online and promoting flexible education in a post-COVID world.
By focusing on components of the programme, we were able to address the dwindling media scenario by reaching out beyond the Education media. We extended invitations to Technology & Business media titles as well, thereby generating more coverage than what was initially expected.
Key Results:
We garnered a total of 290 coverage, specifically 108 coverage in Malaysia, 71 in Indonesia, with a PR value of over 100m RM. Some of the media that covered the story included The Star, Sin Chew Daily, The Edge, BFM 89.9, Astro AWANI, Kontan, Liputan6.com, Vietnam Business Review and The Saigon Times. We were also able to be featured in non-education segments such as tech and lifestyle.
Additionally, the markets conducted post-launch activation and below are the results:
- Malaysia (Post launch interviews)
- Indonesia (Post launch interview)
- Vietnam (Byline)
As a result of the project, the client was also pleased to learn that Taylor’s 100% Online Postgraduate Programmes exceeded its initial target of 9 by achieving nearly 8 times more at 76 student registrations. In addition, the programme has generated close to 10,000 prospect leads across local and international markets up till the June 2023 intake.