USC Thornton School of Music Marketing Campaign

How do you brand and market 5 new master’s programs?

In the summer of 2017 the USC Thornton School of Music, one of the world’s premier music institutions, approached UNINCORPORATED to launch five, new professional graduate degree programs.

As a music school, admissions are largely audition-based. Because these new programs are non-performance programs, USC Thornton needed to not only reach a large and diverse group of prospective students but educate students why they needed to consider these career-driven degrees.

Before Inbound Marketing

Since being founded in 1884, USC Thornton, the oldest continually operating cultural institution in Los Angeles, has relied on their reputation of rigorous musicianship and expert faculty members to attract the world’s most talented artists.

Because these vanguard degrees required USC Thornton to articulate their value to potential students, they couldn’t rely solely on their reputation to build an applicant pool for their inaugural cohorts. This challenge required us to augment their traditional recruitment marketing methods with a digital-first approach that attracted students, educated them, and nurtured them through the application process.

With such a complex campaign and limited resources, we knew we had to use every tool at our disposal. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to put inbound marketing to the ultimate test.

Solution

We saw a huge opportunity to get in front of prospective students from the very beginning of the awareness and research phase by organizing an integrated marketing campaign that leveraged inbound marketing tactics, paid advertising, and email marketing communications.

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