Alex Yates
Creative Director
Manh Nguyen
Filmmaker
Chau Nguyen
Video producer
Brett Wertz
Content Strategist
Background
Fourdozen has specialized in study abroad marketing in Vietnam since 2017 and boasts a client list of more than 100 educational institutions around the world that depend on its marketing support to reach potential students and their parents. Before the pandemic, our clients reached their business goals by personally traveling to Vietnam and hosting events in places like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.
Recognizing that COVID-19 would completely upend business as usual in the study abroad sector, Fourdozen had to rapidly innovate a new suite of services to help those clients meet their enrollment goals without the benefit of travel or face-to-face meetings. We came to call this service “Linh’s List”.
Our Big Idea
Fourdozen made a strategic decision early on to not simply adapt in-person events to the online world. Despite a suite of available tools to facilitate online meetings and events, we found this a too-obvious choice, one that seemed designed to generate revenue for marketers without results for clients, by charging the same fees as for in-person events without the same benefits (our prior experimentation with “virtual fairs” found users resistant to the platforms). So, from the outset we agreed that virtual events would not form part of our strategy.
Instead, our approach was to build a new brand that could form the basis of a set of Vietnamese-language permission assets. We did this by developing a grassroots online community interested in study abroad. This new brand, Study Abroad Success (Du Học Thành Công) was built with help from talented Vietnamse student creators who had been studying abroad but were back in Hanoi due to COVID-19 and had joined our team for the summer.
With our new community growing quickly on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, we turned our efforts to develop a suite of cost-effective, scalable digital marketing services for educational institutions to reach customers interested in study abroad that could credibly and cheaply replace in-person events. This set of services, which we called “Linh’s List,” gave our clients access to the community in a variety of beneficial ways.
Finally, we supplemented our organic social media strategy with a video advertising campaign that leans hard into whimsical, unexpected combinations. Taking inspiration from a hugely popular black and white comedy YouTube VLOG that spoofs tropes from the early-postwar era in Vietnam (the “1977 VLOG”) we created a series of video advertisements that paid loving homage to the style and motif, but adapted the punchlines for study abroad.
Results
Using the above approaches, Fourdozen quickly came to own and control a set of monetizable assets and benefits that, deployed correctly, could scale to help our large list of clients. Our Study Abroad Facebook success community grew to more than 100,000 users, ultimately settling at ~140,000, far exceeding our goal of 100,000. Our advertisements ran on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, resulting in thousands of leads for our clients. Importantly, our approach was able to keep clients in business during COVID while saving them money compared to in-person events.
In addition, the Study Abroad Success community continues to go strong to this day. Our creators continue to post on YouTube and Facebook with fresh, fun ideas aimed at their demographic cohort. Even after the pandemic recedes into the rear view mirror, the new service we developed on the back of the Study Abroad Success community can continue to be a cost effective way to help student recruiters stay in the Vietnamese market.
