700K leads in 4 months for educational institution

Kroton is Brazil’s leading private educational organization, offering on-campus and remote learning courses throughout the country. Like so many other educational organisations, the pandemic heavily impacted Kroton’s ability to operate, but as a commercial organization, it could not rely on being propped up by government.

Instead, Kroton decided to accelerate its digital transformation process. It built adaptive learning, gamification and advanced learning environments that would offer continuity for its students while setting it up for long-term digital success.

Now, it needed to connect with more learners and open their eyes to the benefits of remote education. Under financial pressure from the impact of COVID and investment in their own digital transformation, it didn't have the budget for large-scale social advertising. This is where Upstream got involved with a unique form of engagement that would soon deliver vast numbers of potential new recruits.

Upstream ran targeted campaigns, targeting young Brazilians of school-leaving age for four universities across various regions in Brazil - Unopar, Anhaguera, Pitagoras, and Unime. Thanks to Upstream’s close partnership with mobile operator, TIM, it was able to target users geographically using regional Brazilian mobile number codes. Also, it had a way of reaching young Brazilians that no-one else has access to – and an engagement offer that no-one else could offer.

At TIM, Upstream runs “Free-D”, a clever “three-sided business model”. It is an “out-of-data” portal connected to TIM’s network, which benefits TIM, its customers and advertisers. When prepaid customers run out of their data allowance (which happens constantly in prepaid dominated markets like Brazil), they are re-directed to Free-D, a data rewards platform, where users can acquire free data by interacting with advertisements.

Within just four months, a total of 692,000 fresh leads were gained. During that time, there were 22.3 million ad impressions and 4 million ad clicks. An impressive 17% conversion rate was achieved. Perhaps most impressive of all, Kroton was able to achieve these figures at a 75% drop in cost per lead versus its existing strategy on Facebook and Google.