Liverpool Media Academy is one of the UK's leading specialist media education institutions — offering courses in music, musical theatre, game design, film and TV across campuses in Liverpool and London.
LMA came to Simplicity needing more than a campaign. They needed a full digital marketing operation — strategy, creative, paid media across multiple channels, and the infrastructure to measure what was actually working. Open day bookings were the primary conversion metric: get prospective students through the door and the academy's own team would take it from there.
The audience was primarily 16–18 year olds and their parents — a demographic split across platforms, with different creative requirements for each. Reaching a prospective student on TikTok requires an entirely different approach to reaching their parent on Facebook, and both journeys needed to end at the same place: a confirmed open day booking.
We built and ran the full digital operation — not just media buying, but the strategic framework, creative production, channel mix and the attribution infrastructure that tied it all together. Campaign activity was structured around the academic calendar: clearing windows, UCAS deadlines, and open day dates each demanded a different approach and budget weighting.
Paid search was structured across four campaign categories — brand, location, course and events — with budget shifting between them based on where students were in their decision journey. During clearing, 81% of paid search leads came through course-led searches. As open day season approached, brand searches dominated. The campaign adapted in real time rather than running a fixed structure throughout.
On social, we built and managed campaigns across Meta, TikTok and YouTube simultaneously — each with distinct creative requirements. Instagram Stories delivered a 19.78% CTR at peak. TikTok drove 20% uplift in brand search when active. A video burst featuring a well-known brand ambassador drove a 370% spike in brand-led searches — demonstrating the cross-channel amplification effect that good social creative creates in search.
Alongside the campaign work, we built custom attribution dashboards that gave LMA's leadership team genuine visibility into what was driving bookings — not just clicks and impressions, but the full journey from ad exposure to confirmed open day attendance. This infrastructure became a significant asset as the business scaled.
Open day bookings were consistently delivered across campus and virtual formats throughout the engagement, with national reach across five key conversion geographies — London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Slough and the North East generating the majority of enquiries.
The attribution and digital infrastructure we built proved durable enough to outlast the engagement itself. When Galileo Education acquired LMA, the digital marketing systems, dashboards and channel frameworks we had built were sufficiently robust to be integrated directly into Galileo's broader tech stack — a mark of the quality and scalability of the work.
The relationship ran from LMA's independent phase through to and beyond the acquisition, making it one of the few agency engagements that contributed directly to the conditions that made the business attractive to acquire.
Liverpool Media Academy · Full Service Digital · UK
