Liverpool Media Academy trains the next generation of performers and creators — music, musical theatre, game design, film and TV — from campuses in Liverpool and London, and ranks among the UK's leading specialist media education providers.
What LMA asked for went well beyond a campaign: a complete digital marketing operation covering strategy, creative, multi-channel paid media and the measurement infrastructure to know what was working. Everything pointed at one conversion: open day bookings. Get prospective students through the door, and LMA's own people would do the rest.
The audience made it interesting — 16-to-18-year-olds and their parents, split across entirely different platforms with entirely different creative expectations. Winning a student on TikTok and reassuring a parent on Facebook are different crafts, and both journeys had to converge on the same booking page.
We ran the whole operation: strategic framework, creative production, channel mix and the attribution layer tying it together. Activity flexed with the academic calendar — clearing windows, UCAS deadlines and open day dates each got their own approach and budget weighting.
Paid search ran in four categories — brand, location, course and events — with budget moving between them as students moved through their decision. In clearing, course-led searches produced 81% of paid search leads; by open day season, brand searches took over. The structure adapted continuously instead of running fixed.
Social ran across Meta, TikTok and YouTube in parallel, each with its own creative demands. Instagram Stories peaked at a 19.78% CTR. TikTok activity lifted brand search 20% whenever it ran. And a video burst fronted by a well-known ambassador sent brand searches up 370% — the cross-channel amplification that strong social creative produces in search.
Beneath the campaigns, we built custom attribution dashboards giving LMA's leadership true sight of what drove bookings — the full journey from exposure to confirmed open day attendance, not a wall of clicks and impressions. That infrastructure became an asset in its own right as the business scaled.
Open days filled, consistently, across both campus and virtual formats — with reach concentrated in the five geographies that produced most enquiries: London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Slough and the North East.
When Galileo Education acquired LMA, the dashboards, systems and channel frameworks we'd built were absorbed straight into Galileo's own stack — the plainest possible endorsement of how the infrastructure was engineered.
The relationship spanned LMA's independent years through the acquisition and beyond — one of the rare agency engagements that materially contributed to what made the business worth buying. It's the fullest expression of the full-funnel operation we now offer from Canada.
Liverpool Media Academy · Full Service Digital · UK
