The University of Siegen is a research-intensive university with strong regional roots. To sharpen its profile in the competition for prospective students, we generated audience insights into how it is perceived by prospective and current students.

On this basis, we developed the strategic positioning for applicant marketing: "Wir sind nahbar". From it, we derived the campaign claim "Liegt nah" ("Close at hand"), which strikes a chord with the target groups. It brings together several dimensions of the university's USP: the personal sense of togetherness on campus, the close support from teaching staff, and the high quality of life and career prospects in the region. The campaign turns this attitude into a cross-media concept of social media ads, video assets, out-of-home motifs, landing pages and authentic ambassadors, across numerous touchpoints.

Over four phases, more than 65 ad variants run across seven channels. And the campaign is working:

– For the 2025/2026 winter semester, the number of new students (first-time and new enrolments) rises by 10 per cent.
– Funnel and conversion optimisation (ads, landing pages, user journeys) delivers exceptionally strong performance: 160 per cent more clicks than in the same period the year before, and a click-through rate (CTR) of 11.4 per cent on Google Ads.
– Within a year, the CTR of social media ads on YouTube climbs to a strong 2.1 per cent.

In total, the campaign brings several hundred thousand visitors "to Siegen". In the two-month consideration phase alone, the website received 90,000 more visitors than in the same period the year before. The marketing for individual degree programmes also pays off in these two months: almost 80 per cent of the roughly 54,000 views of the "Social Work" landing page came via ads.

The campaign has not only strengthened the University of Siegen's brand for student recruitment. It also leaves the university with a scalable idea and campaign architecture for its future marketing. Tobias Klöckner, Marketing Manager at Uni Siegen, puts it like this: "The campaign shows what many students value about the University of Siegen: our closeness, our community and the opportunities the region offers. With mc-quadrat, we have turned these strengths into convincing communication, with measurable results in reach, interest and applications."

It goes without saying that this kind of marketing only works with a modern website that converts. We helped make that happen. See the case here.