Spyridon Mesimeris is the Head of Digital Marketing at Student.com – a global marketplace that helps students find a room to live wherever they study. When the company struggled to hit their sales goals in the Asian market, Spyridon decided retargeting with AdRoll might change their fortunes. The investment paid off – and the company soon saw an increase in bookings, and their reach expand by 80%.
We sat down with Spyridon to hear his #DareToGrow story, and find out how retargeting helped his company break new ground in Asia.
I've worked with student.com for about two years and a half now. I started off as a paid search manager and then got promoted to the Head of Digital Marketing. Now, I not only look after the paid side of advertising, but organic search and social media.
Student.com started in Shanghai with a vision to be the global marketplace for student accommodation. A normal day in the office looks very busy because there are a lot of students trying to find a room. Every student has a different budget, and they all use a variety of channels across the world. For example, a student in Malaysia or Thailand may use Facebook a lot more than US students, where they might use Twitter. So, trying to optimise for a global audience is a big challenge – and one of our biggest challenges last year was to grow our customer database outside China.
We have an ambitious growth target for the Southeast Asia market, specifically Thailand and Malaysia. We invested a lot in our Asian call centre, but we hadn’t seen success. We needed to find something that would drive more students to call our call centre.
That was when we decided to launch a new campaign with AdRoll to drive more traffic, leads to the website and calls to the centre. All the students who visited our website but didn’t book a room were retargeted with AdRoll banner ads. The aim would be for them to return to the website and actually sign up for a room.
In Southeast Asia, Facebook and social media is big, and we relied a lot on Facebook retargeting via AdRoll. But the moment we launched the campaign, we saw results straight away. Three months later, the campaign has continued. Thanks to AdRoll, we’ve also been able to maximize the capacity of the call center and manage student inquiries so we can help them find a place to stay.
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Last updated on September 20th, 2023.