Cerro Coso - GradComm

Communicating the Power 
of a Cerro Coso Education

Providing critical educational opportunities.

With one of the largest service areas in California, Cerro Coso Community College has long been a respected and important member of the Eastern Sierra community providing critical educational opportunities to students from a variety of backgrounds. The college has five instructional sites as well as an incarcerated student education program.

An effective refresh to brand identity, done in record time.

As the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic began to pass, Cerro Coso found itself ready to reassess its identity and better position itself to inspire future students and communicate the life-changing opportunities their institution provides. At the same time, a lapse in attention to marketing had led to messaging and collateral that lacked clarity and cohesion. Cerro Coso needed a way to refresh its identity and messaging quickly and effectively.

Research reveals solutions.

To understand the overall strengths and weaknesses of Cerro Coso’s current communications, a thorough analysis of over 75 pieces of collateral (including emails, text messages, digital and traditional ads, social media accounts, and web pages) was conducted. GradComm conducted individual interviews and focus groups with faculty, staff, and students to get a clear sense of the college’s identity and perceived place within the community.

Based on this research, GradComm developed a unique tagline that solidified Cerro Coso’s internal and external identity and provided a consistent rhetorical foundation for future messaging. In addition to two highly successful short-term, digital media buys, a year-long marketing plan was created to support ongoing communications.

Tagline Takes Flight! The “Take Flight” tagline was revealed to college leadership who responded with unanimous praise and excitement. President Sean Hancock was so excited about it he was ready to start deploying it the day we presented it.

Changes to creative strategy and messaging resulted in significant improvements across all campaign metrics!

Social media saw a 65% increase in CTR while CPM and CPC costs decreased by 30% and 108% respectively.
Display CTR increased by 144% with a CPM decrease of 109%.
Despite a budget reduction, Pay Per Click performed better resulting in a 66% reduction in CPC which came in at just $.24 cents per click compared to the industry average of $4.00!