WITT wins national marketing award

The WITT marketing team, with partners TGM Creative, Apex Digital, and EightyOne Media, has won the Short-Term Marketing Initiative Award – Best Public Sector/Government Marketing Initiative at the TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards held in Auckland this month for their trimester one recruitment campaign ‘From Conversion to Conversation’.

How does a polytechnic find over 15% year-on-year growth in applications, with no more budget, no international students, and a mandate to only recruit from within their region? This was the challenge facing WITT as it prepared to recruit for the 2022 calendar year.

“Each year we aim to grow the number of applications we receive. With 2021 being a record year of applications for us, it was going to be hard to top in 2022,” says WITT’s Marketing Manager Natalie Warren.

“We never expected our marketing approach to student recruitment to win an award on the national stage.”

With a small in-house team, WITT calls on the expertise of regional and national specialists to support their student recruitment campaign.

“Winning this award is a testimony to the expertise and the passion that a small team of the right people can make,” she adds.

Managing Director of EightyOne Media Grant Maxwell has been working with WITT for the last 14 months and partners with the polytechnic to execute their recruitment campaigns.

“We are really proud of the work we did in creating this campaign framework from the ground up.”

Having seen the standard of campaigns entered in the awards Grant was keen to enter the campaign.

“We felt that our work was at least comparable to those.  When the TVNZ Marketing Awards call for entries came out, we decided to put the work forward.”

For Grant, a highlight of the campaign is working with a cross-organisational team of specialists both within WITT and from external agencies.

“As a small team we built a recruitment campaign from the ground up that answered the specific needs of WITT, but at the same time challenged some of the marketing conventions that are no longer relevant in the current market.”

Grant’s advice to anyone who is indecisive about entering awards is to think about the story you are trying to tell.

“There’s nothing wrong with celebrating good mahi. If you are proud of your work, and you can directly demonstrate the results it has achieved, go for it,” he said.

Pictured (left-right):  Samantha Legge (WITT), Phil Bailey (WITT), Olivia Conley (WITT), Tracey Howarth (TGM Creative) Elle Brennan (TGM Creative), Natalie Warren (WITT ) and Mieke Rotteveel (Apex Digital)

Absent : Grant Maxwell  (EightyOne Media)