Business Masters Pathway Strategy & Impact
Project Overview
Higher education has changed a lot in the last few years. Policy changes are affecting enrollment across the country, affordability keeps getting harder, and students are asking more openly whether a degree is actually worth it. Business schools have to answer that with programs and pathways that meet students where they are, both on cost and on getting them ready for a career.
The Business Master's Pathway (4+1) is one of Simon's answers to that. It gives undergraduates from any major an earlier, more affordable way into a Simon master's, letting them earn both a bachelor's and a master's in five years across MS options in Accountancy, AI in Business, Business Analytics, Finance, Marketing Analytics, and Management. It also gets students connected to career support like the Benet Career Management Center while they're still in undergrad, so they can start thinking about long-term goals before they graduate instead of after.
What made the web side of this different was the audience. BMP had to reach three separate groups at once: URochester juniors, high school seniors, and undergraduates at six partner schools (Allegheny College, College of Wooster, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, SUNY Geneseo, Union College, and Ursinus College). These groups were pretty different from each other. They found their way to the program differently, the incentives weren't the same for each, and they were all at different points in figuring out their next step. Because of that, a single BMP page wouldn't really cover what each of them needed. The site had to become the hub for a campaign that ran across paid social, paid digital, organic social, email, and outbound outreach to partner schools.
My Role
I led the web and UX strategy for BMP. It was a big group effort with a lot of teams involved, including central university marketing, our social media lead, the paid digital team, admissions, and our developer. My piece was the website itself, and how it fit into everything else the campaign was doing. The whole thing was built around conversion, getting prospects to actually inquire or apply, and setting it up so it could grow, both as Simon added more partner schools and as other schools within the university looked to run similar pushes of their own.
That started with the architecture of the page set: figuring out how many pages we needed, what each one had to do, and how someone from each audience would move through them toward taking that next step. From there I wrote the content strategy for each audience-specific page, deciding what each group needed to see and how to frame it for where they were in their decision.
I built the pages so new partner schools could be added later without starting over, and so the same structure could be picked up by other schools in the university looking to do the same kind of thing. I also built the Figma components the whole page set was based on, so the pages stayed consistent and were faster to hand off to development. And I set up the GA4 measurement framework we'd use to see how the pages performed once they launched, so we weren't guessing at whether the strategy worked.
Tools: Figma, GA4, Siteimprove, Drupal 9, Slate CRM, FigJam
The Opportunity
The launch was a chance to do it differently than usual. Most program launches at business schools end up as one page with many sub-sections trying to talk to everyone at once. What happens is prospective students scroll past the parts that don't apply to them, and the message gets muddy for everybody. BMP was set up differently from the start. There were three separate audiences and five separate channels all pointing at the website, so the goal was to build a set of pages where each person landed on content that was actually meant for them.
Every channel was bringing in a different kind of visitor. Email was going to URochester juniors who were already in the university system. Partner referrals were coming from students at schools that already had agreements in place. Paid social was casting the widest net, mostly for awareness. Paid digital was backing up brand search for people who were already looking. Each of those visitors was arriving for a different reason and at a different point, so it made sense for each one to land somewhere built for that.
Channel | Primary Audience | Web page |
|---|---|---|
URochester juniors | URochester Juniors page | |
Partner Referrals | Undergraduates at 6 partner institutions | Partner Institutions page |
Paid Digital | Regional prospects, brand search | Ad landing page |
Paid Social (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok) | High school seniors, general awareness | Ad landing page |
Organic Social | Broad, mixed audiences | URochester Juniors page |
The Impact
The multi-audience approach changed how the launch actually ran. Instead of sending every campaign to one URL and hoping that page could work for everyone, each team knew which page their traffic was going to, and each page was set up to fit the people landing on it. The early numbers backed up the approach.
Web engagement ran well above Simon's site averages, the channels performed above their baselines, and the campaign brought in real leads within Slate. The partner referral data was the strong signal our partnerships were working: Union College came in as the #3 traffic source and Wooster College as the #5 within the first month of program launch.
BMP Page and Channel performance (Month 1)
Metric | Result |
|---|---|
BMP page views | 1,238 |
Engagement rate | 67% |
Average engagement time | 49 seconds per session |
Bounce rate | 32% per session |
Union college referrals | 181 Views |
Wooster college referrals | 106 Views |
Email click rate | 2.1% (vs 1% Simon average) |
Email open rate | 66.5% (vs. 30% Simon average) |
LinkedIn paid social CTR | 3.30% (13.2K impressions) |
Slate CRM pipeline
Stage | Count |
|---|---|
Total BMP leads | 52 |
Inquiries (not yet applied) | 20 |
Applicants | 32 |
Applications submitted (Fall 2027) | 24 |
Applications in progress | 8 |
Admitted | 6 |
Outstanding offers | 5 |
Declined offer | 1 |
Awaiting decision | 18 |
The breakdown of leads by school (90% University of Rochester, 8% Union College, 2% Wooster) shows that partner outreach is a real channel worth keeping up, especially with more partner schools still to come online.
It also showed that interest in BMP was spread across Simon's MS programs rather than clustering in just one:
Finance: 8 submitted applications
Business Analytics: 8 submitted applications
AI in Business: 4 submitted applications
Accountancy: 3 submitted applications
Marketing Analytics: 1 submitted application
The Strategy
The idea was to give each audience their own page while still keeping everything tied back to what Simon offers as a whole. Instead of one BMP page trying to talk to everyone, I built a set of pages where each one was aimed at the audience and channel most likely to land on it.
Paid social landing pages, built for conversion. These were short and focused, meant for people seeing BMP for the first time. One clear path to inquire, rather than trying to explain everything up front.
The core BMP program page, for the full story. For people who were already interested and wanted to dig in, this page had the essentials: the program timeline, admissions details, MS program options, and how the pathway actually works. It was built for people evaluating the program, not getting a first impression.
The URochester Juniors page, focused on what mattered to them. The 40% tuition scholarship, the option to take MS classes senior year, no application fee, Benet Career Management Center coaching, and being able to stay in the URochester community they already knew.
The Partner Institutions page, similar but adjusted for the partner agreements. A 30% scholarship, senior-year coursework limited to SUNY Geneseo students because of how close they are, and MS program availability that varied by school.
Every page tied back to Simon as a whole. Career outcomes, individual MS programs, and student stories showed up across the page set. Someone looking at BMP isn't only deciding on the pathway, they're deciding whether Simon is the right school for them, so the pages needed to help with both.
Measurement
Measurement mattered here, so I used two tools that each told me a different part of the story. GA4 covered the big picture: views, unique sessions, engagement time, bounce rate, key events, and where traffic was coming from. That let me confirm the audience-specific pages were pulling traffic from the channels they were meant for, and that people were actually engaging once they got there.
Siteimprove behavioral maps covered the closer-up view. Scroll depth showed how far down people got. Dwell time on different sections told me what was holding attention. And CTA clicks showed which of the main actions people were actually taking. Between the two, I could see both how the channels were performing and what people were doing on the page itself, so I could adjust specific sections quickly instead of waiting out a whole enrollment cycle to fix things.
Implementation
The rollout worked because each team's part was set up to hand off cleanly to the next. Instead of building the pages on their own and then asking other teams to point campaigns at them, we built everything first and then turned the channels on together. That way the site was ready for every kind of traffic on day one, and no team had to water down their message to fit a page that was already there. The work broke into three phases:
Phase 1: Pre-launch build. Central marketing set the audience targets, messaging, and creative direction. I built the page architecture and content strategy in Figma. which I then implemented within Drupal 9 from a shared component library.
Phase 2: Channel launch. The social team turned on the paid and organic campaigns. Paid digital layered in Google Search Sitelinks and Responsive Display ads targeting a three-mile radius around URochester and the partner campuses. Email launched the URochester junior campaign. All of it routed to pages built for that traffic.
Phase 3: Post-launch monitoring. Weekly check-ins across teams to go through the GA4 and Siteimprove data, adjust CTA placement based on behavioral map data, and continued to grow the pages as new partner schools come into the fold.
Team | Contribution |
|---|---|
Central Marketing | Overall strategy, audience targeting, brand-aligned creative direction |
Simon Web | Page architecture, content strategy, Figma component library, measurement framework |
Development | Drupal 9 implementation from Figma handoff |
Social Media | Paid social activation across Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn; organic amplification |
Paid Digital | Google Search Sitelinks and Responsive Display targeting |
Email & Slate | URochester junior email campaign, lead capture routing |
All teams | Weekly performance reviews, behavioral data reads, iterative refinement |
Key Takeaways
A few things made this project work. The biggest was setting the web strategy up to work with the other teams instead of just taking whatever traffic they sent. Every channel had a page meant for it, which got rid of the friction people usually run into when they land on a page that wasn't built for the ad or email that sent them. This was backed by our GA4 data: engagement was high, bounce rates were low, and the partner referrals brought in real sessions, all pointing the same way.
The project was also a good reminder that pages built for a specific audience do better than one generic page, at least when the audiences are different enough for it to matter. BMP's three audiences really were coming in for different reasons, and building pages that spoke to those differences directly proved to benefit our users.
Future Considerations
The main next steps are extending BMP internationally and continuing to grow our partner agreements, and is something we will continue to grow upon to help strengthen out BMP program. There's also a real opportunity to share this approach with with other schools across the University, whose own 4+1 marketing could adopt the same audience-specific page template. Past that, the first round of Siteimprove behavioral data will inform CTA placement adjustments and content sequencing on the highest-traffic pages, and continued partner expansion will scale the existing Partner Institutions page structure as new agreements come online.