Project
Project
Texas A&M University School of Law
Texas A&M University School of Law, located in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Originally founded in 1989 as Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, it was acquired by Texas A&M in 2013. Amplus Agency was engaged from June 2022 to March 2023 as a full-service retained partner in the Education industry.
Challenge
Three core challenges made this engagement uniquely complex:
- Reaching a Non-Consumer Audience That Doesn't Self-Identify — The audiences that influence U.S. News rankings (academic deans, law faculty, legal employers, peer institution administrators) don't respond to traditional advertising. They aren't searching for law schools or clicking enrollment ads. Reaching them required original audience research built on geographic, institutional, and behavioral signals.
- Translating Reputation Strategy Into Measurable Digital Actions — Reputation has no direct conversion metric. There's no click that maps to a peer assessment score. The challenge was defining digital proxies for reputation influence (impressions to the right audiences, engagement rates among academic content consumers, YouTube visibility with research audiences).
- Operating Within a Large University System — Multi-layered approval processes, compliance requirements for public university communications, longer planning cycles, and alignment with multiple internal departments — all while delivering a focused strategy within the engagement timeline.
Solution
Amplus structured the engagement around five interconnected workstreams:
- Reputation Strategy & Target Audience Planning — Mapped the audience landscape that determines rankings; defined target personas (academic deans, faculty at peer institutions, senior legal employers); created a prioritized audience framework with messaging direction.
- Digital Media Consulting & Spend Analysis — Advised on budget allocation across YouTube, Google Display, and Facebook; focused on weighting channels, flighting investment, and concentrating spend on ranking-influencer segments.
- Campaign Creative & Asset Development — Produced branded graphics, campaign visuals, and short-form video calibrated for professional/academic audiences, reflecting TAMU Law's authority and differentiators.
- YouTube Channel Audit & Optimization — Full audit of metadata, thumbnails, keywords, and playlist architecture; delivered an optimization roadmap for academic research discoverability.
- Audience Research, Segmentation & Remarketing Architecture — Deep-dive mapping using geographic, behavioral, and institutional signals to build targeting logic that concentrated every media dollar on qualified audiences.
Result
| Year | U.S. News Ranking | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | #53 | Amplus engagement begins |
| 2023 | #46 | Strategy in active deployment |
| 2024 | #29 → #26 | Post-engagement: largest single-year jump |
| 2025 | #22 | Top 25 nationally achieved |
The school climbed 31 positions (from #53 to #22) over the period surrounding and following the engagement — one of the most significant short-term ranking climbs in the U.S. News system. The frameworks developed were designed to be institutionalized within TAMU Law's marketing operation, and the strategy remains in use today.
Ready to Transform
Your Marketing?
Let’s collaborate to craft a strategy that drives real growth for your business.