Using Paid Advertising in School Marketing

Using Paid Advertising in School Marketing

Marketing is no longer a one-way system of advertising a product. No longer are we simply sold a product, it has become a two-way system of communication. Marketers must now provide value, importance and often entertainment. 

Ever logged in to your preferred social media channel and wondered why you are seeing an ad for something that you were searching for earlier? Is your instant thought that your phone must be listening to you? Well, you are right, in a way! The amount of information that Facebook, Google and other platforms hold about us would surprise even the most tech-savvy marketer. Facebook even gives you the option to download the data that they hold on you: Wondered how they got that information? It’s that little cookie bar at the bottom of the page. But, as a school marketer this information is priceless and not simply spooky! Digital advertising overtook traditional advertisements for the first time this year: so what better time to get on board! 

How can my school use paid advertising?

Every decision in marketing must be informed by data. It’s at our very core as a company in our motto: informed by data, transformed by tech, led by humans. This data is vital in making informed decisions on who to target in your advertising and marketing efforts. Use this data collected to find your target audience and those who are your target audience but do not yet know it. 

Here are some ways in which your school can use paid advertising:

• Open days - Have an open day coming up? Run a conversion campaign to drive sign-ups to your event. 

• Events - Have a big event coming up open to the public? Much like open day campaigns, use paid advertising to drive conversions on this event. 

• Not a well-known school in the local area? - Use a brand awareness campaign to make people aware of your school and why their child MUST go here or at the very least attend an open day. 

• Blogs - Does your school not run open houses? Be creative in driving people to your website. Blog posts such as ‘The values of an independent school education’ would be brilliant in driving traffic to your website. Then, with a call to action on the page, encourage visitors to log their information or delve deeper into your website. 

• Website traffic: Got a shiny, new Interactive Schools website? - Use a traffic campaign to drive new visitors to your website to let them see for themselves. 

How can we help?

At Interactive Schools we are experts in all things digital, social, and creative. They do not call us the team of #DigitalJedi for nothing. 

• We can set up your campaigns for you based on our experience with 100s of schools WORLDWIDE. 

• We can use our @intSchools special sauce to craft the perfect campaign with the perfect keywords and targeting. 

• We can recommend the perfect media based on past first-hand experience of successful campaigns and in-depth knowledge of each platform.

• Not getting the expected results on your campaign? We can help! Paid advertising is a learning process and we sure have had a lot of learning time! 

• Daily tracking on your advertising to make sure everything is running as planned and make any optimisations to any ads not reaching our high expectations. 

• Weekly in-depth reports of your campaign progress and any changes we’ve made. 

• Availability for a chat  ☕️ at any time to speak through any optimisations and recommendations made. 

• Ultimately, we ‘get’ schools and can help BOOST admissions and DRIVE engagement to your school. 

Different Platforms

Facebook/Instagram:

Facebook paid advertising is a great place to focus your digital marketing presence and is usually the first place that most school marketers start out. A simple campaign set-up on Facebook is relatively straightforward, but knowing best practices to maximise results can only be attained through trial and error, the so-called ‘learning’ process. 

When you first load up your ads manager account, you will be asked to create a campaign, then an ad set and finally an ad. You must complete all of these steps before you can start advertising on this platform. 

Targeting:

Targeting is one of the most difficult parts of Facebook ads to get right. Too broad and you could risk wasting money on the incorrect audience, too defined and you risk missing out on the perfect prospects.

Audiences and targeting are based around 2 main areas: location and demographics/interests. Use data from your admissions team to inform your location targeting and make sure to target areas that you have had success with in the past. Bear in mind here if you are a boarding school whether you are targeting the boarding, flexi-boarding or day community, you may need to set up two separate campaigns or ad sets here.

Interests and demographics should be informed by your Google Analytics and admissions team data. Make sure to target the correct parent range and don’t forget about the all important grandparents! Interests vary from continent to continent and what may be available in the USA is not necessarily available in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, The Americas or Africa. Luckily for you, our @intSchools team are experts in each region and the differences in targeting availability. 

Placements:

You’ll notice our title also includes Instagram as well as Facebook. The platform has a highly-visual market for digital advertising and influencers, so do not miss out on Instagram. When you create an ad on Facebook, automatic placements will be selected by default. This will mean that you are targeting a number of platforms including: Facebook: feed, stories, marketing, in-stream videos and Instagram: feed, stories, explore and other audience networks. Therefore, it is vital to make sure that your media is relevant and meets the needs of each of these platforms/features.

• Not sure where to start?: Read our easy guide on 5 steps to Set Up a Facebook Ad

• Not sure what to write? Read our blog on How to Write Compelling Copy For Your Facebook Ads

Google:

Google ads are slightly more tricky to get your head around than Facebook ads as their ads manager platform is a little less user-friendly. However, some good news is that much of the terminology and targeting from Facebook is carried over to Google.

Advertisements on Google

Search:

This is the most common use of Google ads. In contrast to Facebook advertising, those who you are targeting on Google already know what they are looking for. They are looking for a school for their child or grandchild but do not yet know which, they may not even know that your school exists. Search ads work on bidding for keywords such as ‘independent school near me’, etc. With Google you are bidding against other schools who may be running a similar ad campaign to your school.

So, what can make your school stand out from the others?

• Enticing copy that makes visitors want to click through and ultimately convert. 

• Bidding on the correct keywords - be clever with your keyword decisions and use Google’s built-in keyword planner to assist (Note: You will have to have set up a campaign to access this feature)

• Add in negative keywords to not show up on inappropriate searches to your school (e.g. If you are a unisex boys school, if you added the keywords private school on the broad match setting, anyone searching private girls’ school, will also find your school. This is not the audience we want viewing our ad. 

• An awesome landing page: Does your ad simply click through to a boring form? Make sure you are providing an experience for anyone clicking through your ad, remember they may not know a single thing about your school. 

• Correct tracking: it is of utmost importance to correctly set up tracking, or your efforts will be wasted or impossible to prove. Remember: a social media campaign is only as good as you say it is, unless backed up by data! 

Twitter:

Twitter is a fantastic platform on which to share up-to-date live feeds of content from your school. Twitter is the kind of platform where if you were not there at the time, then you may have missed that content in your feed! Here at @intSchools HQ, we are huge fans of this platform and recognise its super powers! Twitter can also be used for advertising and there are some very handy tools involved in the platform’s advertising offer:

#Hashtags:

Did you know that you can target a specific hashtag? This is great if you’d like to target specific events and appear first.

Users and followers:

Twitter’s advertising tool allows you to target specific people/companies and even their followers. This makes Twitter advertising even more targeted than Facebook & Google as you are now narrowing it down to individuals. 

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is considered the social media network of networking and professionals, a place that some consider no place for emojis! We have seen many schools focus efforts on LinkedIn in the past for alumni engagement, recruitment and for sharing any large news developments. But, did you know that LinkedIn also has its own advertising features?

Types of LinkedIn ads:

• Sponsored content - this can either be a promoted post or a post created just for the ad. 

• Inmail - the cheapest of the advertising options, this will send out targeted messages. 

• Text ads - a short 25-character headline with a 75-character description and an image. 

Traditional Marketing:

Although we previously mentioned that digital marketing had overtaken print/traditional marketing for the first time, it does not mean there isn’t still a place for these styles of marketing.

Conclusion:

Paid advertising may seem like a minefield when first starting out but remember it is definitely a learning process. As always, never fear because the team of @intSchools #DigitalJedi are here to help. Drop us an email at social@interactiveschools.com to find out how we can help with your paid advertising efforts. Also, keep your eyes peeled on our events for any upcoming events on advertising and any others that catch your eye.