How You Can Use Online advertising

To Attract Parents To Your Academic Institution

Mark GraysonAccount Manager for Education

The Digital Marketing Bureau

introduction

this white paper aims to help you understand how you can benefit from using online advertising to attract potential parents to your academic institution; whether this be to enquire directly or to come and visit on a scheduled open day. the cost of private schools - it’s now a staggering £12,345 on average. the most expensive schools cost well over £30,000. therefore, attracting the right parents is a fundamental concern.

It will discuss platforms like Google (receives 3 billion queries per day), Facebook (1.4 billion active users) and other more niche networks where you can find the right audience and serve the adverts exactly when they are looking. It will discuss best practices and how you can benefit from including online advertising into your marketing spend.

My name is Mark Grayson, I am an Account Manager at The Digital Marketing Bureau and I run the education side of the business. Having been in the Education sector both private and state for 13 years. My various roles have included, Head of Department for IT and Computing, Network Manager including running School websites with implementing Digital Strategy and MIS Manager hopefully I understand the challenges you face and hence do feel free to call me with any questions about it at any time.

the Problem

Offline advertising is often frustrating. You and your marketing team spend hours designing and resizing adverts for different publications and yet most research is now done online - over 61% of people carry out research online (1). Equally, once it has gone to publication, can you truly understand how many people actually stopped and looked at your advert? Do you know how many people called you up or visited your website to book an appointment?

Is there any wonder that now most businesses are pushing a considerable amount of their advertising online? In fact, Internet Advertising is expecting to overtake TV spend by 2018 and nearly 2 out of 3 marketeers have moved more than 30% of their marketing spend from traditional to digital media (2).

Aside from knowing distribution figures you will never know how many people will have seen your advert which, as marketing people we always need to know. How do you attribute your marketing spend when you don’t know where people are actually seeing your advert?

a solution

Moving a proportion of your marketing spend online is one way to tackle this problem. Finally being in control of what is being shown to potential parents, when and ultimately where, is key to showing your school above all others in your area.

Knowing who your audience is and where they search for information is key to success in online marketing. It goes without saying that two of the most dominant players in terms of both proven advertising success as well as audience are Google and Facebook. We will cover both and look at how these platforms perform and some top tips for you to implement.

Marketing Using google

Google holds a monopoly amongst search engines –88% of all searches are carried out through google (3). There is no doubt you have a website and it is most likely a lot of people will find you through Google.

Equally, if you have Google Analytics set up (a clever way for you to look at your website traffic and see what people are viewing) you will find most people will find you for terms like your school name.

“Offline advertising is often frustrating. You spend hours designing and resizing adverts for different publications and yet most research is now done online - over 61% of people carry out research online.”

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the amount of marketing spend most marketeers are moving from traditional to digital media.

However, people search in varied ways. They may not know of your school and will type in something far more generic like “Private Schools in Surrey” or “Schools near Dorking” for schools they would like to visit and ultimately send their children too. Google Adwords is one way you can increase your chance of appearing in the search engines for more varied keywords.

Google Adwords goes by many names – some call it Pay Per Click advertising or just PPC.

Some call it CPC or Cost Per Click and all this is because you serve an advert and you only pay when someone clicks on your advert to visit your website.

Let us explain further. in the screenshot you will see a search for the term “Private Schools in Berkshire”. Those at the top and right hand side – as indicated – are the Sponsored Ads (CPC, PPC etc); as you can see there are a few schools being shown here. Only when I clicked on one of their adverts would I be charged for doing so.

How can i advertise using google

There is a primary Adwords tactic. This is to pool together all likely search terms that people would type in to fi nd schools in your area. These may be termed very differently e.g. Public Schools, Private Schools, by towns or by the county. Either way, you have to exhaust every possibility.

Once this is done you have to decide on the advert text you are going to use. You are restricted by the number of characters you can use and it must be relevant to the keyword it is going to be seen with. This is all displayed in the graphic to the left.

There is a particular skill involved in setting up these campaigns as the better and more relevant the adverts are, generally the less you pay.

There are other ways to use Google to advertise and uses a technique called Retargeting which is discussed a little later.

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Five top tipsFor using google adwords:

Marketing using Facebook

For many years people weren’t sure on marketing with Facebook, even despite its 1.3 billion audience. How-ever, when the statistic came out a few years ago that the most popular and active usergroup were 45-49yr old women a few eyebrows were raised.

Essentially Facebook is no longer a young persons social network, it is for the parents and here is your opportu-nity to advertise to them.

Facebook adverts are shown in someone’s timeline (where their updates are displayed from friends) as well as on a sidebar on the right hand side). You can see from the image here how adverts look.

How can you target people using Facebook?

The main advertising spend is to attract people who are perhaps not aware of your school. This is done by demographic targeting .

This means understanding who your audience is and filtering your advert to be shown only that audience i.e. you can be very specific to age demographics, marital status and even geographical location. We have seen this work very well for schools attracting an international audience showing them very contextual adverts for their country of origin.

It is a clever way of attracting new parents to your school based on demographics and we find visuals hold a very important part of setting up your adverts. There are even more specific ways of advertising which are included inour retargeting section below.

retargeting

Clients will visit your website from any number mar-keting sources but you can “retarget” them using paid advertising if they do not carry out what you hoped they would do i.e. download a brochure or book to come on an open day.

Obviously they may not have liked the look of the school but you do want to rule out the other alternative first!

Facebook and Google now allow retargeting in a couple of ways and allow you to target specific adverts at people who have been to your website previously. Facebook have led the way here and it was only recently that Google followed suit seeing how successful it had been. Lets look at two ways you can work with retargeting.

Placing “pixels” on your website

A pixel is a small line of code that is provided to you by Facebook. It is a simple copy and paste job for your developer but, from the moment it is installed, it starts building a picture of the people that visit your website.

This is done by applying a “cookie” to that persons computer (similar to attaching a receiver to a person and then tracking their movements) and then, you can serve them with adverts when you feel it is the right time. Previously this has been abused and people have been silly with how they serve the adverts but people are now working out the best methods of doing it. Lets explain that further.

With Google retargeting your adverts can show on many millions of websites around the world that al-low adverts to be shown on them. This can be split geographically and by topic – meaning you only show adverts on sites that you feel are a natural fit for your advert – after all these people have visited your sitepreviously.

With Facebook retargeting you get a little bit more control and it is all held within the Facebook platform. You can start to build different audiences all from that one pixel. For example you might want to build an au-dience of all visitors to your site. Alternatively you may want to build an audience that only looks at certain pages but not at others – Those that have looked at an open day but not booked a place for example.

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Based on the audience you can then show them ad-verts in their Facebook timeline which are relevant to the audience you have grouped them into.

Of all searches online are carried out through google.

Using existing database lists on your website

This is another form of retargeting and works with your existing list of e-mails – assuming you have kept a record of parents who are interested in visiting yourschool (or indeed your existing parents should you want to share some events with them like school plays etc).

Both Google and Facebook allow you to import your data lists into their systems and you can then serve adverts to them. This is because people’s e-mails of-ten match the details they use to log in to the social networks and thus creating a bespoke audience for adverts.

What to do next and how could we help.

There are now several options open to you. Firstly you could take all this in house. There are some excellent online and offline training courses on each compo-

nent part of what has been discussed here. Most will be one or two day training courses and some may do courses that spread over a few weeks with little bits of bite sized information for each module.

Alternatively, you could look at a local agency to help you carry out these tasks and do the hard work for you. Generally there would be three core stages to do this.

Firstly there would be the initial set up; mixing work involving keyword research with work involving web developers for the retargeting. We can take care of all that.

Secondly, there would be the campaign set up and getting it all started. We usually recommend a 6 month initial campaign – this gives it long enough to get it all moving and to let the campaign bed in a little bit.

Over that 6mth period the third task takes place, that of management. Campaign management means the agency constantly tinkers with your campaign and en-sures it is being successful. Over that time we should start seeing some really promising results and we can start to look at the next 6 months based on the results we are seeing.

Here at The Digital Marketing Bureau my role is to support the Education Sector. Having been in the Education sector both private and state for 13 years. My various roles have included, Head of Department for IT and Computing, Network Manager including running School websites with implementing Digital Strategy and MIS Manager hopefully I understand the challenges you face. Call me to chat any questions you may have.

thank you.

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Of people carry out research online.

references

(1) http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics

(2) http://www.marketingcharts.com/uncategorized/marketers-

shifting-ad-spendmix-to-digital-media-22369/

(3) http://www.techworld.com/blog/war-on-error/google-

still-totally-dominates-uk-search-traffic-but-does-this-

matter-3608494/

the digital Marketing Bureau

www.thedigitalmarketingbureau.com

mark@thedigitalmarketingbureau.com

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mrkgrayson

https://twitter.com/MrkGrayson

Tel: 07971 866281