Top Reasons to Invest in Higher Education Marketing
Over the past five or so years, there’s been a measurable shift in priorities among young people: increasing numbers of high school and college aged students are questioning the value of higher education. Why?
We can attribute many of these attitudinal changes to COVID-era remote learning protocols that left many students out in the cold, snowballing tuition costs, uncertainty around student loan debt, and an increasingly competitive admissions landscape, to name a few. As a result, four-year colleges and universities are vying for smaller pools of prospective students.
What does today’s challenging higher-ed landscape mean for college and university marketing teams?
Richardson Media Group’s Media Director, Anne Richardson, offers her perspective:
An Experienced Higher-Ed Marketing Agency Makes All the Difference
Despite the changes in higher education, one element that remains consistent is the value of cost-effective higher education marketing strategies to help meet university enrollment goals.
In an increasingly competitive environment, it has become more important than ever for higher-ed marketing professionals to showcase their institution’s unique worth, differentiate themselves from other schools and to explain how they plan to deliver on students’ dual expectations of personal growth and career development. An effective higher ed advertising campaign should connect prospective families to what’s happening on campus as well as in the real world.
Certain variables can affect the outcome of an advertising investment, especially one designed to achieve higher education marketing ROI goals. When our team considers using paid media for a university client, we typically ask questions such as:
- What type of call-to-action has been most effective in generating leads in past media campaigns?
- Does your admissions team have the bandwidth to respond in real time to leads generated by an advertising campaign?
- What are some barriers that may prevent student applicants and their families from engaging with your digital ads in the past?
- Where do you see prospective students drop out along the enrollment funnel?
- What trends have you noticed in your institution’s enrollment statistics over the past few years?
- What external factors have affected enrollment year over year?
- What key differentiators set your college apart from the competition?
When building an ad campaign for any client, including those in the higher education space, it’s important to create a multi-layered framework. We always start out by facilitating a strategic intake session, which helps us get a good sense of an institution’s unique challenges and set realistic expectations for what the university’s ad campaign will be able to achieve.
5 Factors That May Impact a Higher-Ed Marketing Campaign
Once the strategic intake session is completed and we have analyzed our findings, we begin the media planning process. Here are five considerations that make a big difference in the effectiveness of a paid media strategy for a college or university:
1. Your school’s level of brand awareness at the outset of the campaign
Knowing where we are starting out along the awareness spectrum is critical to understanding how strong a paid media push we’ll need to make. By “push,” we mean how many total impressions we’ll need to deliver, how long we’ll need to keep the ads running, and how “loud” our share of voice needs to be.
Some questions that help us better understand the current level of brand awareness may include:
- What public perceptions of your school already exist?
- What words immediately come to mind when folks hear your school’s name?
- What feedback does your admissions team receive when they are out and about promoting your school?
- How do you feel you compare to your direct competitors?
In lieu of investing in a formal market research effort (which can be expensive), we’ll make a general determination of your school’s current level of awareness by reviewing your website traffic data in GA4, checking your Google My Business profile to read reviews and see how many searches are happening, and taking a look at how many followers you have on your school’s organic social media accounts.
2. The current online and mobile search visibility of your school’s website
Digital ads are served on mobile and desktop screens. A click on a digital ad drives a user to your website, ideally a dedicated landing page, where information promised in the ad is available and where there may be an opportunity to complete a CTA (a conversion mechanism like a form fill, button click, video view or phone call). Sounds perfect, right?
Well, we know enough about human behavior to understand that not all ads will experience immediate engagement, nor do all ad clicks translate into actual website visits. So, how do we improve the odds that your website or landing page will actually see user traffic as a result of your digital ad campaign?
Encouraging users to visit your website via a digital ad campaign requires:
- Designing properly sized digital ad files for mobile and desktop placements.
- Making sure campaign landing pages meet search engine criteria for content relevance, page performance and accessibility.
- Connecting the messaging of the ads to the content on the destination landing page.
- Being patient! Audiences often require multiple exposures to your ads (this is known as frequency) before they’re willing to convert.
Finally, any website involved in a digital media campaign should be optimized based on mobile and online search engine standards. Our SEO team is poised to boost your website’s search visibility to help organic and paid visitors find and convert on your site.
3. The amount of relevant content on your website, especially on pages where ads will drive traffic
It’s worth reinforcing again: relevant content on a campaign landing page makes for a more consistent user experience for both humans and search engine bots and will ultimately lead to a more successful ad campaign.
Imagine we’re on a timeline. Serving an ad to a member of your target audience is just the first of many touch points along this timeline. To ensure audiences stay engaged with your brand and ultimately choose to interact with you, your ads must feel connected to every other asset in the campaign.
Landing pages should have a similar look and tone of voice to the messages in the ads. When a user arrives on your landing page, engaging content will keep them there longer. We often use the term “sticky” to mean that a user may be inclined to spend more time on your page (i.e. get “stuck” there) if they find content that interests them.
Tried-and-true content marketing strategies to keep visitors on your landing page or website longer include:
- Crafting a unique but informative headline to catch users’ eyes.
- Making sure your CTA form or button is easy to find (i.e. don’t bury it too low on the page)
- Keeping it simple: don’t try to cover too much ground on one page.
- Featuring compelling images or videos to keep users engaged.
- Being transparent. Always tell users what you plan to do with their personal information and what they can expect once they’ve shared it.
4. Your admissions team’s readiness to respond in a timely manner when leads arrive
Let’s face it. Response time matters. Once we build a higher education advertising plan designed to achieve your college’s enrollment goals, advise your creative team to build beautiful and compelling digital ads, drive campaign traffic to a well-written and well-organized landing page, and eventually collect and share data on advertising leads, it will be up to your internal admissions team to fulfill those leads.
Whenever we run a performance media campaign, the clock starts ticking as soon as the first lead is gathered. Lead response time is key to making sure that relatively ‘cool’ inquiries pulled in via the media plan can be warmed up into valuable connections that hopefully end up as deposits and applications down the line.
We always remind our higher-ed clients that a timely response to early stage leads sets the tone for the rest of the fulfillment process. It’s natural for audiences to kick tires at first. It takes careful nurturing to build trust and start a meaningful conversation that will result in more tangible and measurable results.
5. Your advertising budget
Determining the budget for your advertising investment can be a source of stress for many higher education marketing directors. That’s why we’re ready to advise and educate you about the budget process, too. In fact, one of the most common questions we hear when meeting with a new paid media client is: How much money does my organization need to spend on advertising?
There’s no single answer because there are a million variables at play, but whether you’re a smaller school or a larger university, an experienced media planner is the right person to guide a discussion about budget. Keeping sensitive conversations about budgets transparent and realistic is always the best approach. When you finally land on a budget figure, it’s our job to let you know if we think it will suffice to achieve your goals. We’ll help you set realistic expectations for your campaign investment.
When determining media budget, you should consider:
- The reach and frequency required to meet your goals
- Your current cost per lead
- How you have measured the success (or failure) of past campaigns
- The benefits of running ads on more than one platform
- How certain digital platforms may be better suited than others to deliver your unique messaging
Remember, your media investment will need to cover more than just the cost of your advertisements. To avoid any surprises, plan ahead for:
- Agency fees that cover planning, implementation and management of your campaigns.
- Costs for creative, web and content development. (If your internal team can handle these tasks, that’s great!)
- Additional production resources needed to build a fulfillment strategy that will ensure leads are cultivated quickly and thoughtfully.
Transparency and Accountability in Higher Education Advertising with Richardson Media Group
We often say the RMG team “takes an educational approach” to higher education marketing. We realize that paid media planning and buying can feel like a foreign language, so we consider it our collective responsibility to untangle misconceptions and bring clarity to our clients who choose to embark on a paid media adventure with us.
When you work with Richardson Media Group, we’ll share our custom metrics dashboard that tracks the progress of your campaigns and ensures that we stay accountable for data points such as impression delivery, CTR, total conversions and budget. You will receive your own login access to this dashboard so you can review your campaign at any time and feel confident that it’s moving in the right direction.
To chat with us about working on an advertising campaign or SEO strategy for your college or university, drop us a note and we’ll be in touch.
