The education industry is experiencing a rapid rate of growth. Current studies show that online degree programs are estimated to have a 9.1% compound annual growth rate through 2026. While the prospect of more students seeking an education is exciting, the rapidly increasing interest in online and traditional learning also creates a competitive market for higher education institutions.
Although many families still send their students to their alma mater, relying on word-of-mouth marketing is no longer enough. Maximizing paid advertising in education helps your institution or academic learning program stand out to a diverse range of learners in a global market.
The Power of Paid Advertising for Education
Paid advertising puts you in the driver’s seat for targeting specific demographics and interests of potential students. Compared to traditional marketing methods, paid advertising allows you to expand your reach to wider geographical and demographic areas.
The defined parameters that are involved with using paid advertising also make it easier to track the results. Achieving measurable results allows you to have even more control over how you develop and implement future marketing strategies.
Optimizing Your Budget for Higher Enrollment
The majority of educational programs have clearly defined budgets for education marketing that must be spread over several key areas. Fortunately, you have options for stretching your budget further by using these essential strategies.
Goal Setting
Planning is an important aspect of education marketing, and you’ll want to start by clearly defining campaign goals. These may include increasing brand awareness, generating more website traffic and obtaining higher application completion rates.
Targeting Strategies
To drive higher enrollment rates, your marketing campaign should also include utilizing target strategies that are available on popular platforms such as Google Ads and social media advertising.
Being able to target your educational programs to people who fit within a specific demographic or who have experienced a life event such as graduating high school makes your advertising more effective. You can also use paid advertising for retargeting website visitors to increase repeat traffic and conversions.
Platform Selection
Putting ads up where the target audience will never see it is a waste of your insinuation’s marketing budget. To avoid this pitfall, you’ll want to work with our experts at Semgeeks to identify the right advertising platforms. We’re familiar with all of the search engines and social and video platforms that people visit, which allows us to pinpoint which ones fit your educational program’s target audience.
Creative Optimization
Education marketing materials should always be eye-catching and informative. Otherwise, the target audience won’t pay attention long enough to get your campaign messages. Crafting compelling ad copy and residuals that resonate with the target audience will leave prospective students with a desire to fill out an application or delve deeper into the website to learn more.
A/B testing is a method we use at Semgeeks to further improve optimization. By comparing two web pages or different advertisements, we can fully understand their effects on the target audience and use what works best.
Landing Page Optimization
At some point, most of us have visited a website that only led to confusion. Most likely, you’ve given up on ordering takeout or making another form of purchase due to landing on a website that was hard to navigate.
The same situation also impacts educational marketing. If students find your institution’s web pages hard to understand, slow to low or lacking information, then they’ll quickly go to your competitors.
Creating user-friendly landing pages is another aspect of stretching your advertising budget to increase enrollment rates. Prospective students should be able to find the information they need along with prompts and calls to action that leads them directly to areas where they can fill out an enrollment application or request to speak with a representative from your program.
Measuring Success and Refining Your Strategy
Calculating your ROI on education marketing involves paying careful attention to conversion rates. We use conversion tracking and analytics to measure campaign performance, and we place high importance on using data insights to optimize ad spend, refine targeting and improve ad creation for better results.
Maximizing paid advertising effectiveness requires strategic targeting of specific demographics to achieve the highest effects. While you have many traditional marketing options at your disposal, paid advertising stands out among the rest for giving you more choices for refining your plans. As you sit down to discuss and plan your educational program’s marketing budget, consider paid advertising as an essential component for driving higher enrollment rates.
At Semgeeks, we believe in helping educational institutions and programs reach their goals of increasing their enrollment rates so that every student finds their ideal place to pursue a degree. To help you get started, we’re offering a free consultation for paid advertising in education. Reach out to us today and get ready to see those enrollment rates start soaring!
