5 The Reasons Why You Should Consider Facebook Ads For Your School, College Or University.

When it comes to operating an effective paid ad campaign to improve enrollment statistics, Facebook advertising offers an excellent way of engaging with your ideal target market. This is especially as it’s quick, precise, and most importantly cost-effective. Ads appearing in the newsfeed have the potential to target your ideal target audience amongst more than 4.3 billion monthly active users in July 2022 across both Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. You can also retarget your current customers too.

Facebook ads are the best place to start if you want to eliminate competition, promote your offerings, curriculums, and student achievements and attract new traffic and new students Facebook ads are one of the most effective, easily accessible tools you can use to grow your school’s online presence and brand awareness among prospective students as an increasing number of schools, colleges and universities are using Facebook and Instagram to just that.

But before diving into the Facebook ad strategies for education, it’s important to know the benefits so here are 5 Reasons Why You Should Consider Advertising on Facebook Ads for Your School, College or University.

1. Reach a Wide Audience

If you are looking to reach a wide audience of prospective students then it's undeniable that Facebook offers you the ability to do just that. It boasts one of the largest user bases of all other social media platforms as it has 2.9 billion monthly users. This is why Education institutions simply cannot ignore the social media powerhouse. Facebook can provide the largest advertising opportunity to connect with your target audience and prospective students, this is second only to Google’s search. So If you're not already using social media to connect with your audience, then you should seriously consider it. Facebook's popularity allows you to attract new student customers to your course and market to them. On average, a person spends also it’s 2.5 hours daily on social media and Facebook is their go-to as they spend an average of 33 minutes per day on the platform. More than roughly 35% of all the people on Earth use Facebook today and 67% of users have an account and access the platform every day. That is more than any other social media platform and the audience on Facebook is not merely large, it spans across many demographics, the platform attracts users of all generations, with data showing young people are still some of the heaviest users of Facebook with around the world in 2022. 53% of all Facebook users are between 18 and 34 which is the age of a typical student making it ideal to use to target your ideal students.

2. Facebook Ads are Inexpensive

The platform's cost-efficiency will astound you if you go into Facebook advertising with a focused approach to your strategy. We all know that having a strong ad offering on social media can help us grow our businesses exponentially. However, this isn't always easy, especially if you are working with a tight budget. Thankfully if you are looking to get the most out of your money with Facebook ads then know that in terms of cost to reach a thousand people CPM Facebook ads are a low-cost option compared to other forms of online and offline marketing channels cost especially as adverts on buses and billboards are very costly. Getting traction from organic activity on your business page is on a continued decline as Facebook is trying to get businesses to spend money on ads. Therefore there are ways of making sure that your strategy is right so that every single pound you spend on Facebook ads gets used to its full potential.

When advertising on Facebook and optimising your budget, we want to make sure that the amount we spend sees a proportional return in the form of increased revenue or engagement. Facebook's Ad Manager system allows you to set up objectives for each ad that determine what it means for them to be successful.

Firstly you set a reasonable daily budget, then once you hit your spend cap Facebook stops showing your ad to your target audience so you don’t exceed what you’re able to spend. You can choose to limit how much you want to spend so that the CPC can be more cost-effective. The bigger the budget, the more users you will reach. However, what’s pretty impressive is that you have the potential to retarget a large number of people who visited your site with just £5 per day. Additionally, if you spend £5 per day on Facebook ads, you have the potential to will get in front of over 100,000 people that wouldn’t have seen or heard you otherwise. If you can’t spare as little as £150 per month, you shouldn’t be in business.

3. Precise Targeting capabilities

The ability in targeting your ideal prospective students on Facebook is one of the most popular reasons education institutions advertise on social media platforms. The location targeting is especially useful for schools, colleges and universities looking to advertise within their locality, especially for potential students seeking to study close to home. The social media giant also offers the opportunity to target your ideal audience by location, you can also target based on demographics, Interests behaviours, and connections. You can dig deeper than any other platform, the level of detailed targeting is pretty impressive so much so you can target 16 to 18-year-old high school students who are interested in Computer Science or Law related topics and can even layer interests by combining them to ensure you’re eliminating users who aren’t your target audience who wouldn’t be interested in your courses. This is important because Facebook has a wealth of information about its users so focusing on audience quality is more important than the size which allows you to benefit by targeting just the people who are most likely to sign up or enrol on your courses instead of just random visitors. Another targeting option is to use lookalike audiences. This is probably where Facebook excels the most compared to other advertising platforms.Lookalike audiences are made up of users similar to your current audience, therefore taking the guesswork out, you just won’t find these options elsewhere.

4. Large Selection of ad formats

The number of Education institutions using Facebook to advertise is constantly growing so theirs pressure to stand out from the crowd and so becomes imperative that your ad campaign gets done right.

Whether you choose to utilise the following:

• Facebook Feed Ads Various Sizes

• Carousel Ads,

• Right Column Ads

• In-stream Video Ads,

• Marketplace Ads

• Instant Articles Ads,

• Stories Ads

• Facebook Collection ads or even Instagram Reels Ads

Or all of the above Facebook offers a large selection of ad formats that allows you to advertise your education institution on Facebook in a variety of ways that will suit your campaign. It is useful to understand that both Facebook and Instagram social networks are owned by the same parent company Meta, the campaigns you create in Facebook Ads can also be served on Instagram although have different specifications which can be set in your ad accounts on the Facebook Business Manager.

Of course, there are advantages to each ad format so it is useful to try out each one to test so that you don’t miss out as each format is suited for different audiences depending on the demographics of your ideal students e.g. age, gender, location, and much more. Testing out these format variables in your campaigns will let you identify what works best for you so you can iterate on that to generate more business, increase student leads or even get better results for less money and therefore achieve your institute's goals and maximise your results.

It is helpful to match your campaign objectives with your institute's objectives before creating your Facebook advertising campaigns. Defining your objectives also helps Facebook optimise your ads for the specific goals and results you want to see like generating meaningful interest from prospective students. As well to Facebook, Instagram can be an incredibly valuable tool to cultivate interest in your school. Instagram has a strong following among teens and young adults and offers an uncluttered, intuitive user experience and excels in generating high audience engagement.

5. Find New Qualified Leads

ToFu (top of the funnel) is the awareness stage in the first interaction of a lead generation conversion path, where you have your widest and most general audience, this involves a pool of people or prospective students you are trying to attract to an open-day event who have a problem or inquiries e.g. deciding if pursuing a degree is worth it or determining which course will meet their needs. Prospect users would be driven to a landing page on your website, messenger ads or lead form via a Facebook ad. This method can be great for reaching high-quality potential students at scale, especially since you’re attracting people that have willingly abandoned what they’re doing previously when scrolling to tap your ad. For instance, a user scrolling through the newsfeed, looking at post after post you have managed to “stop the scroll” with your highly visually pleasing engaging ad that grabs their attention and appeals to their pain-pints and CTA. While your prospect stays in the app, Facebook will display a form that's pre-filled with their basic information, Such as (email address, name, phone number, etc.) which is a great way to reduce friction when signing up, since they have fewer form fields to complete. This Is then sent seamlessly into your CRM database through a integration of your choice. Additionally, you can create ads that send people into a Messenger interaction that starts a conversation with your education institute. This is also a great way to reach people at scale, and then continue to interact with each of them individually on Messenger fostering two-way communication. Whether they want to learn about an open-day, new course product or need to resolve an issue, you can tailor your interactions to meet their specific needs – and get closer to your institution's goals, one conversation at a time.

The Mofu (middle of the funnel) is the consideration stage, this is the next objective of your student recruitment strategy once you have answered all of the questions that your educational institutions have received the next goal of your student recruitment strategy. This provides a unique opportunity to retarget to increase the number of student applications by effectively using retargeting ads. The BoFu (bottom of the funnel) Conversion/Decision stage and the goal is to turn leads into enrolments by processing student applications

If you want to create remarketing ads to target prospects who have already expressed interest in your educational institution the Custom Audience feature allows you to effectively use this ad targeting powerhouse to push on the fence leads down the marketing funnel who have already connected with your institution on by visiting your page, liking, or commenting on a post, sending you a message, or click through on a link you provided. Using the ‘lookalike audiences” feature is another terrific way to attract more leads who are similar to the ones you already have. This ad targeting strategy enables you to take an existing audience that is doing a great job at converting and Facebook will create a fresh list of users with similar demographics, interests, and behaviours to your existing leads who are therefore most likely to be interested in your course, service or other offerings at some level therefore likely to purchase from you or enroll on one of your courses. For example, A Lookalike Audience developed with the targeting narrowed to 5% of the population will produce a bigger demographic that closely resembles the modelled audience. Lookalike audiences can also be built with conversion pixels those who install data from apps, and your Facebook fans page. As well as this you can further define the size and targeting options to ensure your lookalike audience is an accurate reflection of your prospective student target market.

Conclusion

Advertising on Facebook is an essential way to expand your reach on the social platform. In addition, Facebook advertising complements your other digital marketing efforts to cultivate user engagement by increasing awareness of your brand, attracting leads while promoting your courses or featured content to your desired target audience, and providing valuable information to them to convert prospects users into students. Facebook ads play a role in your overall digital marketing strategy as it's critical to your organic strategy although the organic reach of brands on Facebook is now very limited, it is increasingly essential to ensure that your school’s visibility on the social network is a top priority to aid your paid efforts reaps the greatest rewards.

We can create customised Facebook advertising campaigns that will increase your school’s overall visibility both at home and internationally, better establish your brand identity, and generate meaningful interest from prospective students.