Your plan for the year
How can you plan your social media for the whole year ahead?
As a marketer, you have these sort of peak seasons and off-peak seasons, and you have to keep your momentum going through both seasons for your promotions. I’m going to be specifically at Facebook advertising, even though you can apply these principles to any other social media platforms, as well.
Community management
There are two aspects of Facebook advertising typically. There’s one side, which is our page and community management, where we are updating parents with photos of our students. We’re giving out all the good news of what’s happening in the college. But then we have the other side. And that’s our Facebook ads.
We can tie those two together and leverage our efforts for better results. Looking at the community management side, we often have to wear two hats for school marketers: we have to cater to our parents and prospects.
I find that often many schools have that internal news. They update their Facebook page with photos of their students at sporting activities, concerts, and individual students’ images, and they have lots of parents interactions. Still, they haven’t reached an external audience that has never heard of the college before.
I want to encourage school marketers to focus on reaching those unreached audiences with engaging content on their Facebook pages. Such as:
- Engaging video
- Blog post, where people have to click through to your website
- Engaging posts, just ask people to like and comment, and you get lots of engagement on your Facebook post.
- Create a download as a resource for people to use.
The goal here is to reach new people with this content.
Custom audiences
You may need to boost this content to audiences you’re trying to reach so it can be part of your weekly growing strategy. The reason why we do that is that we can use something called custom audiences. On Facebook, you can create a custom audience for each of those activities. So for when someone views a video, you can target people who view that video, target people who visit your website, target Facebook page engagements.
During these off-peak seasons, your goal is to build audiences and put all these people into a bucket, so when it comes the time to promote your open morning, you have an audience that’s already warmed up and interested in your college.
The decision to choose which school to go to is a long term decision. It can take parents anywhere from a month to a few years. That’s why you need to warm up your audience during that decision making phase.
Custom conversions
Once you have that community management plan going, you need to look specifically at your advertising. A few principles will help you achieve overall with your ads:
1. Create custom conversions.
I visit school websites quite often. And the first thing I see is that they don’t have a Facebook pixel on their site. So Facebook cannot track how many people they’re sending to the website, and it’s not giving Facebook any data back. Create custom conversion for the actions you want people to take, so if you create an ad for people to register for an open morning, you need to have that as a custom conversion. You need to track those conversions so Facebook can see how people are performing on your website and how the ads are doing.
2. Optimise AdWords for conversions.
That’s a setting that you can choose on the ad when you’re setting up your campaign. That means Facebook knows how to tweak its algorithm to get more people who are happy to take the actions you want them to take. It will increase the quality of your audience.
3. Facebook.
Facebook within the ad set, when you have everything set up, and you’ve had your ad running for a day, and you’ve gotten a few impressions, go back into the ad set. Facebook will have a graph that shows you how your ads should be performing according to the budget that you’ve set. Facebook marketing requires that you go in and check your campaigns. Look at all the click-throughs and click-through rates, impressions, and conversions metrics and try to do that daily.
Now you have your community management plan and your plan for your open mornings or those peak seasons.
Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au
