As the world’s second-largest advertising platform, Facebook and Facebook Ads significantly influence consumer choices, travel destinations, and, what schools to attend.
While Facebook Ads for schools allows us reach a massive audience, effectively targeting the ideal prospects among its 2.45 billion monthly active user is there something that you can do to support your campaign?
Absolutely! And today, we’re sharing the Facebook advertising tips that we send to our school clients on how they can support their campaign and ensure they get optimal results.
Take advantage of your parent audience
Many school marketers aren’t aware of the fact that Facebook ads for schools relies on both your pixel data (data from people that engage with your advertising and click through to visit your website) AND data from your Facebook page to decide who is likely to take action on your ad.
While you are no longer relying on organic reach from your Facebook page to build enrolment enquiries, it is important to keep your page engagement alive and kicking.
Schools are fortunate to have a large audience of parents that are generally highly engaged with their content. The trick is to link these parents to your page and use your community to provide Facebook with data on your ideal target market.
Invite people to “Like” your page
Your current parent’s list is the perfect template of who your customers are. We always recommend that schools invite school parents to like their Facebook page. Use community notices, emails and letters home as an opportunity to mention why they should like your Facebook page.
You can also encourage enrolment enquiries to like your Facebook page. One of the best ways to do this is to include a ‘Like us on Facebook’ link on the website confirmation pages for enquiries and event confirmations. You can say something like: “Thank you for booking a school tour, we would love to stay in touch, why not like us on Facebook?”
Plus, did you know that you can invite people who engage with your posts to like your page? You can do this for both Facebook ads and organic posts and it’s a great little strategy to help grow your followers.
Keep your followers engaged
Keeping your followers engaged is still very important. Most schools are great at sharing community news articles about student achievements and school programs. Beyond that, aim to create content that is of interest to a broader market. Think of parenting or education-related content you could include in the mix – your Facebook page is the perfect testing platform for new content ideas.
A good metric to look at is your engagement share. The engagement rate for a post is calculated by dividing the total number of engagements (reactions, shares, comments) by the total reach of the post, multiply the whole thing by 100 to get an engagement rate percentage. A good target to aim for is an engagement rate above 1%.
Share the ad organically to your page
Once your ad is up and running, you can help it along by sharing it to your Facebook page during a peak time. Your followers are more likely to engage with and share your ad, giving your ad an extra push in the right direction.
We often launch a Facebook ad for schools targeted to parents first so that we can gain social proof and testimonials before launching it to cold audiences.
Don’t run too many ads at once
A word of caution: running ads at the same time could lead to ‘audience overlap’ where your ads essentially compete against each other, causing your campaigns to perform badly and one of the campaigns to stop serving. Always think about how audiences may overlap and if you are unsure, check with your agency or use the Facebook Audience Overlap Tool.
Of course, the best way to get optimal results out of your Facebook ads for schools is to have a professional do it for you. We specialise in Facebook advertising for schools and continue to get great measurable results for our clients.
