The student recruitment landscape has been shifting for years with the rise of social media use and increasing privacy concerns. Existing issues with the rise of stealth applicants and diminished trackability — and the difficulty that creates when measuring channel ROI — will only persist. As the Director of Digital Strategy at Two Ocean Education Partners, the enrollment marketing services division of MARKETview, I specialize in advertising on Google and Meta. Our team has also been doing extensive testing on TikTok and Snapchat. Using this hands-on experience, I created a guide for navigating the present (and future) of enrollment marketing on social media while maximizing the return on your investments.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Marketing to Students on Social Media
Advantages:
Variety: Different social media channels offer suites of options when it comes to paid content strategy. Ads can appear in multiple places within a given platform, giving institutions the ability to reach students through short form video, static image ads, in-app interactive ad formats and more.
Unique targeting: Each platform has native interest lists based on their proprietary data and user behavior. Therefore, institutions can target audiences based on unique characteristics like “in-market for College Admission Information.”
AI and machine learning tools: Social media ad management platforms now offer many options in terms of content creation and automation in this new AI era. This can be helpful for teams with limited resources for these efforts.
Disadvantages:
Limits on younger audiences: While you can target audiences under 18 years of age, doing so limits you from layering on other targeting capabilities. For example, if an institution is single gender and wants to target pre-seniors, most platforms require you to choose between age OR gender designations.
Mysterious algorithms: Much of a platform’s algorithm is proprietary, so it can be difficult to fully understand campaign behavior despite being intentional with your targeting/content strategy, due to the ‘black box’ nature of ad serving algorithms.
AI and machine-learning tools: While also an advantage, these can likewise be a disadvantage: Auto-created assets can be useful for the resource-limited enrollment marketing team but have to be proofed and monitored very closely to ensure alignment with brand guidelines, messaging intent, and more.
Changing Messaging for a Social Media Audience
Social media marketing must be much punchier than “long-form” marketing like email or print. It needs to inspire students to stop scrolling and engage with the ad — even if they don’t click through, simply viewing the ad is valuable for your brand awareness.
Lifestyle imagery and/or live-action video coupled with strong CTAs is the best practice. Also, social media gives enrollment teams the opportunity to embrace cultural trends. Ads that can touch on humor, “memes” and trends while staying safely within institutional brand guidelines can perform well.
Measuring Success in a New Recruitment Landscape
Measurement is a heavily loaded topic with many considerations when using social media to promote your institution. Ensure your site is tagged with Google Analytics code and the account is set up properly with inquiry conversion events you find valuable (e.g., application starts and completes).
Also, it’s important to invest in insights other than direct funnel impact. Social media is an excellent marketing tool, but at the end of the day audiences don’t necessarily take immediate action once they see an ad. If we value social media purely based on last-click attribution, the campaigns will not stack up very well against more traditional methods of advertising. Therefore, it is critical to understand the broader impact of social media campaigns to fully value their ROI. For example, if you’re running YouTube campaigns, invest in a brand lift study to understand how many incremental users you’re reaching with your ads.
Additionally, make sure to optimize toward efficiency benchmarks — to ensure your dollar is well spent not only from a market penetration and funnel results perspective, but also from a Cost-Per-Click (CPC)/Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) and Click-Through-Rate (CTR) perspective. Benchmarking these metrics against the industry can help teams understand if they are maximizing their investment and ultimately if their campaigns are producing a good ROI.
Best Practices From an Expert
Invest in your website: The number one asset schools have is their website. Audiences are arriving at college websites in more ways than ever, so the site experience is extremely important. This means student recruitment efforts should focus on website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices (especially in light of AI impacting algorithms), as much as traditional marketing platforms.
First-party data reigns supreme: Use first-party lists when platforms allow you to use them. Minimum sizes apply, but this type of targeting allows you to be hyper specific with your messaging and content strategy.
Lean on video as much as possible: Short-form video typically performs best across younger audiences and gives you the opportunity to feature practical and compelling scenes of campus life.
Quality over quantity: With a limited budget, don’t try to run campaigns across all platforms. Research and strategize around what works best for your goals and concentrate your investments accordingly to maximize results.
Interested in enrollment marketing informed by the latest real-time data on student preferences? Two Ocean Education Partners takes advantage of custom multi-channel programs for Student Search, Application Marketing, and Deposit/Yield Marketing.
If you’d like to learn more, schedule a demo with Two Ocean or MARKETview today.