How to Create an Effective Organic Social Media Strategy for Your College or University
What is organic social media?
Organic social media and organic content are terms we often hear in the world of online marketing. What we don’t always hear is a clear explanation of what these phrases mean.
Organic social is any social media activity that does not use paid promotion. The opposite of this is paid social or any social media content influenced by an advertising budget. There are a variety of reasons why focused, proactive organic social marketing is important for higher education.
- Establish and represent your brand’s personality and voice
- Connect with potential students by sharing entertaining, informative, or inspiring content about your University
- Offer potential or current students great service
Choose the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Target Audience
As colleges and universities have expanded their offerings to a wider range of students, from the traditional first-time student to lifelong learners, it is important to pinpoint which social media platforms will most effectively reach and engage each audience. When choosing the best social platform(s) for your brand, it's important to know the demographics of each. Here's a breakdown.
Turn to LinkedIn if you want a social platform that targets working professional adults, with 59% of users worldwide between the ages of 25 to 34. LinkedIn is a great tool for employers to connect with potential employees and vice versa. For universities, it is best utilized for paid advertising, but it is still important to keep an organic social presence. Professionals seeking a bachelor's completion or master’s program will find informational content useful.
Facebook/Instagram
Facebook and Instagram are owned by Facebook, Inc. but offer different functions and have very different audience demographics. Facebook has 1.8 billion daily active users and 2.7 billion monthly active users. According to Statista, 32.4% of Facebook users are 25-34, while the 45+ age group consists of 21.4% of all Facebook users. This provides a great opportunity to target those seeking an online degree program or those who have previous college credits but may be considering going back to finish school.
On the other hand, Instagram has over 1 billion users that log in each month and is considered one of the most popular social media platforms among young teenagers in the U.S. The next largest Instagram demographic is the 25-34 age bracket, comprising one-third of Instagram’s users. Given this, traditional university posts that would appeal to someone seeking a campus experience are more suited for the Instagram platform.
Twitter is popular in the United States, with 68.7 million users. According to Statista, 26% of Twitter users have completed some college, and 33% have a college degree. This platform provides a great opportunity for master’s degree programs.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another platform that appeals to the younger crowd with the largest user base between the ages of 13 to 17. Fully 82% of the platform’s users are under the age of 34. Since Snapchat has a large audience of high school-age students, universities can use Snapchat to offer entertaining content for potential students to follow.
Create a Social Media Content Plan
With this basic understanding of which platforms work best for each demographic or degree program, we can create a targeted monthly or quarterly unique content plan.
Content plans should include the number of times to post each week, the topic, a call to action, and ideas for creative. A good mix of content includes university or campus updates, student spotlights, entertainment pieces, faculty highlights, alumni success stories, and program or university offerings.
Creative
You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create eye-catching organic social media posts. There are a variety of inexpensive, easy-to-use sites like PicMonkey or Canva that are perfect for creating quick, catchy designs.
- Incorporate your brand colors and fonts.
- Use clear images.
- Keep social copy simple. Many social media users scroll on their phones so copy should be quick and easy to read. Stick with 1-3 sentences and a clear call to action.
For example, if you are sharing your university's latest blog article on social media, summarize the article in a few sentences, include a clear call to action statement such as “learn more,” and add the link to your blog article to encourage engagement
Reach Your Audience with Engaging Content
Armed with an understanding of social media platforms, a clear picture of their respective audiences, and a content plan, the next step is to create engaging content.
Interesting, relevant, and engaging content will encourage likes, shares, comments, and followers. These social signals contribute to a page’s organic search ranking in powerful ways that include:
- Link building: Search engines gauge quality by how often a URL is seen throughout the internet. Social media engagement leads to more links back to your site, increasing visibility and brand awareness.
- Site stickiness: Guiding prospects to your site through compelling organic social content leads them to spend more time on the page. This encourages repeat visitors and decreases bounce rate, further strengthening search engine position.
Multiple Brands, Consistent Voice, Relevant Message
There are often many brands within a university, each with its own voice and story to tell. For example, an online brand vs. on campus brand would speak to current and potential students differently. Departments within universities use different brand voices as they relate to the type of program, curriculum, and the type of learner.
Each brand should tell its own unique story on social platforms, focusing their specific message and demographic to the appropriate platform.
For instance, plan to entertain high school students with fun and insightful content about campus life on Instagram and Snapchat. For adult professionals, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook works best for online bachelor completion programs or master’s degrees.
Some of the best social media content involves storytelling from current students or alumni that will appeal to prospective students. While personal posts about students, faculty, or alumni tend to see the most engagement, it is still important to keep a healthy mix of content in your plan. Keep the 80/20 rule in mind when creating your content plan. 80% of your social content should be valuable or entertaining, with only 20% promoting your business.
Use Organic Content to Build Stronger Paid Campaigns
Organic social and paid online campaigns work hand-in-hand. Users often land on social platform pages to gather information about a college before filling out a lead form or visiting a landing page.
Social media is where potential students will go to see if they envision themselves attending your college. Fifty-eight percent of teens researching colleges uses social media in their research. That percentage increases once they have decided to apply. Sextant has found that organic social aides in assisted enrollments at a 26% rate but if potential students don't find consistently engaging organic content, they may bounce off quickly.
Organic social is a great tool in a multi-strategy approach where a prospective student may come in through an organic social post but then end up converting through another method such as direct traffic, paid social, or vice versa. Exciting, relevant, and engaging content paints a picture for prospective students. That picture helps them envision themselves enrolling in the perfect program—yours.
University Branding: How to Tell a Story Prospective Students Want to Hear
What is your university’s brand? Where do you find it? Is it in the bucolic campus quad? Its storied past? The dean’s office? The alumni newsletter? The mix of degree programs or reputation of its professors? The excellent research opportunities for post-grads? The football team?
The short answer is yes. And no.
A university brand encompasses every aspect of what makes it great. But telling a persuasive story is the art of clarity, precision, and understanding your hero’s journey.
For each element that comes together to make a college or university great there are motivated, passionate women and men behind it, each with their own idea of what is most important, all vying for the attention of our hero - the right student.
In order to build our story we need to get out of our silos. If your brand is everywhere, it’s nowhere.
University branding is a whole greater than its parts. It feels like a daunting task. But all the elements are there. You’ve done much of the hard work. It is on that hard work that we build a brand.
How to Market to College Students - The Art of Sacrifice
Branding, Chris Perkins of Bernstein-Rein told Sextant in a recent interview, is “knowing your ‘why’ and ‘who would care?’” It means know your True North, who you truly are and why you do what you do.
Put another way, a successful brand understands and articulates its mission, it knows who that mission serves, and how to tell a story that is compelling for those people. A good brand brings it all together.
The challenge here is precision. There is a natural tendency to try to “boil the ocean,” Perkins says. It’s not so much about finding any student, but the right student.
After all, our story and our brand is exclusive. There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to university branding, though Perkins sees ad agencies and marketing firms try.
“Positioning is the art of sacrifice,” says Perkins. “A position done well automatically disqualifies the right people for the right reasons.” It requires precision. This, he explains, is why Bernstein-Rein is a key partner of Sextant Marketing.
Sacrifice is hard. When done for the right reasons, it leads to clarity. At its best, a clear message is a simple message.
University Branding Strategy - A Holistic Approach
Articulating a brand that resonates is no simple task. According to Greg Ash, president of the advertising firm Heavy Studios, one of the “pitfalls that often come” up is integrating the many components that make up a great college or university into a single, compelling message.
Everyone has the same goal in mind - elevating the brand of the university, furthering its mission, but there are many perspectives to consider. What constitutes “brand” in the mind of one department may not necessarily resonate the same in another.
“When colleges and universities use the term brand, it can mean a lot of different things,” says Ash. “It can mean something as targeted as an admissions campaign trying to recruit the next class or it could mean raising money... focused on giving initiative. Maybe it's about reputation, development, or management. It could be around faculty recruitment.”
It is a challenge, but managed strategically, all these various perspectives come together, like a well-diversified portfolio, into a brand “holistic enough to consider all those audiences and applications,” Ash says.
With a sound strategy of collaboration, precision, and focus, we have our ‘why.’ Now it’s time to tell our story.
Create a Conversation with Your Audience
According to the New Oxford American dictionary, a conversation is “a talk, especially an informal one, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged.” It’s a connection.
It may seem like oversimplification but connecting with your audience is really just a conversation. Asking a lot of questions and listening. Mostly listening.
“It’s not rocket science,” says Greg Ash. “It's a series of interviews with students, faculty, alumni, donors, the cleaning crew, campus security, folks in the surrounding neighborhood, the football team, the servers at the bar down the street where all the kids hang.”
Inevitably they’ll all say a lot of different things, the professor from the bartender, the cleaning crew from the quarterback. But what you realize is that there are bits and pieces that each has in common. When you boil that down into the four elements shared by all, you have the foundation upon which you can build a unique message.
“You always come back to those four things that you heard across 75 different interviews, Ash says, and with those four things,” you know exactly how to tell your story.”
By listening, you know what to say. Though you won’t say it exactly the same way to each person.
Generational Marketing - Know Your Audience
Traditional college-age students grew up in a different media landscape than their parents or adult students. If the story remains essentially the same, the format for telling it is important for generational marketing.
Technology has lowered the cost of entry for access to advanced story-telling tools. Upper funnel techniques like video campus tours are important methods for extending a school’s outreach, especially in the challenging situations brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whether a video tour or a printed brochure, it’s the story that connects.
“What cool stuff happens in this lab?” says Ash. “What amazing breakthrough was thought of in this classroom? Who sat in these chairs?”
That’s where you find your connection, your conversation, with the people who care.
Your Students Tell Your Story
All these things may help inform the story that makes the brand, but ultimately, the best place to look for a college or university brand is in the students themselves. Find your students where they are and let them tell your story.
University branding is no less a challenge than it ever was. More so now with increased competition and the rise of online education, especially in response to the COVID-19 health crises.
Any good story employs both a top-down and bottom-up perspective. From the top we consider what the story is, why we want to tell it, to whom we will tell it, and why they should care. From the bottom comes how we tell the story and all the elements that comprise the whole.
What the people associated with your brand say about you informs your raison d’être.
Sextant Marketing - Your Partner in Branding Strategy
Sextant Marketing’s vision is of a world where each prospective student selects the right institution to support their best learning experience.
A student’s journey begins with a story, a conversation, and a brand connection. Sextant Marketing is an extension of your brand story.
We are a full-service marketing consultancy and a comprehensive complete enrollment cycle management partner for residential and online programs. Sextant is uniquely positioned to understand and articulate your brand, telling an engaging story that reflects and connects with your ideal student.
Our storytelling framework is built on a diverse set of tools. Used individually or collectively, we create the foundation for a holistic, coordinated, and persuasive brand narrative.
College branding is at once complex and simple. Sextant Marketing understands both. Our mission, our raison d’être, is incorporating the complexities of college branding into a story that connects with your students. One that lasts throughout their journey, from discovery, enrollment, and study, to graduation and whatever lies ahead.
Sextant Marketing Founding Day: A New Year in Higher-Ed Marketing
Sextant Marketing celebrated its second annual Founding Day late this year. Initially observed in June, this time the event coincided with the company’s virtual holiday party. The change was in keeping with what was sometimes a very peculiar year.
In 2020, the close-knit team buckled down, helping their clients, partners, and each other navigate a world that had changed overnight.
A Virtual Celebration
After months of working virtually (unable to enjoy Sextant’s new, hip office space), it was a happy, smiling group that was ready to let their hair down and enjoy each other’s company.
The festivities began with the presentation of Sextant’s Living Values Awards. The award recognizes employees whose efforts over the past year exemplify the values of the company. Among those values are teamwork, growth, initiative, commitment, and stewardship.
And the Winners Are:
Erika Maldonado – Student Success Representative
Erika “is not only acutely focused on her personal growth and development,” says Jimmy Lynch, VP of Engagement Services, “but is also continuously looking for ways to improve the processes of the Warm Transfer team.”
Working closely with her team members, Erika ensures they’re comfortable in their roles and “provides superior quality work as part of the on-the-phone support team,” Jimmy says.
Anthony Asmundo - Workforce Specialist
Anthony is “truly an unsung hero,” says CEO Adrian Marrullier.
As a member of the call center team, Anthony “provides exemplary service to each advisor, each member of management, the Sextant team at large, as well as any student that we may serve,” Adrian says. “While many of us are enjoying our evenings and weekends, Anthony is supporting our students and the leadership team through all channels.”
Monica Zapata - Marketing Projects Director
If there is a sextant at Sextant Marketing, it’s Monica. “Her ability to see navigational obstacles has greatly improved our project planning and workload efficiency for the marketing operations team,” says VP of Marketing Services Jessica Banich.
Monica “has embraced every workload and efficiency challenge that we’ve thrown at her,” said Jessica. “She keeps us on-course and on-schedule with an upbeat attitude and a bright outlook.”
Jeni Mandahar - Digital Marketing Manager
Always upbeat and ready to help her colleagues, Jeni is a “rock star,” says COO Matt Speer. “I have come to count on her, and I know that any project is in good hands with Jeni. She has excelled in taking on new challenges, diving in head-first and then coming up for air to share new ideas, techniques, and strategies that can help her team and the company as a whole.”
Julie Walbrun - Director of Client Services
Dean Gething, VP of Client Services, presented Julie’s Living Values award. Dean commented on Julie's "tremendous growth in the past year." Noting Julie’s collaborative spirit and work ethic, Dean also praised her tireless effort and dedication to her clients.
Julie and her team oversaw an 11 percent year over year growth with Fresno Pacific University while expanding Sextant’s service relationship with Marian University. And those are just two of the clients under Julie’s purview. “I’m excited to see what she will accomplish in the years to come,” says Dean.
The North Star Award
The North Star Award honors a Sextant crew member who not only lives the company values but stands out through extraordinary performance and dedicated service.
Brianna Tillman - Student Success Representative
As the recipient of this year’s North Star award, Brianna “embodies each of our core values. She serves as a steady guide for all the Sextant crew members,” says CEO Adrian Marrullier.
Student success is what Sextant is all about. Brianna “serves to fulfill that which is at our core mission,” says Adrian, “helping families navigate the complex path toward achieving a college education.”
A New Year in Higher-Ed Marketing
After the presentation of Sextant’s Living Values awards, it was time to reconnect! The group came together to celebrate the holidays and the end of a unique year with virtual activities and games. Everyone celebrated each other and the teamwork that makes Sextant Marketing an extraordinary place to work.
Sextant’s New Year’s greeting to its partners and team sums it up nicely:
“As we say goodbye to 2020, remember that a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. Here's to new challenges as we keep charting our course to accomplishing even higher goals in 2021.”
At Sextant Marketing, the year wound down with a collective sigh of relief and renewed determination to meet the challenges of a new year.
About Sextant Marketing
Sextant Marketing is centrally located in the heart of Tampa’s historic Ybor City. A small group of higher education marketing experts founded the company in 2015. Their passion for the power of higher education brought them together. They each understood that old models for student recruitment and retention were unsustainable.
With years of higher-ed marketing experience, the team created a forward-focused, data-driven, full-funnel model bridging the gap between higher-ed and prospective students. More than just clients, Sextant considers everyone with whom they work their partners. Our goals are your goals: matching the right students with the right program so that each can flourish.
The proof is in the pudding. Sextant Marketing continues to thrive. In November, Sextant Marketing received the Tampa Bay Business Journal Fast 50 award for 2019. For two years in a row, Sextant was recognized, moving from 36th to 8th. Sextant is now among the top-ten fastest-growing privately held companies in Tampa Bay.
Apple's iOS 14 and the Impact on Digital Marketing for Higher Ed.
If you’re in digital marketing and use Facebook to reach your customers, chances are you’ve heard about the current digital war going on between Facebook and Apple.
Apple’s policy changes for iOS 14 and Facebook’s support for small (and big) businesses are in the news, and we’re breaking it down for you!
Read on to find out exactly what Apple is changing, how Facebook responds to the policy changes, how your business, particularly higher-ed., might be impacted, and what steps digital marketers can take to prepare.
Apple Privacy Policy Issues - What is Changing
At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last June, Apple announced a significant change in its AppTrackingTransparency framework for iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.
We believe users
should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how
it’s used. Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before,
App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 will just require that they ask for your
permission first. pic.twitter.com/UnnAONZ61I—
Tim Cook (@tim_cook) December 17, 2020
As of December 2020, Apple requires developers to get user opt-in permission for accessing the IDFA, or Identifier for Advertisers. If you’re not familiar, the IDFA is a device identifier assigned to a specific device. Marketers use the IDFA for targeting and tracking potential customers across apps.
Facebook Response to Apple’s Policy Changes
For its part, Facebook has sharply criticized Apple’s new policy, stating it adversely impacts small businesses that depend on personalized ads to reach their customers.
On a webpage launched voicing its opposition to the change, Facebook says that Apple’s new policy will “limit your ability to effectively reach, understand, and engage people on mobile devices and across the web.”
While Facebook disagrees with Apple’s “policy and approach,” it states that it has “no choice but to show Apple’s prompt. If we don’t, they will block Facebook from the App Store.”
iOS 14 Impact on Higher Education Marketing
Apple’s policy change will make it harder for colleges and universities to reach prospective students and parents, which could limit their enrollment growth.
iOS14 users opting-out from third-party data tracking limits ad personalization and performance reporting for both app and web conversion events.
Facebook does not foresee that the iOS change will cause a complete loss of personalization but believes that the trend is in that direction.
Here’s what higher education marketers can anticipate as a result:
- Changes in Facebook advertising tools, targeting, delivery, measurement, and reporting.
- A decrease in Website Custom Audience sizes will negatively impact retargeting efforts.
Specifically, these changes will limit your ability to:
- Effectively deliver ads to people based on their engagement with your business.
- Measure and report on conversions from certain customers.
- Ensure your ads are delivered to the most relevant audiences at the right. frequency.
- Accurately attribute app installs to people using iOS 14 and later.
- Predict and optimize cost per action over time and efficiently allocate budgets.
To help navigate these changes, Facebook will begin processing pixel conversion events from iOS devices using Aggregated Event Measurement. “This will support your efforts to preserve user privacy and help you run effective campaigns,” says Facebook.
How You Can Prepare for the Change
Facebook has published detailed information on steps digital marketers can take to adapt to Apple’s new policy.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the most important considerations.
For web advertisers:
- Verify your domain in Facebook Business Manager. Doing so gives businesses the ability to configure conversion events for their domain. According to Facebook, “domain verification must be done for the effective top-level domain plus one (eTLD+1). This can help ensure that your domain verification will encompass all variations.”
- Facebook will pause ad sets prioritizing more than 8 conversion events. Prepare to prioritize for a maximum number of 8 conversion events per domain.
- Get ready for changes in attribution reporting inside Facebook Ads Manager.
- Be on the lookout for campaign optimization strategies that may require testing and changes in bidding strategies.
For app advertisers:
App advertisers using the Facebook SDK should update to version 8.1 or above. Facebook also recommends other steps especially for app marketers that you can read about here.
What's beyond (or before) third-party data?
Marketers today are heavily reliant on third-party data. According to a recent study conducted by Epsilon, 69 percent of the respondents believe that eliminating third-party cookies and IDFA will have a greater impact than CCPA and GDPR.
“2020 has been a year of seeing online identifiers fade away,” states the Epsilon report. “In January, Google announced that it’s phasing out third-party cookies (3PCs) in Chrome. In June, Apple made a similar announcement about changes coming to IDFA.”
Businesses and advertisers now realize that it’s time to take control of their first-party data. It is a valuable, cost-effective, asset and comes with minimal privacy concerns.
Tech giants like Google and Apple will continue to tighten restriction on data that can be shared. Because of this, the priority for businesses of any size is collecting and strategizing around first-party data.
How Sextant Will Help You Navigate This Change
From helping build a robust first-party dataset to email nurturing and content marketing, Sextant Marketing has the expertise and deep integration that brings success to your enrollment campaigns. As your marketing partner, we’ll help you stay above the fray as Apple, Facebook, and others battle it out.
With targeted relationship marketing, we can help you take control of your first-party data and streamline your marketing efforts.
Email Nurturing - Building Relationships
Sextant is a SharpSpring silver partner. We can fully integrate and automate your inbound email campaigns, whatever CRM you use. Our future-focused, data-driven suite of tools helps nurture not only relationships, but also your valuable first-party data.
Relevant Content is King
Sextant helps you plan and execute effective content marketing. With relevant, engaging, SEO-optimized content, lead generation dovetails seamlessly with email and social media marketing.
Sextant understands the specific challenges faced by higher education. Apple’s new policy is one such challenge. But challenges bring opportunities. “The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving and presenting new opportunities,” says Jessica Banich, Vice President of Marketing Services. “Everyone at Sextant works hard to identify and implement technology that will benefit our university partners.”
Targeting Enrollment Leads on LinkedIn
With Facebook and TikTok always on the news, we hope you haven’t forgotten about LinkedIn. As higher education marketers, we love the employment-oriented online platform. That’s because we’ve seen tremendous success in generating student leads via LinkedIn for most of our higher-ed clients. Check out our recipe for success when targeting enrollment leads on LinkedIn.
Let us start with the facts. According to LinkedIn:
- You can reach more than 675 million members on LinkedIn - in 200 countries and regions worldwide.
- LinkedIn members are 2x more intent-driven and 7x more receptive to ads.
- (Saving the best for last here!) In 2019, LinkedIn drove 8M+ leads and 120k undergraduate and graduate enrollments for US schools.
So how can you use LinkedIn to target your student enrollment leads? What forms of LinkedIn advertising should you use to target potential students and/or parents?
Let’s discuss the two most popular forms of LinkedIn advertising and how you can use them to your school’s advantage.
1. Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content are native ads you can run in the LinkedIn feed and reach a targeted audience beyond your LinkedIn page followers. It comes in different formats such as a single image ad, video ads, and carousel ads. Make sure you follow some of the best practices to run Sponsored Content to create effective ads that your potential students can engage with. Here are a few tips to get you started:
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- Use a compelling visual (1200X627 pixel)
- Have 3-5 active sponsored content ads within one campaign to increase impressions and lower CPL
- Shift budget to the audience with the highest engagement rate
- For optimal engagement, keep the text accompanying your Sponsored Content under 150 characters.
2. Sponsored Messaging
Previously known as “Sponsored InMails”, Sponsored Messaging is a type of LinkedIn advertising format that allows you to deliver targeted messages with a CTA that reaches your student's LinkedIn inbox. Sponsored Messaging is offered in two formats – Message Ads and Conversation Ads. Both formats can be used as an opportunity to share and promote events and webinars. They can fulfill your objective of brand awareness, event/webinar registrations, lead generation, and program enrollments. Some key tips to get started with Sponsored Messaging on LinkedIn:
-
- Keep copy less than 1000 characters
- Use a clear call-to-action with a 300X250 pixel banner
- Use first name personalization
- Bid competitively, especially if your audience is narrow
Which advertising format should you choose?
According to LinkedIn, customers who use multiple LinkedIn ad formats see improved performance. Warming your audience with Sponsored Content before sending InMails results in higher engagement. When Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging are launched together for the same marketing campaign, advertisers have seen a 43% lift in CTR and a 40% increase in engagement. Hence, we recommend utilizing a multi-product strategy and using both formats to target the same audience.
How do LinkedIn Ads generate leads for higher education?
You might be wondering how these two LinkedIn advertising formats (and/or other advertising formats) that LinkedIn offers will help drive student leads for your university. We’ll let you in on the secret of lead generation inside LinkedIn – Lead Generation Forms. Yes, a form within LinkedIn! Think of this as the RFI form for your website. You can replicate your website’s RFI form, build it inside LinkedIn, and make it easy-peasy for prospective students to leave their details.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are pre-filled with accurate LinkedIn profile data, letting students send you their info in just a couple of clicks. This helps increase your lead conversion rates and improve your overall ROI. Your leads can be easily accessed within the LinkedIn Ads Manager platform and can also be integrated with your marketing automation platform or CRM tool.
Bonus tip – Retargeting!
As with most media platforms, LinkedIn offers retargeting as well. With the help of LinkedIn Insight Tag, you can create retargeting campaigns and get in front of students who’ve already visited your website. Recently, LinkedIn launched a feature that lets you retarget people who’ve engaged with your lead forms. That means you can get in front of people who have opened your lead form but did not submit.
Analyze Your LinkedIn Campaign Performance.
We are against the “launch it and leave it” attitude when it comes to any form of media. With a wide variety of options for ad formats and campaign objectives, we recommend testing, testing, and testing! And, of course, learning from your tests.
You can create an effective A/B testing strategy for your LinkedIn Ads by changing one variable at a time to see if it increases your KPIs. Running A/B tests will help you understand what your audiences best respond to. Always carve time out to analyze your campaign performance and optimize accordingly to reach prospective students at the right time.
LinkedIn Ads vs Facebook Ads
According to Statista, Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020. This makes Facebook the biggest social network worldwide, leaving higher education digital marketers wondering if Facebook is better suited for their business compared to LinkedIn.
While there is no straightforward answer to which platform is better than the other, LinkedIn has certain advantages when it comes to higher education. LinkedIn allows you to target your audience based on exactly who they are professionally: job titles, job function, industry, company name, education level, and even past schools they have attended. This makes LinkedIn better suited for professional working adults, degree completers, and graduate degree and certificate seekers.
With detailed targeting and higher quality leads, LinkedIn ads do generally cost more than Facebook ads. Hence, you will see higher CPC and CPL on LinkedIn because your leads could potentially be worth more.
Below is lead-to-enrollment data for one of our clients who has invested in both social platforms. We see a 34% contract rate, a 5.1% lead-to-application (LTA) rate, and a 0.7% lead-to-enrollment (LTE) rate on LinkedIn. Facebook has a 25.65% contact rate, a 2.17% LTA rate, and 0.32% LTE rate.
| CONTACT RATE | LTA | LTE | |
| Organic | 64.96% | 46.67% | 15.39% |
| Google Ads | 33.94% | 9.33% | 3.13% |
| Microsoft Bing | 30.77% | 15.38% | 3.85% |
| 33.81% | 5.09% | 0.67% | |
| 25.65% | 2.17% | 0.32% |
Naturally, we see higher conversion metrics from organic and PPC sources compared to social channels. However, it is important to remember that each phase of marketing funnel and each platform plays a distinct role in delivering results.
Measure Your Results
Measuring the success from upper-funnel advertising is a well-known challenge for all marketers. We recommend utilizing Google Analytics Attribution reports to better understand how different advertising efforts work together to create conversions. By looking at the conversion paths for this client, we have noticed social, particularly LinkedIn, is an effective channel for assisting conversions. This is why it is crucial to implement a full-funnel digital marketing strategy that will help your institution achieve the strongest results.
Regardless of which channels your leads come from, it is important for your marketing team to work closely with your admissions office to pave a path for lead-nurturing. Let your admissions team know that leads from social channels might not convert as quickly as leads from PPC or organic sources. It helps to create a nurturing environment that is personalized to each student to nudge them from prospective to enrolled student.
As a Sharpspring Silver Certified Partner, Sextant gives colleges and universities the benefits of an automated platform that not only improves lead generation but also helps nurture leads to push them down the funnel of enrollment. Remember that your admissions team is a major player in your overall marketing strategy for your institution. Help them create a personalized communications plan to connect with potential students.
We think it’s safe to assume that this article got you thinking about advertising on LinkedIn. At Sextant Marketing, we’re here to help with that. Contact us to learn how you can utilize LinkedIn to target your enrollment leads and more. And while you’re at it, follow us on LinkedIn!
What is a Sextant and What Does it Have to Do With Your University?
The world of higher education is complex. Things are changing. Degrees have gone online. Enrollment strategies are ruled by data. Digital marketing is essential. The future of higher ed promises more change to come. And the recent COVID-19 outbreak is a reminder that storms can arise at any time. Higher education and marketing for higher education need to be able to change with the shifting landscape as much as they need to adjust course when the unexpected occurs if we want students and universities to thrive.
Sextant marketing has been here through all these transitions and more. We’ve been here from the start. With over 19 years of higher ed program management experience, we’ve seen it all, and we’ve kept our eyes trained on the goals. Connect the right student with the right program. Make a difference to each student we encounter by delivering the highest quality experience from the first impression to initial contact and through enrollment for each institution we represent.
Through future-focused, tech-forward, full-funnel service, we help you gather the data, plot your course, and reach your destination, just like the navigational tool we’re named for.
That’s where SEXTANT comes in.
What Does the Sextant Mean to Higher Education Marketing?
A sextant is a marine navigational tool used to measure the angular distance between a point on the horizon and a celestial body. It determines a navigator’s position and traditionally helped ships find their way on long voyages.
In higher education, we’re all navigators, in one way or another, charged with setting a course to a far-off destination. It’s not always a straight line to your goals. Staying on course requires adjustments – with the help of seasoned partners who can help you chart your course and navigate the uncharted world of higher ed marketing and enrollment management.
Just as future-focused ideas and technology are changing the landscape of marketing for higher education, the historical SEXTANT instrument has since been replaced by more advanced technology, but the principle remains the same. If you know where you are, where you want to go, and what True North is, you can find your way.
A Full-Funnel Higher Ed Marketing Agency Helps You Find Your True North
At Sextant Marketing, our purpose is to serve as the bridge between higher education and prospective students and to support institutions of higher learning with innovative ideas that attract and enroll the right students for their respective institutions.
For colleges and universities, it helps to know what True North is for you.
By definition, True North is the direction along Earth’s surface toward geographic north, according to the Earth’s axis. In the world of higher education, True North is your essential truth. Your institution’s internal guiding compass. Your purpose.
Through a commitment to your True North, a strategic plan, and a flexible partnership with a guide that understands you, together we can journey to fulfill a vision of the world where each prospective student selects the right institution to support their best learning experience, ultimately leading to meaningful, engaging employment.
What does your student journey look like? Let’s chart a course together