If you haven’t advertised on Facebook yet, you are most likely constantly thinking about it just based on all of the Facebook ads that are targeted to you daily. If you’ve had experience with advertising on Facebook, you know that the cost per clicks are extremely low and the amount of traffic you can capture can seem endless. But, a lot of us struggle to drive conversions, making your advertising efforts questionable.

Facebook advertising offers a great mix of advertising options that can appeal to almost any industry, especially higher education. Also, Facebook is frequently rolling out new advertising strategies that can help you stay ahead of the curve in the digital marketing world. But what advertising tactics are right for your institution? Based on my experience with Facebook advertising, I’ve put together my 5 Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Facebook Advertising.

1. Take advantage of advance targeting options. There are so many unique targeting options on Facebook that can work to your advantage when trying to reach prospective students. Capture transfer students by targeting Facebook users who attend nearby community colleges with demographic ‘School’ targeting. Have any tuition incentives for local companies? Target users by workplace. Trying to increase enrollment for your MBA program? Target users by education level and degrees. Test out a variety of options and see what works best for you!
2. Incorporate compelling images or videos. Integrating high quality images and engaging videos into your advertising is becoming more and more popular. An image or video can capture a user’s attention much more than standard text ads used on AdWords or Bing. Use an image that portrays a student or a video that tells a story of a student’s experience earning a degree at your institution. Telling a story helps users’ to picture themselves at your institution and furthering their career.
3. Use Custom Audiences with your prospective student lists. This is a new feature that Facebook offers and from our experience, it has been very successful! Create a custom audience list by uploading your prospective student list to continue to move students further down your recruiting pipeline. These students are already interested in your institution so create ads targeted to these students with an ‘Apply’ call to action to drive these users to complete the application process.
4. News Feed Ads are where it’s at. News Feed ads rolled out in 2012 and have been proven to be much more successful than the right column ads. As you would assume, New Feed Ads appear in your News Feed rather than on the right column. Images appear larger, and, with users typically more engaged with content in their News Feed, it’s no wonder these ads are more successful. The click through rates for these ads average to be 44x higher and cost per leads tend to be about 67% lower than right column ads.
5. Promote an offer, increase leads. We’ve all seen retail related ads promoting an offer to capture your attention and we think this tactic can be used in Higher Education as well! Offering a tuition discount to local community college students or those working at a specific company? Promote this offer in your ad to draw interest and drive leads.

With the ever-changing nature of Facebook advertising, it’s likely that a year from now these tips could be out of date. However, with the constant changing, there will continue to be unique advertising opportunities to take advantage of. So if you haven’t made the Facebook advertising plunge, go for it!

For more information about how Converge Consulting can help with your Facebook and other digital marketing strategies, contact us here!