Using School Social Media Ads to Improve Student Enrollment

Decades ago, schools relied on traditional methods of advertising: billboards, radio ads, the newspaper, direct mail, and such. But in today’s competitive student enrollment landscape, social media advertising for schools has become the new normal.

With the right strategy, social media ads can be a powerful tool in driving more traffic to your school’s website and boosting applications — ultimately leading to higher student enrollment.

Read on to learn the key reasons to use social media advertising for your school and how SchoolMint can help you get started!

1. You Can Target Your School’s Ads and Messaging

For schools, Facebook and Instagram are highly effective platforms for reaching your audience: parents between 18 and 42.

However, that’s a broad age range. And different families within it will have different concerns. For example, a 21-year-old single parent in college will have different needs than those of a 37-year-old married professional.

In this case, using one message to target these two parents likely won’t produce as effective results as two ads tailored to their unique needs. Perhaps the younger parent needs a school with a low-cost aftercare program — whereas the older parent values extracurricular activities.

To earn their enrollment, you need to use messaging that takes into account who each target parent is to ensure said messaging will resonate with them.

And being able to separate and target your messaging is where school social media ads shine.

With Facebook and Instagram, you can target people in your locale based on their age, gender identity, and interests. And the best part is you can reach them even if they haven’t heard of your school.

In this way, social media ads expand awareness of your school beyond just the people who already follow your page.

Plus, by targeting people only in your geographic area, you’ll ensure only people who can actually attend your school will see your ads in the first place.

This means you’ll maximize your ad budget while generating higher quality “leads” (i.e., local parents looking for a school just like yours). You’ll be confident you’re not wasting money advertising your school to families across the country.

Compare this to a radio ad. A radio ad lacks razor-thin precision with who hears your message, and it’s hard to track the effectiveness of the ad anyway. With social media ads for your school, you can zero in on exactly the type(s) of family you hope to enroll. 

If you need help defining who those families are, check out this article on identifying your target parents.

2. You Can Easily Tell Your School’s Story

Social media advertising lets you showcase your school’s highly qualified faculty, state-of-the-art facilities, engaging classrooms, helpful programs and services, diverse extracurriculars, and all the cool, exciting events that happen on your campus.

Advertising your school on social media gives you a chance to spread these exciting things to new families, helping you tell your story — the reason someone should choose you over another school — to your target audience.

By using visually appealing content in your advertisements, you can pique the interest of potential students and their families. Remember the fictional parents in the previous tip? A social media ad would let you tell separate stories to each of them.

Plus you can also use your school’s social media ads to share stories and successes from your school, further enhancing your school’s brand throughout your community.

Interested in receiving more enrollment marketing insights like those in this article? Sign up for the SchoolMint Insider newsletter. Every two weeks, we’ll deliver you school marketing and recruitment advice!

3. You Can Run School Social Media Ads Very Cost-Effectively

Social media advertising in K-12 is significantly more cost-effective than traditional promotional tactics and typically yields far better value for your money. This is particularly beneficial because (this won’t be news to you) schools typically have very limited advertising budgets.

But by allocating some dollars toward school ads, you can reach a highly qualified, niche audience of prospective parents without busting your budget.

This then allows you to focus your resources on other areas of need:

• Investing in classroom technology
• Enhancing extracurricular activities
• Providing professional development opportunities for teachers

Additionally, social media advertising offers you total control over running your ads. Unlike traditional forms of advertising — which are often difficult or costly to modify or cancel once they’ve been launched — social media ads can be paused, edited, or canceled whenever you desire.

This allows you to make adjustments as needed based on results you’re seeing, budget constraints, or any other reason you’d need to modify a campaign.

Interested in learning how cost-effective social media ads can be for your school? Check out SchoolMint’s digital advertising service.

Our partners typically need to enroll as few as just one or two students to pay for the services. But for schools like Baltimore International Academy East (BIA), their investment in SchoolMint’s advertising services paid for itself many, many times over.

At the end of our first engagement with BIA, they had 109 highly qualified, highly interested families to inquire with about student enrollment.

Learn more about the process and see their results in the case study below:

4. You Can Track Performance — and Maximize Your Ad Budget

Lastly, social media advertising allows you to measure the success of your school social media campaigns.

By analyzing metrics such as impressions, clicks, and engagement rates, you can see exactly how your advertisements are performing and make informed decisions about your advertising strategy.

Additionally, you can do something called A/B testing, whereby you create two versions of one ad and compare their performance to see which did better, then use the better version moving forward.

Over time, all of this data will help you fine tune your school’s advertising, helping you get better and better at using social media to improve student enrollment.

Interested in more social media tips? Check out my previous post, 20 Tips for School Social Media!

Get Started with School Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is the future of enrollment marketing, providing better returns on your investment, precise control over who sees your ads, easy ad management, and reduced advertising costs.

But if the thought of learning to set up social media campaigns and run Facebook/Instagram ads has you nervous, don’t be.

To improve your enrollment through social media ads, you don’t need to be a social-savvy advertising savant. You just need to partner with one!

SchoolMint is the industry expert in improving student enrollment, and we provide digital ad services to help schools advertise on social media.

If you’re ready to learn how our ads team can help your school with social media ads, let’s chat!