3 types of admissions media campaigns you can run year-round
6/27/2022
As we discussed in the first article in this series, evergreen campaigns are a valuable advertising tactic because you can run them year-round on a reasonable budget. They aim to increase brand awareness, they drive results throughout their life cycle, and over time, they have the potential to drastically change brand engagement online. In this article, we’ll explore three types of evergreen tactics that could be a helpful addition to your current admissions marketing strategy.
This article is the second in a three-part series on incorporating evergreen media campaigns into your admissions marketing strategy.
With evergreen campaigns, the goal is to create an experience for your audiences that’s relatable, approachable, and accessible over time — without feeling ephemeral or requiring a high level of commitment to a specific time frame. Providing something that always feels fresh is key, since your audience is constantly shifting. This type of campaign should feel just as relevant and helpful and engaging for rising juniors as it does for rising seniors and their influencers.
You have the opportunity to meet your audiences where they are, when they’re ready, and provide something of value with little commitment on their part. These campaigns are often built with softer asks, gently reminding users that your brand is an option. By exposing your audiences to these more general, higher-level campaigns, you can often make your lead generation tools more effective at more critical parts of the admissions cycle.
With the three evergreen tactics below, you can develop a stronger, more recognized brand on your digital channels over time, and you can create content for your audiences that doesn’t have an expiration date. Explore them as potential additions to your admissions marketing strategy:
1. The simple request for information (RFI)
2. The curated content marketing campaign
3. The overarching awareness campaign
1. The Simple RFI Campaign
It’s never too early to start building your admissions pipeline. With all of the internet at your fingertips, and a variety of targeting options for reaching potential students and their respective influencers, it’s not a bad idea to put out an invitation for users to request information about your institution as a whole.
By keeping paid media in the market year-round, at a low level as a minimum (not just for the upcoming year), you gain additional ways for prospects to start being exposed to the marketing efforts that come with all things admissions. And when you enable more people to request information without having to be on your formal .edu site, you can offer them a more casual point of entry, and you can start sending them personalized communications about their needs much earlier in their college search process. Frankly, this tactic may feel like a no-brainer, but often it’s launched too late in the prospect’s process, and it’s aimed too far down in the admissions funnel to reap the return most colleges would like to see.
The other key piece to this recommendation is keeping the RFI simple. The purpose of an evergreen campaign like this is simply to get enough context for following up, not to get all the answers right away. A form for this type of campaign should have a low barrier to entry, with fields as simple as name, email, and phone number (optional).
When you collect this type of information earlier in the funnel, you have plenty of time to build out a prospect’s profile, and they’re more likely to engage, since they “opted in” from a place of interest on their own accord, likely outside of the context of higher ed (like Niche).
2. The Curated Content Marketing Campaign
Content marketing is designed for the long game. Curated pieces take time to develop SEO value and ranking status, but once they do, they can be one of your best-kept secrets. Start by developing one to three strong topics to cover: choosing lifestyle topics over academic ones may help you stand out from your competitors.
Think about how popular content curators like Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and Hubspot take common topics (sometimes super-niche ones) and turn them into quick and digestible reads, short-form videos, or downloadable guides that reach far and wide. This positions them as thought leaders on subjects like “the top 10 trending dog names of 2022” or “the 5 most creative marketing strategies of the last decade.”
The key here is creating content that is clear, evergreen, and easy to engage with.
There’s no reason this can’t be done for higher ed, and there are so many ways to bring prospective students into the culture of your institution well before they make any big college decisions.
Why should you build out a content marketing strategy? For starters, it provides great content for paid media to drive more traffic to your site. Even more important: this tactic offers rich experiences after click-through that are valuable to the user — but it doesn’t ask them immediately to “apply now!”
Next time you’re asked to contribute to your admissions marketing strategy, consider some ways to add value to the experience, with topics like:
- 5 ways to make applying to college easier on yourself as a high school student
- A quick guide to making friends in your first week on campus
- 10 things you didn’t know you would need when starting college
- How to explore possible college programs and majors as a high school student
The list goes on, but the point is this: If you think about it, each of these topics is relevant to a high school student considering college, as well as to their influencers, who want to help them thrive in their experience.
3. The Overarching Brand Awareness Campaign
Evergreen brand awareness campaigns are a great way to build brand awareness in new places (geographically or online) or to shift perception in the marketplace over time. Here’s how to think about it: The goal shouldn’t be to increase admissions by a certain percentage by next year. Rather, the goal should be more like gaining more impressions in a particular location, or reaching a certain percentage of video completions on a particular asset, to show that a brand message is resonating (or isn’t and needs to be adjusted).
Since an evergreen campaign of this nature aims to gain both attention (impressions and reach) and engagement (click-throughs, video completions, social shares, and the like), it’s important to keep the following idea in mind: When users see one of these ads, they’re often at what we call the “pre-contemplation” stage.* They may or may not be considering college, and they may or may not have heard of your institution before, but what they do know is they chose to be on this platform, at this time, with another intention. What’s important is aiming to educate, and offering context for how your brand can add value to their life experience. That’s why gaining frequency with these campaigns is critical for educating audiences without a commitment to direct action.
*See the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) for changing behavior.
Recap
In reality, a college or university could be running all three types of evergreen campaigns simultaneously — but that would be a fairly large lift. Instead, to get your toes wet and start building momentum in your admissions marketing strategy, we recommend you choose an area to get started. While others are taking a break, this will help keep your institution top of mind.
