Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising for the education industry is a cutthroat playing field. To say that finding your footing and claiming a profitable chunk of the market can be hard is an understatement. So it’s really not surprising to see eLearning companies battling (and mostly losing) against high costs and intense competition.
Well, if it’s so complicated to successfully market courses digitally, why do so many education marketers continue to pursue PPC advertising?
The answer: your students are found online. The audience you want to attract and capture begins their search for the best-fitting learning provider using the internet. Without a strong digital presence, you miss the opportunity to place your company on the radar of prospective students.
And although PPC is packaged as this daunting process that’s near-impossible to succeed in, the truth is that it’s just it’s another tool–one that can be utilized properly to create long-term growth for your brand.
First up in maintaining a foolproof online marketing strategy is to minimize easy-to-spot PPC mistakes you could be making that are draining and wasting your hard-earned dollars.
Launching campaigns without clear goals
One of the factors that separate a winning PPC strategy from a failing one is how well-defined goals are before ads are launched for public scrutiny. However, you’d be shocked at how many marketers skip this seemingly no-brainer process.
All too often, companies begin a PPC campaign without setting up and determining their target audience, budget, and messaging. Predictably, this leads to vague branding materials that attract the wrong audience, cause ineffective performance, and produce disappointing results.
You can steer clear of this dilemma by taking the time to sit down with your team to establish a clear, specific purpose for your PPC campaign. Here are some questions you need to be asking to create effective campaigns:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- How many leads are you aiming to convert?
- Is there a course you want to promote?
- Are you working with a specific location?
- Do you have a timeline and acquisition cost in mind?
Determining these elements will help you come up with copy, landing pages, and branding materials that persuade prospective students. Geotargeting through Google Adwords guarantees that your ads are delivered to the right audience when they’re most active on whichever platform and device they’re mostly found.
Not considering seasonality
Student traffic in the education space peaks and dies down throughout the year. You can maximize your campaigns’ success by calculating seasonal fluctuations in your strategies. A costly mistake eLearning marketers fall prey to is keeping their PPC spending uniform all year round. You miss out on the chance to reach more ready-to-enroll leads during peak season and end up overspending during the lean periods.
The months before the school year start is when you can expect the most interest in courses and learning. This means it makes the most sense to turn up your ads budget during this time and lower them during slower months (e.g: holidays).
Underutilizing Remarketing
Enrolling in a school or course is not an overnight decision any student makes. It’s a massive commitment and arriving at a choice they’re sure they won’t regret can typically be a months-long process. What most education marketers have difficulty with is sustaining and nurturing lead interest once they scroll past an ad for a course.
Introducing: Remarketing. Good remarketing helps you stay on your prospects’ radar even when they’ve clicked out of your ad or website. A winning remarketing strategy, on the other hand, takes your prospective students from someone looking up a list of courses and benchmarking their options, all the way to enrollment.
Your PPC campaigns become so much more powerful when combined with a perfectly set up remarketing strategy.
There’s a fine line between hitting a minefield and a goldmine when it comes to navigating PPC marketing for the education space. Without the proper strategies and execution, you may either spend too much money on unrewarding campaigns or overlook profit-generating opportunities.
The Grow Enrollments crew are specialists in creating and sustaining growth for education companies. We work as an extension of your team, always aiming to deliver maximum ROI and the best enrollment year for you yet.
Contact us today–we’re excited to get to know you and your goals better.
