“east coast liberal arts college,” you can target your ads to those keywords, and your ads will appear alongside the search results whenever somebody queries those terms.
Examples of SEM services: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter
DISPLAY ADVERTISING:Display advertising encompasses all of graphical ads you see online, and constitutes the majority of online ads. Display ads have the added benefit of allowing advertisers to integrate multimedia directly into their ad units, including images, audio, animations, video and interactive elements. As a result, display ads can be used for both direct-response marketing, as well as for longer-term brand advertising.
Examples of Display Advertising services: Yahoo! Network, AOL Advertising, Google Ad Network
E-MAIL BLASTS: Despite its age, e-mail marketing is still one of the best methods for delivering lengthier content to your audience. In the age of spam filters, however, e-mail marketers must take extreme care in crafting and targeting their messages to avoid the dreaded Junk Mail folder. Here are three tips for increasing the chances that your e-mails will be read and remembered:
Provide Useful Content— Strictly promotional e-mails don’t offer readers much beyond spreading aware- ness about a particular school. An e-mail that con- tains interesting statistics, relevant advice or links to useful resources, on the other hand, provides value to the recipients and makes them more likely to be receptive to future e-mails as a result.
your e-mails. By repeating this process several times, you significantly improve the performance of your e-mail blasts.
CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING: While mass marketing remains popular for direct mail campaigns, it has become all but obsolete in the online advertising space. The current trend is towards high-precision targeting that focuses on reaching relevant audiences as opposed to relying on sheer volume. Today’s technology allows marketers to serve ads based on demographics, interests, geography and even the time of day and day of the week. Taking the time to inti- mately understand your market segments and adjusting your search engine and display advertising campaigns accordingly can save you a fortune on wasted ad impres- sions, and ensures that your ads are only being seen by people who are likely to be interested in your school and your brand.
SCHOOLS USING RETARGETING VENDORS
American University of Antigua (ReTargeter)
Walden University (ReTargeter) Boston Language Institute (ReTargeter)
Indiana University Kelly School of Business (ReTargeter)
Arizona State University (Fetchback and AdRoll)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Recrue) University of Washington (Recrue) Loyola University New Orleans (Recrue)
Target the Right People—An e-mail blast to every high school senior in the country won’t yield a very good return on investment. An e-mail blast to every high school senior who is, for instance, interested in chemical engineering and studying abroad would be much more tightly focused and would provide a significantly higher conversion rate.
Test, Test, Test—It’s difficult to deduce the optimal configuration of text for your e-mail blast before you start your campaign, but with A/B testing, you can discover this information empirically. Create dupli- cate campaigns and change a single variable each time (subject heading, message text, call to action, etc.) to determine which messages produce the best open rates, click-through rates and response rates for
RETARGETING/REMARKETING: Online advertising has been growing at a strong rate for the past decade and a half, and has shown little sign of slowing down in the near future. As a result, it has become more dif- ficult for brands to stand out amidst the innumerable ads that the aver- age user is bombarded with every day, and it has become more diffi- cult for users to separate the useful signal from the irrelevant noise. Retargeting (also known as remar- keting) is a relatively new technol- ogy that offers a solution to this problem (full disclosure: we work for ReTargeter!). Through retarget- ing, your ads will only be served to people who have interacted with your online presence in some way, either by visiting your website, opening one of your e-mails or
engaging with your school via a social network. When these users browse the web, they will continue to see ads for your school, even on high-profile sites such as
CNN.com and Huffington Post. The effect is to make the most effective use of your ad spend, improve awareness of the school and drive back those that have left your school’s website.
Examples of Retargeting Services: ReTargeter, Criteo, and Chango
RETENTION Once you’ve earned people’s attention, the question becomes: how do you keep it? A static website that is sel- dom updated provides little incentive for users to return to your site or engage with your school online outside of the classroom. A well-developed content strategy, on the
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