Is Your School Making These Common Facebook Ad Mistakes?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade your school most likely has a presence on Facebook. Organic reach from Facebook posts has been declining for years and like many schools your marketing team may be using paid Facebook ads to reach new customers. Facebook (now Meta) is the worlds 2nd largest ad platform and make no mistake, they want you to pay to reach new customers.

In this article, I will break down some of the common mistakes that I see in school advertising campaigns.

Focusing Only On Organic Reach

Many marketing teams have become old pros at social media marketing, so what is the need for paid social media? The short answer is, you may be leaving leads on the table if you only focus on organic social media.

If you are lucky, a Facebook post will reach just 6% of your followers, not to mention that most of these people are already aware of your business. Paid reach on the other hand allows you to target users that are likely to be interested in your services, even if they have never heard of you.

If you are not complimenting your organic reach with paid ads you are not taking full advantage of Facebook’s ability to find users that are interested in your services.

Targeting The Wrong Part Of The Funnel

When was the last time you went on Facebook hoping to stumble across the ideal school for your child? Probably never, this is because Facebook is an interest based advertising platform. That doesn’t mean that parents don’t check the social media presence of prospective schools, but… Facebook users primarily use the platform for entertainment. The platform works well when you have a large audience where it can show your ads and figure out who is likely to be interested in your product or service. Despite this, many international schools go straight in for the kill with bottom of funnel requests like “Apply Now”.

Build Awareness First

Facebook is a great tool for building awareness and trust at the top of your admissions funnel. Promoting blog posts and content that display your schools expertise and community involvement are two great ways of promoting your school this way.

For school marketing teams, Facebook is the undisputed ruler of filling real-world events. Local events are interesting and pair well with interest based ad platforms, using Facebook ads is super cost effective way of building awareness of, and filling your school’s recruitment events – See how I did it for CIS!

Wrong Call to Action Button

Following on from my above point, a quick scan on Facebook Ad Library shows that a lot of international schools use the wrong call to action on their ads. Facebook is good for targeting the top of the admissions funnel, as a result potential parents are rarely ready to click “Apply Now” upon seeing an ad. Softer CTA’s like “Learn More” and “Sign Up” tend to work better.

Retargeting

Have you’ve ever clicked on an ad, only to be shown further ads from the same company (seemingly) everywhere you go after that? That’s retargeting! I rarely see schools using retargeting, let alone doing it the right way.

If done well, the retargeting stage of an ad campaign can be a gold mine for leads. As I previously mentioned, Facebook ads are great for building awareness, retargeting is great for converting that awareness into leads. For schools, this is where you should put in a stronger call to action and direct the visitor to a landing page, or form, where they can take the desired action.

The retargeting stage of a campaign can also be a time to reduce doubt in your potential parent’s minds. By sequencing your retargeting ads, triggers like social proof can be added as intermediary steps, creating a journey that leads your audience down the path to enrollment.

Too Much Text On Images

Facebook recently dropped it’s less than 20% text on ad images rule but you should still try to follow it. According to HubSpot, Facebook has found that the best performing ads are those that include little or no text.

There are a number of reasons for this:

• The most successful ads look like organic content. In many instances, the over use of text can cause an ad too look out of place. Remember, Facebook users are there primarily for entertainment, not to click on ads.
• Facebook can automatically translate text that is part of the ad description into the viewers native language. An image of text cannot be translated, therefore, if your image contains important information about an event, your viewer may not understand.

Pro Tip: You should still double brand (logo and school name) your images as this has been shown to increase brand recall after seeing an ad