LINKEDIN PROVIDES NEW TIPS ON CHOOSING AD CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES: Objective-based advertising is the ability to choose a type of advertising that best aligns to your marketing objectives. It sounds simple, right? Well, for businesses advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s not always been so simple. Originally, marketers had few advertising options on social media platforms and not every stage of the marketing funnel could be easily translated into an optimized advertisement. Now, LinkedIn is making it easier than ever for companies to run highly-effective awareness, consideration, and conversion stage advertisements without having to guess which ad types and formats are optimal for each stage. Is your goal to improve brand awareness, get more website visits, collect leads, solicit video views, or generate more conversions? With new tips on campaign objectives, LinkedIn will help you choose the best ad type and format for your objective.
Why you should care: LinkedIn’s competition with Facebook in social advertising is resulting in greater simplicity and effectiveness of ads for businesses as each platform attempts to out-do the other. For enrollment marketers and admissions teams, it has never been easier to use LinkedIn to reach prospective students, improve your program's brand awareness, and get more conversions. If you’re unsure which ad type is best for your program, start by reading how to select your campaign objective for your LinkedIn ad.
WHY ADVERTISERS MUST WORK TOGETHER: Take a step back and think about why advertising even exists in the first place. “The truth is, ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web,” says Google. Ads connect creators, publishers, and businesses to many people who actually have a need for their products or services. “But expectations are changing. Increasingly, there are users who feel shortchanged in this deal, especially when it comes to their privacy and the ways their personal data is being handled.” Unfortunately, it takes just one bad apple to ruin advertising for everyone. In a lot of ways, this is already happening. As an advertising community, it is critical we focus on improving trust with those on the open web by focusing on the 3 main areas: transparency, choice, and control. People should be able to easily see how their data is being used for ads, their choices about how ads are tailored to them should be respected, and everyone should have better control over the data that is being used to tailor ads to them.
Why you should care: Digital ads are crucial to extending your program’s reach to a broader, even global audience. At the end of the day, the goal is to help connect prospective students to a degree that truly will change their future for the better. But doing advertising the wrong way can ruin ads for everyone, and seriously damage your program’s reputation. So, be clear about the data you collect on prospective students and how you use that data. This might entail updating your program’s privacy policy online. Ensure you’re targeting the right, most relevant audiences. And lastly, remember the point of ads: it’s to connect people to content, products, and services they’re truly interested in!
THE ABC’s OF VIDEO CONTENT: Think back to all of the times you were scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. What made you stop scrolling on any given post? Chances are (if you’re like me) you stopped scrolling to watch a video. It’s clear that video-based content works, so why are organizations still failing to incorporate video into their digital marketing strategy? For most organizations, a lack of buy-in from leadership, a false-assumption that video content is too expensive to produce, and a talent gap in video producers keep video strategy on the back burner. In reality, video content doesn’t have to be this budget guzzling production every month thanks to the ABC’s of video content. With any video production, you can create more than a fiscal quarter’s worth of video content with A-level footage (ex. polished and well-produced, brand overview video for your website), B-level footage (how-to videos, vlogs, 30 second clips) and C-level footage (raw, unpolished, and extremely effective in revealing the “human-side” of your business). Together, all 3 levels can be created from one production shoot to help you finally plan a video strategy, re-use content, and save money.
Why you should care: Today, most prospective students would rather watch a video to learn about your program than read 10 pages on it. The ability to see the campus, other students, and picture themselves in your program’s setting is extremely powerful. While most organizations are slow to adopt video content, higher education is extremely slow to adapt. But the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage using video content is slowly closing. So what’s stopping your program from using video in marketing?