YOUTUBE INTRODUCES AUDIO ADS: YouTube’s new audio ads are aimed at reaching people who use YouTube’s music and podcast platform. These audio ads are a voiceover-delivered message with a simple image or animation that plays on-screen while an individual is listening to music or a podcast. While testing this new ad type, YouTube claims that 75% of audio ad campaigns drove significant brand awareness.
Why you should care: YouTube Music, a competitor to Spotify, is quickly growing in popularity. A benefit of these audio ads is that enrollment marketers can create and run them directly in Google Ads with the same targeting options, bidding strategies, and “Brand Lift” measurements that YouTube video campaigns feature. While it might not be best to promote an eBook or content piece in an audio ad, consider crafting your audio ad around your school’s most powerful message or asking a well-known alum to craft a message promoting your school.
DO BLOG COMMENTS MATTER FOR SEO?: HubSpot recently analyzed over 10,000 blog posts and concluded that “there is no correlation between the number of comments on a post and the number of views that post got.” Ultimately, there is not a direct SEO benefit of enabling comments on your blog, but having a community grow in the comments section of your blog can be good for SEO indirectly through increased time on page and potential of increased site traffic.
Why you should care: HubSpot's Head of English SEO Aja Frost doesn’t advise turning on a comment section for your school’s blog just for SEO's sake. Instead, enable blog comments if your school is willing to spend the time and resources to write ample blog content and foster a community in the blog comments. The comments section of your blog can be a place for prospective students to ask questions and communicate with one another, but it must be monitored by enrollment marketers to remove foul language and black hat techniques.
CREATE ADS WITH OTHER USERS’ ACCOUNTS ON INSTA: Instagram now allows advertisers to create sponsored posts on a user's behalf (with permission, of course). This comes as an update to its branded content ads which allow influencers to indicate when their posts are sponsored by a company or brand. There are some comparisons to LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail Ads where an advertiser can send an ad out on behalf of a LinkedIn member after connecting and providing permissions.
Why you should care: This new capability and process rolled out by Instagram makes it incredibly easy for enrollment marketers to run ad campaigns leveraging faculty, influencer, and other student Instagram accounts. The advertiser sends the user (faculty/influencer/student) a request for ad creation access, the user accepts the request, and the creator receives notification of a created ad for their approval, all within the Instagram platform.
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