Here’s a common situation that marketers across all industries face: you create the perfect social media ad campaign, with the right offer, a sufficient budget and brilliant messaging, only to be disappointed with your results when you don’t know how to target students on Facebook ads.
This can happen for a number of reasons, but with Facebook Ads for schools, the problem often comes down to targeting. The targeting options on the social media giant’s ad platform are so diverse and specific that it can be easy to make a wrong move, and end up serving your campaign to the wrong audience.
If your school has had difficulty finding the right audience for its Facebook ads, read on to find out how to get it right.
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The Groundwork: Having a Clear Student Persona in Mind
If you are wondering, What is the first step in targeting students on Facebook Ads? The answer is simple: The first step to targeting students on Facebook Ads is to determine who your student persona is. Believe it or not, much of the foundations for a good Facebook Ad targeting strategy are laid before you even begin to look at your options on the platform. Simply put, you need to have a clearly defined target audience in mind for your campaigns before you start. Otherwise, you will likely find yourself browsing through a myriad of possible targeting parameters wondering which ones will likely get the best results for your school.
Instead, you should discuss and lay out your target persona’s characteristics with your team beforehand, so that it becomes a matter of simply matching your school Facebook Ads audiences up with what you had in mind.
For best results, you should aim for as much detail as possible. Consider going beyond simple demographic, geographic, and education related parameters to consider things like a prospect’s outside interests and hobbies, publications they might read online, and even their digital habits like device usage and browsing behaviour. These sorts of factors will enable you to get the most out of Facebook’s laser-focused audience parameters.
How to Target Students on Facebook Ads Using Different Demographics
Demographics are clearly defined, demonstrable categories of the population that a person can fall into. If you are new to Facebook ads, you might want to consider this question: What demographic parameters should I consider when targeting students on Facebook Ads? The most important demographics to consider include age, gender, language, nationality, and education level.
These should be easy to set if you have clearly defined your target persona. One thing to keep in mind is that if you are planning to serve ads in a language other than your own, it would be wise to create a landing page in that language too. Prospects who click on an ad in their native language will expect the page they end up on to be in the same language, and may be less likely to convert if it isn’t.
Example: This Korean landing page created by American English College is designed to attract prospects seeking to learn English, encouraging them to convert in a language they’re familiar with.
Source: American English College
Beyond these basic categories, there are also a number of different demographic characteristics that might help you pinpoint your audience on Facebook Ads.
The most pertinent for how to target students on Facebook ads would include education level and field of study, but others may also be useful. Work-related fields such as job title and industry, for example, might be useful for schools who are targeting working students, such as business schools or those running professional development courses.
K-12 schools, meanwhile, will want to look at the possible targeting options in the parents field, which allow you to specifically target parents of children in different age groups.
Targeting the Right Locations for Your School
One area of your targeting that you absolutely need to get right is location. Facebook’s location-based targeting runs the gamut from larger catchment areas like cities, countries, and even continents, to more precise targeting by postcode or even the radius of a specific address. You can opt to target everyone who lives in a location or people who were there recently. If you are wondering: “How can I effectively use location targeting for my school’s Facebook Ads?” HEM’s Social Media Specialist, Amélie Chayer has an answer for you! Here’s what she says: If you have multiple campuses, create separate campaigns for each campus so that you can effectively allocate your budget and see which program performs best at which location. If you offer both online and in-person course options, create different campaigns or adsets in which you can individually target local and remote students, and tailor your ad creatives accordingly. If your school is close to a province, state, or country border, make sure to exclude neighbouring locations you don’t want to target. Finally, if you have a lot of competitors in your city, keep your location radius small to prioritize targeting neighbouring users.
This wealth of options can be both a blessing and a curse when creating Facebook Advertising for schools. Institutions of all kinds will often make the mistake of setting their parameters either far too wide or too narrow, or even just simply make a small mistake that leads to their ad being served to the wrong market. For instance, a business school might set their ads to target a particular country, but see them being shown in rural areas where users are unlikely to be considering this kind of education. A better approach for this case would be to target specific cities.
Example: An audience created in Facebook Ads centred around 5 major European cities with a potential reach of 11.9-14 million people. Note how you can set the targeting radius within a certain number of kilometres of each location.
In general, the more specific you can be about your location the better. Targeting a number of specific cities, or even areas of a country, that are likely to contain interested leads will give you a much better chance of converting than targeting a country or an entire continent. While it may feel like you are limiting your potential reach, you are actually increasing your chances of success.
Getting Your School’s Interest-Based Targeting Right
Interest-based targeting is where the amount of detail you’ve put into defining your personas really begins to pay off. You can target people who have shown interest in the particular fields your programs or courses cover, related industries and areas, or other hobbies or preferences that may be typical of your target persona.
Example: These beauty-related, interest-based targeting options could be very useful for an esthetician school targeting potential students interested in topics related to programs they offer.
One important caveat to this is that these will only be things that users have shown a demonstrable interest in when browsing Facebook itself. The criteria the platform uses to define interests are based on a user’s stated likes and interests, apps they have used, and pages they have interacted with, among other things.
This can arguably limit its effectiveness for schools, as a prospect who is interested in your course or field of study may not necessarily express that on a social network. For example, a prospective student for a language school may not have specifically liked a page related to learning English, or stated ESL as an interest. Nonetheless, adding a few interest-based fields can definitely be helpful for how to target students on Facebook ads.
Furthermore, should you want to target a more specific audience, you can simply click on the “Narrow Audience” button. This option allows you to add more criteria for your audience and target a more specific group of people. For instance, the search results in the example pictured above may be broad for your ad campaign. After all, anyone interested in cosmetics or tattoos would meet your criteria, no matter what their educational background. To narrow things down, you could add an interest in specific esthetician magazines and exclude those who are already attending school or have advanced degrees.
How Valuable is Facebook’s Behaviour-Based Targeting for Schools?
You may wonder: “Is behavior-based targeting useful for schools on Facebook Ads?” Amélie says: “Behavior-based targeting is incredibly useful for schools on Facebook ads when you want to reach new types of audiences. On Facebook, it’s important to have different ad creatives as well as different audiences to maximize your results. Alongside targeting people who are interested in a certain program, behavior-based targeting enables you to expand upon your targeting and reach new potential users. For example, if you are a language school in Italy that offers summer courses for those who are traveling to your city, targeting users who travel internationally a lot, or who like adventure travel, are great options.”
Behaviour-based targeting parameters are much more purpose-specific, and many of the possible fields may be a little redundant in your school’s social media ads. Options like consumer classification, purchase behaviours, and anniversary occurrence are more tailored towards e-commerce advertisers, and will likely not be relevant to your institution.
However, there may still be a few parameters that do come into play, depending on your school’s particular courses and goals. For instance, the ex-pat field, which allows you to target ex-pats who have moved to a country from elsewhere, could be very useful for a language school creating a campaign targeting local prospects.
Likewise, device usage can be particularly important to consider when creating a campaign, as it will help you match your audience with where on the Facebook network you are planning to place your ads.
The Importance of Placement in Facebook Ads Targeting
Speaking of which, placement can be one of the most important targeting parameters to define in your Facebook ads for education campaigns. For a start, being familiar with your audience’s digital browsing habits can be seriously advantageous when creating campaigns. You should consider whether they are likely to use mobile devices, tablets, laptops, desktops, or all of the above. Moreover, the Facebook Ads network has expanded to include the company’s other platforms like Instagram and Messenger, ensuring that you choose the platforms your prospects are likely to be active on will be crucial to your Facebook strategy success.
It’s also important to consider what features and areas of these platforms your prospects are likely to visit and use. For instance, the Reels feature has become increasingly popular on all of Facebook’s platforms, but the majority of users are younger, with older audiences naturally slower to adopt the new feature. If your school is recruiting more mature students, it might not be the best place to reach them.
You should also look at more niche areas of the network where your ad might be served, such as Facebook Marketplace, or even Facebook Watch if you are considering video ads. Do some research to see if your target audience is likely to use these features.
Example: Below, a Facebook Ad for Language Systems International is shown in various formats including Facebook Feed Ads, Instagram Feed Ads, Facebook Stories, and Instagram Stories. The use of multiple advertising platforms such as Stories helps them to reach a younger audience.
How to Target Students on Facebook Ads Using Custom Audiences
If you are looking to create remarketing campaigns to target prospects who have shown previous interest in your school, Facebook Ads Custom Audiences will offer you plenty of options. A good starting point might be to look at users who have previously interacted with your school on the network, whether by visiting your page, liking or commenting on a post, sending you a message, or clicking through on a link you posted.
You can also move outside of Facebook and create a Custom Audience based on traffic to your website. This can be a great way to find prospective students who have been researching your school online but have not found it on the social network yet. While this type of Custom Audience can be useful, the iOS 14 update has put some restrictions on Facebook’s ability to track users, giving them the option to opt out of tracking when browsing apps such as Facebook or Instagram. What’s the solution in this case? Facebook has created its own Facebook API, which is installed on your website, and can speak directly with the app to track user website activity despite users having turned off IOS 14 or using a VPN. Learn more here.
If you have a strong database of leads in your CRM system, another option might be to create Custom Audiences based on lists. Your school can simply upload a CSV or text file with your leads’ details, and Facebook will attempt to match them to the correct profile on their network. The identifiers the site allows include email address, phone number, first and last name, city, location, age, and date of birth, so you should stand a good chance of finding the right matches provided you have gathered enough details in your CRM.
Use Lookalike Audiences to Find More Prospective Students
If you want to attract more leads similar to those you already have, Lookalike Audiences can be a great option for you. You can create a Lookalike Audience using any existing audience you have. Facebook will then define a new list made up of users with similar demographic characteristics, interests and behaviours to your existing leads. In our experience, creating Lookalike audiences based on Page Likes is quite effective!
Lookalike Audiences are created in specific locations, and you can modify them by selecting a percentage of that location’s users (from 1 to 10%) to target. 1% will give you an audience that is most similar to the audience you are modeling on, while increasing the percentage will broaden the size and scope of the audience. Depending on your needs, you can create multiple LookAlikes with different levels of similarity to your source. This can be a great way to expand your reach in a market you have already been successful in.
Example: Here, a Lookalike Audience created with the targeting narrowed to 5% of the population will create an audience that’s broader, but still largely reflects the modeled audience.
Narrowing Down Your School’s Audiences to Target Students on Facebook Ads
While all of these parameters can hold a lot of potential for your campaigns, it’s important to ensure that your target audience remains as specific as possible, while not getting too small. This is ideal for having successful Facebook ads for higher education.
One way that Facebook Ads allows you to narrow your audience is by refining your detailed targeting options to make the criteria leads must meet more specific. For instance, to target users who are both university graduates and work in the business and finance sector, you need to select the “College grads” education level first and then use the “narrow audience” feature to include those working in “Business and Finance.” This way, you ensure that your campaign targets only those who meet both criteria simultaneously, rather than targeting them separately, which would result in a broader audience.
This targeting approach could be ideal for a business school promoting an MBA program. By doing this, you can distinguish which characteristics are essential and which ones are simply desirable.
Additionally, if you find your audience too large, you might look at excluding certain groups from it. This can be a great way to ensure that your ad isn’t shown to users who are unlikely to find it relevant.
Considering your targeting in the areas defined here should help you create far more precise, suitable audiences for your social media marketing strategy. However, there can still be a fair amount of trial and error involved, and you probably won’t get a clear sense of how successful you have been until you begin running your ads. Nonetheless, by keeping a close eye on your results, refining your audiences where necessary, and managing your campaigns actively at every level, you should soon find yourself getting the hang of the platform.
Want to create succesful ad campaigns?
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*This post was originally published in 2012, but has been updated and expanded to reflect the latest trends and developments in the industry.
FAQs
Is behavior-based targeting useful for schools on Facebook Ads?
Behavior-based targeting is incredibly useful for schools on Facebook ads when you want to reach new types of audiences.
How can I effectively use location targeting for my school’s Facebook Ads?
If you have multiple campuses, create separate campaigns for each campus so that you can effectively allocate your budget and see which program performs best at which location.
What demographic parameters should I consider when targeting students on Facebook Ads?
The most important demographics to consider include age, gender, language, nationality, and education level.
