While many schools use Snapchat university marketing as part of their organic social media strategy, few run paid ads on the platform. Because advertising on Snapchat has always involved high costs and a complicated set-up process, many schools opted for other easier-to-use, cheaper social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. If you need guidance on which platforms are best for your school, contact us for assistance with social media marketing for educational institutions that are personalized to your goals.
However, with the release of Snap Ad Manager, all of that could change. The new self-serve ad platform was officially launched in select countries in mid-June and will roll out worldwide in the coming months.
Ad Manager presents a unique opportunity for schools to experiment with Snapchat university marketing: it allows them to create, launch, optimize, and monitor ads from their web browser and makes it much simpler and more accessible to do so than other platforms. Best of all, there is no minimum spend, meaning institutions of all sizes can use the service regardless of their budget.
If you want a new way to freshen up your social media advertising strategy, read more about Snap Ad Manager.
Snap Ad Manager Makes Snapchat University Marketing Accessible
Since Snapchat first began offering advertising services in 2014, schools have been reluctant to invest in the platform. While the app’s ad formats have attracted praise for their creativity and effectiveness, campaigns could only be purchased through Snapchat’s in-house account managers. They were usually developed on a case-by-case basis by an agency or the company’s in-house creative team. This made Snapchat university marketing far too expensive for most schools, including many large universities. The cost barrier was so high that it wasn’t just schools avoiding the platform. Many small businesses wrote off their advertising services because they couldn’t afford it.
Recently, however, Snapchat has been facing stiff competition from other sites like Instagram and Facebook. These sites have introduced Snapchat-style Stories and Direct Messaging features to increase their share of the platform’s audience and offer far more accessible and inexpensive ad options for brands. In response to this mounting competitive pressure, Snapchat made an industry-changing product announcement earlier this year: the new Snap Ad Manager.
With the introduction of Ad Manager, schools of all sizes can now realistically consider using Snapchat social media advertising for recruiting students. The platform allows advertisers to easily purchase, optimize, manage ads, and monitor their campaigns. The service removes the middle man, whether an agency or the Snapchat ad sales team and allows schools to create campaigns on their terms.
Ad Manager is now available in 29 countries, including the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia, and should soon be accessible worldwide. In addition to Ad Manager, Snapchat also launched a Mobile Dashboard, which allows advertisers to view their ads and analytics from a mobile device.
Snapchat University Marketing Uses Unique Ad Formats to Create Opportunities for Engagement with Prospective Students
If you’ve been trying to figure out how to promote a school on social media using ads, you must consider Stapchat’s options. Most of Snapchat’s advertising formats are available on the Ad Manager platform. With several ad formats, you can select which suits your campaign goals and objectives best.
One advertising format on offer is Geofilters. Fantastic for generating awareness and reach, a Geofilter is an image or graphic that Snapchatters can overlay on one of their own images or videos. Geofilters are only enabled when users are inside certain predetermined geographical boundaries, like your school’s campus.
Example: Eastern Kentucky University has its own university Geofilter available on campus.
Current and prospective students and visitors on your campus will use Geofilters to show their friends and family where and what they’re doing. When users make a Snap with your Geofilter, anyone viewing their Story will see your school’s name. Because Snapchat content is known for being authentic and spontaneous, it provides prospective students a credible look at what student life is like at your school from the eyes of real people.
In today’s digital world, prospective students are coming to expect their future school to have fun Geofilters that they can use to show off their university experience. Many avid Snapchatters will even share snapshots of their best Snaps on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, which could expand your reach even more.
For schools looking for more typical social media ads for recruiting students, Snap Ads are a better choice. They can be up to ten seconds long and appear in several places across the Snapchat platform, including Snapchat’s Original Shows, the Our Stories section, within Publisher Stories, and between users’ publicly available stories.
Snap Ads are no laughing matter and have been shown to generate colossal engagement. Two-thirds of Snap Ads are played with audio, which is pretty impressive considering that 85 percent of Facebook ads are watched without sound.
Because ads are integrated seamlessly with other Snapchat content, aiming for a natural, authentic feel is best. This will ensure that the ads don’t appear overly promotional and cause viewers to skip past them.
To inspire users to take action while watching your ad when you use Snapchat University marketing, there are three add-on options you can use:
- App Install: allows you to link to an app installation page in Apple or Google’s stores
- Long-form Video: plays a more extended version of your ad
- Web View: enable the user to open up a mobile webpage from your ad
The long-form Video and Web View add-ons are beneficial for education marketing. Longer videos allow you to showcase your school in more detail, and by using Web View, you can direct users to a landing page with more information and a lead capture form. These add-ons can be quite effective; according to Snapchat, users swipe up for app installs or web views five times more than typical click-through rates on other social media platforms.
Other existing ad formats, such as Sponsored Lenses, still need to be purchased through the Snapchat Sales team, although this may change.
Create Snap Ads In-House Using the New Snap Publisher
If you’re wondering how your school’s marketing department will design Snap Ads, Snapchat has you covered. In the wake of Ad Manager’s release, Snapchat announced the launch of Snap Publisher, an easy-to-use browser-based tool that will help you create engaging and fun ads.
When you use Snap Publisher to create and design an ad, you can import marketing material like promotional videos and images, trim horizontal videos into the standard vertical format, and add motion to still photos. You can also use several pre-created themes for your ads and perform A/B tests.
Snap Publisher compliments Snap Ad Manager, allowing schools with all marketing budgets and staff capabilities to create ads and run them without outside assistance or resources.
Ad Targeting Options Help Schools Reach the Right Potential Recruits with Snapchat University Marketing
If you’re familiar with advertising on Facebook and Instagram, you’re probably already aware of their extensive targeting capabilities. Knowing that it would have to compete with well-established social media advertising platforms, Snapchat included a full suite of targeting options to maximize the impact of advertisers’ campaigns.
You can only target Geofilters by location, meaning every person within the fenced area you have determined can access and use the Geofilter. Snap Ads, however, have many other important targeting options you would expect and want.
Using Snapchat’s data, you can target users based on demographics like gender, age group, and location. You can also target based on the user’s mobile operating system, their wireless carrier, and whether they are connected to Wi-Fi or cellular data.
A more unique targeting option is Snap Lifestyle Categories. You can choose from 60 different interest categories like “Adventure Seekers” or “Do-It-Yourselfers.” These categories could be extremely useful for schools promoting niche programs or courses. For example, targeting the “Console Games” group could be quite fruitful if you’re advertising for a video game design program.
In addition to using Snapchat’s data, you can also take advantage of your school’s own data sets by using the following targeting options:
- Snap Audience Match: Targets users based on your current email lists or mobile advertising identifiers
- Lookalike Audiences: Using your current Snap Audience Match list, target users that have similar characteristics, like age and location, to the contacts on your list
- Snap Engagement Audiences: Targets users who have interacted with your school’s advertising previously, like using a Sponsored Geofilter or swiping up on another ad
Your school’s data can be precious for recruiting students. If you already have comprehensive email lists of quality leads, using them as a reference group for targeting new potential recruits can help ensure that you reach out to the correct type of people.
Pricing Options that Fit Any School’s Social Media Advertising Budget
One of the ways that the introduction of Ad Manager is making advertising more accessible is that Snapchat has eliminated its minimum ad spend requirement. You no longer have to shell out thousands upfront or pay an advertising agency to get your ads up and running. This presents a unique opportunity for schools to tap into Snapchat education advertising.
Snap Ad Manager offers two main pricing structures for Snap Ads: Cost-per-Mille (CPM) and Goal-based Bidding.
Using the CPM price structure, you can bid on ad space based on the price you’re willing to pay to display your ad a thousand times. If you opt for Goal-based Bidding, you bid based on how much you’re ready to pay someone to swipe up on your ad. You’re also charged on a CPM basis for Goal-based Bidding, but Snapchat will push your ads to users it thinks are more likely to click through to your webpage or download your app.
As for Geofilters, prices vary widely because they are priced on a case-by-case basis depending on the Geofence size, date, how long it will run, and location. Some Geofilters have been known to be as inexpensive as $5.
Measuring and Analyzing Your School’s Snapchat University Marketing Campaign’s Success
Snap Ad Manager is a full-service platform. Not only can you purchase and run ads and design them using Snap Publisher, but you can also use Ad Manager to measure their success. You can easily monitor your Snap Ad campaign’s results directly within Ad Manager. Snapchat provides reporting on the following measurements:
- Viewability: How many times and for how long your ad was viewed
- Reach: How many users saw the ad and their demographic information
- Resonance: Uses in-app polling and data from partners to assess what users think of your ad
- Reaction: Using partners determines the impact of ads on driving action like purchases or, in a school’s case, enrollment
- Verification: How many times the ad was served
Ad Manager also provides reporting on Geofilters, which includes metrics on how many times the Geofilter was used and how many times Snaps using your filter were viewed.
In addition to assessing your campaign’s success within the browser-based Ad Manager platform, you can also use the Mobile Dashboard. The dashboard lets you view campaign reporting, change an ad’s status, and view and share creative ads from a mobile device. The following is an example of how campaign reporting looks in the Mobile Dashboard:
Snapchat’s new and utterly self-service tool is turning the possibility of advertising on the platform into a reality for schools of all sizes. While high costs drove them away, educational institutions can now experiment with advertising on the platform at a reasonable price without consulting outside agencies or Snapchat for help.
There’s never been a better time to start using Snapchat social ads for recruiting students. If your school already uses the platform to engage with students organically, Snapchat advertising could be an excellent addition to your current social media strategy. Snap Ads and Geofilters can be an ideal way to reach a younger demographic in a space they are familiar with in an engaging format. Advertising on Snapchat for schools is also unique because ads appear more naturally, nestled among other content. Brands enjoy higher ‘swipe up’ rates (compared to CTRs) and more users viewing ads with sound.
Thanks to Snap Ad Manager and Snap Publisher, you can efficiently execute your advertising campaigns from start to finish.
FAQs To Consider:
How do you target college students on Snapchat?
Most of Snapchat’s advertising formats are available on the Ad Manager platform. With several ad formats, you can select which is best suited to your campaign goals and objectives.
How can Snapchat be used for marketing?
For schools looking for more typical social media ads for recruiting students, Snap Ads are a better choice. They can be up to ten seconds long and appear in several places across the Snapchat platform, including Snapchat’s Original Shows, the Our Stories section, within Publisher Stories, and between users’ publicly available stories.
