If your school is in the unfortunate position of being under-subscribed then you will understand the negative effect this can have. Reduced staffing, budgets cut and limited resources can affect morale and possibly your school’s performance.

If your school budgets have been cut then investing in a costly marketing campaign to try and target prospective parents to your school will have been ruled out. You may have tried and tested the traditional methods of mail dropping leaflets to your local area or putting a banner outside of your school but to no avail.

Have you thought of using Facebook Ads for your school?

Now we don’t work for Facebook nor endorse them in any way shape or form however, what we do know is that there are 2.41billion monthly active users (MAU) as of June 2019 (Source: Facebook 24/7/19). What’s more, the data that Facebook collects allows targeting of any ads to be focused entirely on your target market.

So, for example, you may be a small school in York who is looking at targeting parents in a specific post code area that is within your catchment or you may be looking at acquiring pupils from further afield. Facebook targeted ads allows you to filter your ads ensuring those ONLY in those areas may see your ad. 

In addition to that, you can also target your market by gender, age, interests and may other demographics.

There are a number of ways to set up an Ad but if you are new to this, you may want to start with the most simplest set up which we have created 5 simple steps for below.

5 simple steps to set up your Facebook Ad

Step 1.            Open your School Page and Select Promote

You will need to have a Business Page set up for your school to run your ad. If you haven’t set one up yet you need to do this first.

Select the Promote button from within your School Page on Facebook. You can find the blue PROMOTE button on the left hand side of the page.

Step 2.            Choose Your Objective

You need to be clear with your ad what you want to achieve. If you are looking to get people to visit your school website (in particular your admissions page) then you would select ‘get more website visitors’. If you want to get people’s contact information to enable you to proactively market your school to then select ‘Get more leads’. 

If you have an objective of increasing your school admissions and have an Open Day that you are wanting people to attend then you can select ‘Boost an event’. You will need to have already have an event set up in order to Boost the event so make sure if your objective is to get people to attend your school Open day that you have already set up the event.

Step 3.            Add Your images, text and call to action

Now create your ad with a suitable image. So, for example, if you are boosting your Open Day event you may want to add an image of your Nursery play area or an image of your school.

Add your text and a call to action. Your call to action will be linked to the promotion you selected in the previous step. So, if the promotion is to boost your event then the action will be ‘Interested’. If it is to get website visitors then it will be ‘Visit’ or ‘Learn more’

Step 4.            Create Your Audience

This is where you can target your ideal market. For example, I want to target parents who have pre-school children (ideal for my open event to increase my school admissions) within a 14 mile radius of Guisborough, which would give me a potential market reach of 70,000 people.

Step 5.            Set up Your Budget

You can set up budgets for your ads and this will ensure that you never go above this budget. You can select the duration for your ad and also the daily budget per day.

Once your ad is set to run you can monitor your success and make sure you follow up on all of those interactions! 

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