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Precision Global Marketing LLC

Managing your pay-per-click (PPC) program shouldn’t feel like wandering through a haunted house.

An effective PPC campaign helps your school engage prospects while giving you an opportunity to try out strategic remarketing, location targeting, and brand awareness.
Here you’ll find:

Why school pay-per-click (PPC) audiences can be unpredictable
How to leverage generation segmentation
How the pandemic has affected PPC strategies for schools
Tips for your school’s PPC campaign
With more than 34,000 private and over 500 virtual schools in the United States serving almost millions of K-12 students, the competition can be fierce. And, perhaps now more than ever, online promotion is key to attracting your target audience and converting them quicker than your competitors.

Let’s take a closer look at important aspects of PPC marketing for elementary, middle, and high schools.

PPC for schools tips
For best results, PPC campaigns for schools should be aimed at top-of-the-funnel searchers who are still in the browsing stage. (Image via Unsplash)

Defining a tricky target audience
Defining clear segments of your target audience is one of the toughest parts of running a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign for schools.

That’s because you want to design ads for people who technically won’t be taking advantage of your services. Unlike PPC campaigns for higher education, PPC tactics for lower-level schools involve marketing to an audience of adult parents.

While the target audience for K-12 schools is mostly parents, rising or current high-schoolers may also be searching for options. These two target audience segments can be drastically different, which may involve creating separate campaigns to reach each one.

Additionally, you should consider parents who have a child in your school already and may be contemplating enrolling another one.

Once you decide to create different ads and landing pages for each target audience segment, it’s also wise to conduct A/B testing to see which elements resonate most with each one.

Pro tip: For best results, PPC campaigns for schools should be aimed at top-of-the-funnel searchers who are still in the browsing stage. As people progress down the funnel, they tend to visit websites directly.

PPC marketing for different generations
Another tricky part about your target audience is that it consists of parents who come from different generations. Paid marketing efforts for millennials and Gen X, for example, can differ substantially.

Catering to millennial parents
When it comes to PPC for schools, millennials are less susceptible to traditional marketing tactics and tend to do a lot of research across different channels.

When they need to learn something new, millennials often prefer YouTube videos to textual content. Additionally, they’re avid Instagram users. That’s why it’s worth experimenting with paid social marketing on Instagram and YouTube. You could even look into partnering with popular, high-quality accounts and channels where millennial parents can get information about your school.

Marketing to Gen X parents
Generation X spends less time on social media than millennials do. While they also appreciate video marketing, their key social media platform is Facebook.

Many of these parents turn to Facebook and Google to find information about schools. To target them, consider designing Google and Facebook Ads campaigns.

Taking the pandemic into account
It seems safe to say that any parent with school-aged children (not to mention teachers and staff members) has had their routine upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing their children’s educational experience in a closer, more direct manner has caused some parents to rethink what they look for in a school.

Some things parents may be looking for in their child’s school moving forward include questions like:

Do they offer remote learning options?
How are they supporting teachers and staff during this unprecedented time?
How are they ensuring children are still getting the best instruction possible?
Are they testing and vaccinating teachers?
Do they follow CDC recommendations?
All of this is fertile ground for PPC ad content. By highlighting how your school has dealt with the pandemic and its consequences, you may be able to boost your school above the competition.

Implementing remarketing
Depending on how soon they start researching, a parent’s buying journey can take months or even years. That’s why remarketing can be such a game-changer.

By taking advantage of remarketing options, you can stay top of mind and make sure not to lose prospects after they leave your website.

As we’ve laid out before, remarketing involves placing your ads in front of potential clients after they interact with your school online. These ads can follow prospects across platforms to keep reminding them about your school’s benefits.

Besides bringing back potential clients, remarketing ads work well for existing parents and students by increasing brand awareness.

school paid search
While PPC campaigns for schools have a high conversation potential, they require a multifaceted approach. (Image via Unsplash)

Tips for effective PPC for schools
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when designing your school’s PPC campaign.

Avoid bidding on branded terms
While bidding on branded terms works well for many businesses, it can be a budget-eater for schools. Many existing parents and students use Google to find and visit the school website to see everything from schedules and updates to your events calendar.

These people will be clicking your ads simply to get to the website. The result: A serious waste of your PPC budget.

Focus on the audience segment with the highest potential
Since your target audience is complex, it’s wise to pick your battles when it comes to designing PPC ads. If you have a tight marketing budget, catering to all segments can be tough to execute.

To achieve the highest marketing ROI, focus on the segment with the highest potential to convert. Not sure who that is? If you don’t have a ton of demographic info when it comes to your ideal client persona, now’s a great time to start gathering that data.

Don’t ignore negative keywords
Negative keywords allow you to save money on your PPC campaign by not showing your ad to those searching for certain disqualifying words or phrases.

For example, if your school doesn’t offer remote learning options, you can specify that keywords related to remote studies shouldn’t trigger your ads. Otherwise, you won’t just waste campaign money, but you could also increase your website’s bounce rate.

Be careful with geo-targeting
While proximity to home is an obvious factor for parents when choosing a school, many won’t object to traveling a few extra miles to give their child the best opportunities possible. Because of this, you don’t want to limit your paid search ads too narrowly when it comes to location.

Start by analyzing your previous enrollment data to identify your best-performing areas. From there, you can conduct A/B testing with different regions to see which one brings the most visitors.

Pro tip: Take advantage of negative location keywords to cut costs.

The takeaway
While PPC campaigns for schools have a high conversation potential, they require a multifaceted approach. A thoughtful marketing strategy is key to keeping your campaign budget low while achieving top-notch results with such a diverse audience.

By sorting out priorities, understanding your audience, and doing sufficient A/B testing, you can create a highly efficient PPC campaign and improve your school’s profitability.

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