1. How You Can Use
Online advertising
To Attract Parents To Your
Academic Institution
Mark Grayson
Account Manager for Education
The Digital Marketing Bureau

2. Introduction
This white paper aims to help you understand how
you can benefit from using online advertising to
attract potential parents to your academic institution;
whetherthis be to enquire directlyorto come andvisit
on a scheduled open day. The cost of private schools
- it’s now a staggering £12,345 on average. The most
expensive schools cost well over £30,000. Therefore,
attracting the right parents is a fundamental concern.
It will discuss platforms like Google (receives 3 billion
queries per day), Facebook (1.4 billion active users)
and other more niche networks where you can find
the right audience and serve the adverts exactly when
they are looking. It will discuss best practices and how
you can benefit from including online advertising into
your marketing spend.
My name is Mark Grayson, I am anAccount Manager at
The Digital Marketing Bureau and I run the education
side of the business. Having been in the Education sector
both private and state for13years. Myvarious roles have
included, Head of Department for IT and Computing,
Network Manager including running School websites
with implementing Digital Strategy and MIS Manager
hopefully I understand the challenges you face and
hence do feel free to call me with any questions about
it at any time.
The Problem
Offline advertising is often frustrating. You and your
marketing team spend hours designing and resizing
advertsfordifferentpublicationsandyetmostresearchis
nowdoneonline-over61%ofpeoplecarryoutresearch
online (1). Equally, once it has gone to publication,
can you truly understand how many people actually
stopped and looked at your advert? Do you know how
many people called you up or visited your website to
book an appointment?
Isthereanywonderthatnowmostbusinessesarepushing
a considerable amount of their advertising online? In
fact, Internet Advertising is expecting to overtake TV
spend by 2018 and nearly 2 out of 3 marketeers have
moved more than 30% of their marketing spend from
traditional to digital media (2).
Aside from knowing distribution figures you will never
knowhowmanypeoplewillhaveseenyouradvertwhich,
as marketing people we always need to know. How do
you attribute your marketing spend when you don’t
know where people are actually seeing your advert?
A Solution
Moving a proportion of your marketing spend online is
one way to tackle this problem. Finally being in control
of what is being shown to potential parents, when and
ultimately where, is key to showing your school above
all others in your area.
Knowing who your audience is and where they search
for information is key to success in online marketing.
It goes without saying that two of the most dominant
players in terms of both proven advertising success
as well as audience are Google and Facebook. We will
cover both and look at how these platforms perform
and some top tips for you to implement.
Marketing Using Google
Google holds a monopolyamongst search engines –88%
of all searches are carried out through Google (3).There
is no doubt you have a website and it is most likely a lot
of people will find you through Google.
Equally, if you have Google Analytics set up (a clever
way foryou to look at yourwebsite traffic and see what
people are viewing) you will find most people will find
you for terms like your school name.
“Offline advertising is
often frustrating. You
spend hours designing and
resizing adverts for different
publications and yet most
research is now done online
- over 61% of people carry
out research online.”
1
The amount of
marketing spend
most marketeers
are moving from
traditional to
digital media.

3. However, people search in varied ways. They may not
know of your school and will type in something far
more generic like “Private Schools in Surrey” or“Schools
near Dorking” for schools they would like to visit and
ultimately send their children too. Google Adwords is
one way you can increase your chance of appearing in
the search engines for more varied keywords.
Google Adwords goes by many names – some call it
Pay Per Click advertising or just PPC.
Some call it CPC or Cost Per Click and all this is because
you serve an advert and you only pay when someone
clicks on your advert to visit your website.
Let us explain further. in the screenshot you will see a
search forthe term “Private Schools in Berkshire”.Those
at the top and right hand side – as indicated – are the
Sponsored Ads (CPC, PPC etc); as you can see there are
a few schools being shown here. Only when I clicked
on one of their adverts would I be charged for doing so.
How can i advertise using google
There is a primary Adwords tactic. This is to pool together all likely search terms that people would type in to
find schools in your area. These may be termed very differently e.g. Public Schools, Private Schools, by towns
or by the county. Either way, you have to exhaust every possibility.
Once this is done you have to decide on
the advert text you are going to use. You
are restricted by the number of characters
you can use and it must be relevant to the
keyword it is going to be seen with. This is
all displayed in the graphic to the left.
There is a particular skill involved in setting
up these campaigns as the better and more
relevant the adverts are, generally the less
you pay.
There are other ways to use Google to advertise and uses a technique called Retargeting which is discussed a
little later.
2

4. 3
Five Top Tips
For using Google Adwords:

5. Marketing using Facebook
For manyyears people weren’t sure on marketing with
Facebook, even despite its 1.3 billion audience. How-
ever, when the statistic came out a few years ago that
the most popular and active usergroup were 45-49yr
old women a few eyebrows were raised.
EssentiallyFacebook is no longerayoung persons social
network, it is for the parents and here is your opportu-
nity to advertise to them.
Facebook adverts are shown in someone’s timeline
(where their updates are displayed from friends) as
well as on a sidebar on the right hand side). You can
see from the image here how adverts look.
How can you target people using Facebook?
The main advertising spend is to attract people who
are perhaps not aware of your school. This is done by
Demographic Targeting .
This means understanding who your audience is and
filtering your advert to be shown only that audience i.e.
you can be very specific to age demographics, marital
status and even geographical location.We have seen this
work very well for schools attracting an international
audience showing them very contextual adverts for
their country of origin.
It is a cleverwayof attracting newparents toyourschool
based on demographics and we find visuals hold a very
important part of setting upyouradverts.There are even
more specificways of advertisingwhich are included in
our retargeting section below.
Retargeting
Clients will visit your website from any number mar-
keting sources but you can “retarget” them using paid
advertising if theydo not carryoutwhatyou hoped they
would do i.e. download a brochure or book to come
on an open day.
Obviouslytheymaynot have liked the look of the school
but you do want to rule out the other alternative first!
Facebook and Google nowallowretargeting in a couple
ofways and allowyou to target specific adverts at people
who have been to your website previously. Facebook
have led the way here and it was only recently that
Google followed suit seeing howsuccessful it had been.
Lets look at two ways you can work with retargeting.
Placing “pixels” on your website
A pixel is a small line of code that is provided to you
by Facebook. It is a simple copy and paste job for your
developer but, from the moment it is installed, it starts
building a picture of the people that visit your website.
This is done by applying a “cookie” to that persons
computer (similar to attaching a receiver to a person
and then tracking their movements) and then, you can
serve them with adverts when you feel it is the right
time. Previously this has been abused and people have
been silly with how they serve the adverts but people
are nowworking out the best methods of doing it. Lets
explain that further.
With Google retargeting your adverts can show on
many millions of websites around the world that al-
low adverts to be shown on them. This can be split
geographically and by topic – meaning you only show
adverts on sites that you feel are a natural fit for your
advert – after all these people have visited your site
previously.
With Facebook retargeting you get a little bit more
control and it is all held within the Facebook platform.
You can start to build different audiences all from that
one pixel. For example you might want to build an au-
dience of all visitors to your site. Alternatively you may
want to build an audience that only looks at certain
pages but not at others – Those that have looked at an
open day but not booked a place for example.
4
Based on the audience you can then show them ad-
verts in their Facebook timeline which are relevant to
the audience you have grouped them into.
Of all searches online are
carried out through Google.

6. Using existing database lists on your website
This is another form of retargeting and works with
your existing list of e-mails – assuming you have kept
a record of parents who are interested in visiting your
school (or indeed your existing parents should you
want to share some events with them like school plays
etc).
Both Google and Facebook allow you to import your
data lists into their systems and you can then serve
adverts to them. This is because people’s e-mails of-
ten match the details they use to log in to the social
networks and thus creating a bespoke audience for
adverts.
What to do next and how could we help.
There are now several options open to you. Firstly you
could take all this in house. There are some excellent
online and offline training courses on each compo-
nent part of what has been discussed here. Most will
be one or two day training courses and some may do
courses that spread over a few weeks with little bits of
bite sized information for each module.
Alternatively, you could look at a local agency to help
you carry out these tasks and do the hard work foryou.
Generally there would be three core stages to do this.
Firstly there would be the initial set up; mixing work
involving keyword research with work involving web
developers for the retargeting. We can take care of all
that.
Secondly, there would be the campaign set up and
getting it all started.We usually recommend a 6 month
initial campaign – this gives it long enough to get it all
moving and to let the campaign bed in a little bit.
Over that 6mth period the third task takes place, that
of management. Campaign management means the
agency constantly tinkers with your campaign and en-
sures it is being successful. Over that time we should
start seeing some really promising results and we can
start to look at the next 6 months based on the results
we are seeing.
Here at The Digital Marketing Bureau my role is to
support the Education Sector. Having been in the
Education sector both private and state for 13 years.
My various roles have included, Head of Department
for IT and Computing, Network Manager including
running School websites with implementing Digital
Strategy and MIS Manager hopefully I understand the
challenges you face. Call me to chat any questions you
may have.
Thank you.
5
Of people carry out
research online.

7. References
(1) http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
(2) http://www.marketingcharts.com/uncategorized/marketers-
shifting-ad-spendmix-to-digital-media-22369/
(3) http://www.techworld.com/blog/war-on-error/google-
still-totally-dominates-uk-search-traffic-but-does-this-
matter-3608494/

8. The Digital Marketing Bureau
www.thedigitalmarketingbureau.com
mark@thedigitalmarketingbureau.com
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mrkgrayson
https://twitter.com/MrkGrayson
Tel: 07971 866281