High School and college students are crucial audiences to engage. While these students might not be in your target demographic or need your services now, as they age they may become future clients. It is important to speak with them now so that they can start building a relationship with your center. As they get ready to go back to school, you can be preparing your marketing strategies to engage them and let them know who you are and that you are there for them; for example they can visit https://www.sofi.com/refinance-student-loan/ for student loan options. There are a variety of platforms and advertising options your center can use to connect with students in your area. Together these platforms can strengthen your reach and impact lives.
Effective Social Media Platforms
Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms with 2.7 billion users.
- 35 percent of those users are under the age of 25
- People in rural areas prefer Facebook, with 58 percent of rural residents using Facebook compared to 25 percent using Instagram and 18 percent using Snapchat
- Over 50 percent of American teens use Facebook
Students are still using Facebook and it continues to be a relevant platform for centers to advertise. Your presence on Facebook adds credibility to your center and builds awareness so they know where to go when they are deciding to make an appointment.
Awareness Campaigns
Awareness campaigns are a great way to reach students before they are in need of your services. They let students in your area know about you and keep you top-of-mind if they or someone they know finds themselves in need. While these campaigns do not feature a call-to-action button, users can still click and be directed to your website or page. The main objective is to get your name in front of users.
Web Traffic Campaigns
Web traffic campaigns draw students to your website to learn more about your center and it gives them the opportunity to contact you or make an appointment. The purpose of these campaigns is to direct users to your website and drive more traffic. Typically these ads feature call-to-action buttons that lead them to a page within your website.
Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns serve new advertisements to those who have already searched for information about your center or have visited your website.
When someone visits your website or clicks on one of your ads, those users are pixeled. This means that you can target those individuals specifically with advertisements. For example, you can retarget those who have visited your “Students” page on your website with student-focused advertising on Facebook.
Facebook advertising is just one component of your overall strategy. It is a great tool to support your center’s goals and can be changed on a monthly basis based on their performance and to better suit your center’s needs.
Instagram’s popularity among high school and college-aged users make it an ideal medium to reach students.
- Instagram has over 1 billion active monthly users
- Over 500 million people use Instagram every day
- 64 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 34
- Users under 25 spend about half an hour on the platform every day
Instagram stories are becoming more popular and are nearly as important as posts. Stories are posts that appear in the top banner and are only available for 24 hours unless saved to the account’s highlights. We have found centers have success posting stories about their services or similar subjects, then saving the stories to the highlights section below the bio on their profile. This allows students visiting your profile to see what you offer without having to leave the app.
Facebook owns Instagram so a lot of the same targeting options for advertising on Facebook are available on Instagram. This allows you to use both platforms to target students in your area in a way that is cohesive and better engages them.
YouTube
YouTube has a wide reach because 96 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds use YouTube- making them the age group with the highest percentage of users. For this age group, videos are the preferred way they receive information.
This is the greatest platform of video content, that is why you need to stand out from the crowd, creating a 3D explainer video will catch the attention of your audience and bring more visitors. And to bring your product to life virtually with photoreal 3D design, you may want to check out this Fuse Animation webpage here for more info!
Students turn to YouTube to learn.
- 86 percent of users reported that YouTube was important to them when “figuring out how to do things they haven’t done before”
- 55 percent of users reported that YouTube was important to them when making a decision about a purchase or service
Whether it be researching pregnancy symptoms or learning about abortion procedures, students are searching YouTube for information.
Owned by Google, video advertisements can be run on YouTube to reach students in your area before and during posted videos they are watching, depending on the length of the video, whether or not the video is monetized (meaning the creator is making money from the ads displayed on the video), and what ad settings the content creator chose when posting.
YouTube advertising should be brief, professionally-made video advertisements. If advertisements are more than a couple of seconds, YouTube gives the viewer the option to skip the advertisement. This is why it is important to catch the viewer’s attention in the first seconds of the ad.
Dating Apps
Facebook added Tinder to the Facebook Audience Network in 2017 and we have found it to be one of the best dating app options for center advertising. Compared to other dating apps, Tinder is known for casual dating and hooking up. This allows you to target women where they are meeting their partners. 40 percent of US college students say: “Tinder is for hookups, and Bumble is for dating.” Tinder also does not have any current competition from Planned Parenthood and allows you to have full control over the conversation with those users.
Tinder is a popular dating app among college-aged students.
- 10 million daily active users
- 35 percent of users are between the ages of 18-24
- 25 percent are 25-34
Tinder presents users with short profile previews of other users in their area and the users can “swipe” to indicate if they are interested or not. Swiping the profile to the right means that they are interested in matching with this person and swiping left means they are not interested.
Tinder is an effective marketing tool for awareness marketing and promoting certain services. Because of the hookup and casual dating culture, Tinder is a great place to promote pregnancy testing and STD information/testing, letting them know that your center offers free and confidential services. Below is a preview of an effective Tinder advertisement that a center could run. Your center’s name, graphic, text, and button show up within the app and this allows users to engage with you.
We see important pieces to these advertisements. They are most successful if they reference topics that are relevant to young people or promote actions for users do, like swiping or matching. For example the action: “Swipe right on Free STD Testing,” would prompt more women to engage with your advertisement. The main goal of advertising on Tinder is to engage them before they need your services as you start building that relationship with them.
Snapchat
Snapchat is extremely popular among students.
- Snapchat has 190 million active daily users
- It reaches 90% of all people aged 13 to 24
- High school students check Snapchat up to 100 times a day
Students use Snapchat as a main channel of communication as well as for posting stories. Their posts, visible to all their friends, expire after 24 hours.
We have seen a lot of success with centers posting advertisements on Snapchat. Advertising on Snapchat allows you to make advertisements that play between their friends’ posts or on community stories. Ads look similar to what a friend’s story would look like.Videos advertisements can be taken on a cellphone, either featuring people or taken on a front-facing camera are effective in engaging users without disrupting their in-app experience.
Website Content
“Students” Page
Adding a students page to your website can further engage them by letting them know what services you offer such as student loans (get the details over here). On this page, you should address concerns that are specific to students. Things like telling their parents, the confidentiality of their appointment, age-restrictions for services, or being able to continue in school can all be helpful. You should mention the services you offer that are available to them and can even link to the pages on your website. We recommend including directions from all the local schools in your area to your center so the students can see how far away the center is from their school.
Having a student’s page helps boost SEO for your website The student-focused content will allow the search engine to direct people to your website when they are searching for student-specific resources. You should be using this page in other strategies, like retargeting, to send student-specific ads to those who visited the page. Those ads should then send them to student-related content.
Paid Search Ads
Google Ads is a platform that allows you to place advertisements on the results pages of people searching on Google. Paid search ads allow you to come up first when students are searching for your selected keywords like, “pregnancy testing” or “abortion pill near me.” They will see a result for your center closer to the top of the first page, above organic search results. Having your ads show in front of an abortion-minded woman allows you to reach them when they are searching for you and when they need you most.
In June, Google began requiring any organization that wanted to target abortion-related keywords to go through a certification process, but Google Ads remains an effective platform for centers that have certified. Our centers that have certified have not seen a drop in the amount of abortion-minded women making appointments as a result of their campaigns on Google Ads.
Geofencing
Geofencing allows you to set virtual boundaries around physical places to serve display advertisements to people in those areas – using the Google Display Network. To reach students, you can run geofencing advertisements that target schools, malls – and even your local abortion clinic. You can pinpoint targeting for potential clients and raise awareness for your center. As they click on your advertisement, it sends them to a landing page that prompts them to fill out a form for an appointment. This makes it easy and streamlined for those who are interested in contacting your center.
The more awareness your center has, the more students are likely to seek your help when they need it most. These strategies will help you reach students whether they need your services now, or will need them in the future.
There are a lot of different tactics mentioned in this guide, but we can help you prioritize the ones that will work best for you by creating a custom strategy based on your center’s specific needs. If you are interested in learning more about how your center can better reach students during this back-to-school season, contact Choose Life Marketing today!
Give us a call at 573-445-9295, email us at info@chooselifemarketing.com, or visit our website at www.chooselifemarketing.com to learn more about how we can help!
