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Maximize Your Media Buy (continued from previous page) Newspapers: Print and Online Options With more multimedia content finding its way online, consider some of the alternative options your daily or weekly newspaper provides. Does the paper have an online version? Can you combine digital and print ads in your package? Ask the newspaper to provide statistics for its online readers to determine if there is a target market better suited for online advertising than traditional methods. Do you have a specialized program you need to promote? A targeted ad in a special section might prove more beneficial than a generic ad on the newspaper’s home page. For example, place ads for a performing arts program in the arts and entertainment section of the newspaper’s website. Looking to promote your athletics programs and increase attendance at events? Place your ad in the online sports section. If you’re seeking to promote registration or increase brand awareness, your best option is to place banner or poster-sized digital ads in the top stories or breaking news sections. These are the sections the newspaper promotes through its social media channels, daily emails and home page. Outdoor Advertising Outdoor and transit advertising are great for quick messages targeted at a broad audience. Think about your service area. Are there highvolume traffic zones? Could you reach a larger number of commuters with an outdoor or transit ad versus a print ad that runs once or twice a week? Companies that operate outdoor media can provide helpful statistics, including average vehicle impressions per month. For an outdoor ad, consider creating a custom URL or splash page for a campaign to attract new visitors to your site. This will help measure the effectiveness of the ad while enlightening your community about a new degree program, event or athletics. TV or Cable Broadcast television advertising can be costly in large markets. However, if you live in an area 10
with a regional affiliate, the cost for commercials is considerably less. Most local television stations also have a creative services team that can assist with production. If broadcast TV isn’t an affordable option, you should strongly consider cable. With hundreds of cable networks, each with a defined audience, your message can be specifically targeted on networks that provide programming content that matches your college’s key programs or has viewers that reflect the demographic profile of your prospects. An added advantage of cable is the Internet service that most companies provide. Consider packaging television commercials with linked online ads on an email login page, for example. Online Advertising Online advertising offers the advantages of customization, engagement, immediacy, interactivity and tracking capability. The most common formats are banner advertisements and keyword advertising. Online tools allow you to fine-tune the reach of your advertising by selecting demographics, geographic location and interests of your audience. Mobile formats offer the same alternatives. Check with your local newspaper and radio stations to see if they provide an option to advertise on their smart phone apps or mobile sites. When investing in online advertising, consider how you want to pay. Do you want to pay for impression-based advertising or do you want to pay per click? Impression advertising is a good format for raising the awareness for your school’s brand, specialized programs, events and registration. This is similar to outdoor/transit where vehicle impressions are measured based on the location of a billboard. You pay for the number of impressions you can afford and are not charged if the user clicks through. A possible disadvantage to impression-based advertising is site traffic. If it is a popular website, your impressions (25,000, 50,000 or more per week) may be used up before your campaign’s end date. An alternative is pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-for-performance online advertising. This is a better option for a sustained campaign, especially if you’re testing different messages or running multiple campaigns at once. For this option, you pay for each user who clicks on your ad. Don’t panic, you’re not going to drain your budget within the first day. With PPC, you can set a daily budget based on a prescribed bid price. For example, in August, you want to run a last-push campaign for three weeks using PPC ads on Facebook. Your budget is $500. Playing it conservatively, you set a daily budget of $20 and bid an ad cost of $1. This allows for 20 Facebook users to click through before you max out your budget each day. Each day, you can monitor the traffic. If you’re maxing out within the first