A Guide to Powerful Native Ads for Educational Institutions in India

Advertisements are no longer just for selling your products and services. In a world that’s becoming increasingly online, it’s now imperative for educational institutions to establish an online presence, as well. Potential students (and the parents funding their education) are now searching for schools and universities that have a presence in cyberspace.

As stable connections and internet-capable devices become cheaper, the percentage of the Indian market looking for educational solutions online will only increase. Thus, the demand for education advertising will continue to grow over time. So, how can you dominate the competition and reach the most suited students for your educational services online? That’s what we’ll discuss in the rest of this article.

Introduction to Native Advertising for Educational Institutions

There are many ways to promote a product or service, but we’re confident that native advertising is the most suitable method for launching education advertising campaigns. There is a way to build awareness within the target market beyond overt promotion. This involves native advertising.

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is a way of promoting a brand, business or product in a more covert manner. For example, let’s talk about school advertisement ideas. Instead of just telling your audience about a new course offer, focus on why they should enroll.

Educational institutions have a reputation for being cold and unapproachable. With native ads, you can break the ice with your audience. This way, they are more likely to listen to you, which can vastly improve the outcome of your education marketing campaigns.

The Importance of Native Ads in the Indian Educational Landscape

Today, native ads are more relevant than ever. With your target audience being bombarded by messages all the time, how will you stand out?

Current Advertising Trends in Indian Education

Educational institutions have long relied on traditional media to advertise their courses and other offers. They have been successful in creating brand awareness, but how well they do in converting can’t be measured.

Like almost all other industries, the education sector shifted its advertising efforts online. Today, institutions are focusing on the many ways to advertise on the internet, including paid search and social media. Native advertising has come into play as an innovative way to promote to the audience without disturbing their browsing experience.

Benefits of Native Ads for Educational Institutions

When done right, implementing native education ad campaigns boasts a number of benefits.

• Enhanced visibility and reach among target students and parents: On platforms where ads are sharable, great native advertising content may be redistributed, which helps improve organic reach. Using native advertising can help make sure that your audience actually pays attention to your ad.
• Higher engagement and enrollment rates: Audiences are also more likely to react to the ad content. This may be in the form of feedback, which can help you improve the brand messaging, or interaction with the ad itself (assuming that this option is available, of course!). With more people engaged with the ad, you’ll have a larger pool of potential leads and students that you can still convert further down the funnel.
• Seamless integration with educational content: Users already engaging with educational content are more likely to react positively to ads that don’t break their browsing experience. Think of education industry examples. If someone is reading about cabinets, do you think even the best educational ad will be noticed?

Using native ads to promote offers in the education sector can vastly improve the outcome for the same budget. The effects are also longer lasting as it helps build the institution’s brand.

Implementing Successful Native Ads for the Education Sector

Great educational advertisement examples are created by understanding the principles of marketing and advertising. We’ll show you a case study later on, but for now, focus on these general steps to deliver results.

Understand Your Target Audience

Just because they’re students doesn’t mean you can treat your audience like a monolith. That’s why college marketing campaigns can (and should) look vastly different. In fulfilling this part of the implementation, try to answer the following questions:

• Which student demographics am I targeting?
• Which specific needs do they have that can be addressed by the solution I’m providing?
• What is the biggest issue that you believe you can communicate through advertising education content?

If you can sufficiently answer these questions, you’re on your way to getting your desired outcome for the campaign.

The Power of Market Segmentation

Even when you have a target audience in mind, it can be useful to further dissect it into smaller segments. By doing so, you’ll be able to create educational marketing campaigns that will truly resonate with your desired market.

So, here’s an idea: why not customise the ads to match the aspirations and expectations of both students and parents? People seek education for different reasons and can have varying requirements that need to be met. By recognising these differences through your education ads, you’ll be more likely to convert.

Craft Impactful Content

It’s one thing to know what you want to say and who you should say it to. However, if you don’t deliver the message correctly, you may not see the results that you’re looking for. So, let’s get into more detail about how you can create impactful content for your target audiences.

Tips for Creating Compelling and Informative Native Ad Content

The purpose of native ads is to blend in to stand out. Therefore, the approach will be a little different than that of traditional online advertising methods. However, some of the general principles of advertising will still be relevant here to some degree.

Let’s say that you’ve found good products to advertise for school projects. These are a few tips that you may want to bear in mind.

• Focus on creating value: Yes, this is the rule, even if you’re going with a display ad. For example, instead of leading with a discount, why not highlight a feature that your audience will love? For example, a university ad campaign can focus on the fact that it’s 100% online instead of pushing a time-bound discount.
• Use a strong headline: This is the first (and probably the only) thing that most users will read. So, make it count! If they were only to look at the educational ad for two seconds, what do you want them to take away from the experience?
• Make sure that the media used complements the text: An image or a video is great for getting users to stop and take a look. But you also have to think about how it relates to your advertisement and message. The last thing that you want to happen is for your creative decision to confuse your audience.

If you’ve been creating content for a while, you’ll already have some sense of what will or will not work. However, data is more important than intuition. So, create many ad variations and see which versions yield the best outcome.

The Role of Storytelling in Native Educational Campaigns

Storytelling helps convey complex ideas in simpler and more relatable forms. So, how can you incorporate storytelling into your campaign? Here are a few ways:

• Introduce a success story that they can aspire to;
• Show the journey from problem to solution and results;
• Create a sense of belonging that will allow the ad viewer to see that the issue is a shared experience.

By trying to implement these points, you’ll be able to relate to your audience on an emotional level. And as you know, emotion buys, but logic justifies!

Selecting the Right Platforms for a Native Educational Advertisement

Which platforms should you use for your native campaign? It depends! To decide, refer to the table below, where we have summarized the pros and cons of each top option:

Case Study: MGID’s Success with Native Ads in Education

Are you curious about what successful educational campaign examples look like? The way one arrives at the intended goal is different for each client. That’s why it’s important that education campaigns are aligned with the intended outcome and highlight the strengths of the offer or brand.

What we’re about to discuss is just one of the many routes that an education marketing campaign can take.

Background

MGID is a global platform that specializes in native advertising. We connect advertisers with publishers around the world to help get the right eyes on every piece of ad content that we run. (Yes, this includes educational ads!) We mainly achieve this through programmatic advertising: through AI and our sophisticated system, we match the ad based not on the audience but on the context. For example, an ad about shoes may be displayed on a text about how to run your first 10k. With this strategy, you can expose the ad to a high-intent audience that is ready to love your brand, click the ad and take action.

A large company in the Indian EdTech industry came to us with a challenge. They had launched a master’s degree programme for working professionals. They wanted to generate leads to attract the first batch of students.

Strategy and Execution

Through our series of education advertisements on top-notch publisher sites, we made it happen. Essentially, we employed a three-step approach.

Information Gathering

Like any strategy, the first part was dedicated to gathering information. Learning about the geographic location, preferred device and other relevant details helped us determine which audiences to target. At this point, we also identified publishers that we believed were most suited to educational advertising. Since credibility is important, we went with high-authority sites with large followings in our targeted locations.

Creative Development and Campaign Launch

We helped our client build creatives that resonated well with the target audience. The message was simple: you can get a master’s degree while still holding down a full-time job. We created various versions of this education advertisement, allowing our team to draw more insights and generate more information for the next step.

Since the goal was to collect leads, clicking the ad led to a landing page where the user had to fill out a form with their details. After that, they could download the prospectus.

Targeting and Campaign Refinement

Based on the information gathered from the first two steps, we further refined our campaign. To improve the clickthrough and engagement rates for this educational campaign, we prioritised budget allocation to the target audiences that were delivering the highest clickthrough rates. The same principle was applied to determining which ad would be displayed. Through our series of monitoring and evaluation, our team exceeded the target KPIs we set at the beginning of the campaign.

Results and Key Insights

By creating an educational ad and campaign, we achieved the following for our client.

• 35% decrease in the cost per lead: We were able to drive down the CPL from 2,300 INR to just 1,500 INR. Assuming the same conversion rates across the board, this means considerable growth in the profit per sale.
• 16,500 clicks per month: Even though the master’s programme is very new, it still generated a lot of interest. This is a combination of having an ad that resonates with the most interested target market and using the most suitable platform.
• 250+ leads per month: The pool of leads doesn’t just help this campaign. Even if these prospects don’t end up applying for this specific course, we’ve already captured their interest. This means that it will be easier for our client to sell them other offers.

These results just go to show that there is room for digital marketing for the education industry. We achieved these results by using the advantages specific to native advertising, such as getting their attention on a subject they’re already engaged in.

However, a lot depends on good old research and expertise! Having a capable team like MGID can yield great results for you in the education sector.

The Future of Native Advertising in Indian Education

All kinds of advertising can be seen in digital marketing in the education industry. But just like the rest of the world, the Indian market can’t be satisfied with the existing relationships that businesses (in the education sector or otherwise) have. Outright promotion will always be a part of digital advertising for schools. However, we’re confident that native advertising will continue to creep in and become one of the key methods used in the industry.

Emerging Trends

Advanced technologies are being used to further personalize advertisements, which improves the performance of educational advertising. These include:

• Artificial intelligence: Using AI, we can analyze vast amounts of real-time data and create hyper-personalized ads based on this. It has the potential to vastly improve conversion rates.
• Immersive content: The advertisements and forms of content that the users can interact with are expected to become even more prevalent. Native ads examples for students will have a lot more quizzes, forms and even games!
• Greater localisation: India has a rich local diversity, and the many ways that this diversity manifests itself is through language. We’re seeing that more advertisement content is being created for regional audiences, allowing the education industry to better connect to these markets.

Long-Term Benefits

Seamless ads help create a meaningful experience for the audience, whether we’re talking about beauty or education marketing campaigns. These communications make it easier for users to connect with your product because native ads become part of the experience instead of just disrupting it.

Even assuming the same conversion rates in other parts of the campaign, you can expect a greater number of enrolled students. However, the impact of your university marketing campaigns doesn’t end once you’ve stopped running ads. The impression that your brand made will remain. And with a stronger brand recall, it may be easier for you to capture leads in the future.

Preparing for the Future

To maintain relevance online, educational institutions will do well to implement future-forward strategies, including:

• Making data the heart of the campaign: In an ever-changing landscape, data is your map in navigating your way to success. Instead of basing decisions on trends, look at what the data tells you.
• Go mobile: Mobile devices are now being used for practically everything, including looking up educational institutions. Today, the best education advertising campaigns are present on mobile platforms.
• Implement a multi-platform approach: By doing so, you’ll be able to follow your target audience as they browse the web. This will help keep your offer at the top of their minds.

Need Advertisement Ideas for School Students? Start with the Data and Build a Connection

Making native advertising work for the education industry — or any industry, for that matter — entails creating the perfect storm for success. Gather the necessary data to create ads that resonate with your audience wherever they hang out. Most importantly, you must become a part of their browsing experience instead of interrupting it. This way, you can enjoy the benefits associated with native ads, like better enrollment rates and brand recall.

So, if you haven’t yet, consider how you can insert native advertisements into your existing campaign. Use these to expand the influence of your educational institution and the potential of your brand to transform lives.