We also began searching for ad placements that would impress or surprise our current families. Among these options, we tried podcasts, radio, TikTok, sponsored content with Kveller and commercials on Hulu. Both platforms were surprising and impressive, leading our students and families to talk and “buzz” about the placements. I’ll never forget the day a student came up to me on campus with a curious expression on their face and excitedly asked: “Mr. Morrow? Did I see a Milken commercial on TV last night?” Reactions like this are the kindling that ignites word of mouth. Per Jonah Berger, in this case, we provided a story, in an unexpected manner, that provided an emotional reaction, touching 3/6 of his tenets of sparking word of mouth.
Before We Go Any Further
We’ve avoided being too technical until this point. To get the maximum benefit from reading this, please be patient and consider watching the videos linked throughout the article. If at any point you feel overwhelmed, I want you to know that everything here is easy to teach yourself and is much simpler than it seems at first glance.
How to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign
How to Buy Ads on Hulu
Strategy #3: Broaden the enrollment funnel by targeting users connected to current and prospective families through social media.
Word of Mouth is a proximity-based tactic. It involves utilizing social or geographic proximity to trigger conversations between individuals. Paid advertising on social media mimics the proximity in traditional social spheres, with the same benefits as Word of Mouth.
To do that, one must first engage the audience through organic content. Once a user engages with your content, they become targetable through ad platforms. At Milken, we create ads to target this audience with two purposes:
- We want this core audience to see what we’re posting on social media, understand it and discuss it with their friends.
- Every time a user interacts with our content through likes, shares and comments, it is more likely to be seen by people they are connected to, mimicking in-person WOM on social media.
Strategy #4: Utilize “lookalike audiences” to broaden the funnel.
A Facebook/Meta Lookalike Audience lets you find new people similar to your current customers or followers. You provide Facebook with a group of people, like your existing customers or website visitors. Facebook takes their common traits, like age, interests or behavior, finds new people who share these similarities and shows your ads to them, helping you reach more potential customers likely to be interested in what you offer. (More information on lookalike audiences can be found here: Facebook Ads Lookalike Audience Tutorial 2024.)
At Milken, we utilize multiple lookalike audiences throughout our advertising strategy. Since Meta limited the targeting options available to organizations, lookalike audiences are an increasingly valuable tool for finding Jewish families for our schools. While we can no longer target the followers of feeder schools, we can use our data and allow Facebook to build audiences similar to ours. Throughout the admission season, we use the following lookalike audiences:
- Milken Social Audience Lookalike: We create a lookalike audience based on the users we currently engage within social media.
- Admission Pipeline: We utilize our data to create a lookalike audience based on the people who have expressed interest through an inquiry or admission event attendance.
- Milken Applied: We use the data of people who have applied to our school.
Targeting lookalike audiences is helpful, but the parameters of the audiences could be more optimized. To ensure efficiency in our spending, we limit our lookalike audiences to specific geographic locations and use demographic information like “parents of tweens” or “parents of teens” to cultivate the most relevant audience.
Strategy #5: Utilize Google Search and YouTube to capture “in-market” families.
Until now, our advertising discussion has focused on mimicking or enhancing WOM. I will add that two notable platforms help improve what we’ve discussed. WOM is quite helpful in digital marketing, as noted above. What it needs, however, is the ability to reach in-market customers without attachment to our community. By using Google Ads (search-based) and YouTube ads, not only can we use targeting parameters like ZIP codes, specific levels of income, families who have recently moved, and “parents of tweens” or “parents of teens,” but we also can be interest-responsive:
- Through Google Search ads, we can target families who are looking for any number of attributes that describe a school.
- Through YouTube, we can even target families as they watch specific YouTube videos, like those of your feeder schools, your non-Jewish competitors or even videos about rising antisemitism in public schools.
Helpful Resources:
How to Buy Google Search Ads
How to Buy Ads on YouTube
Strategy #6: Nurture prospects into inquiring, applying and enrolling.
Milken’s final strategy is simple: Keep them on the hook once you have people talking and interested in your school. Most schools have rudimentary tools to communicate with prospects. At Milken, we believe that from the moment someone expresses interest in our school, we must begin leading them toward applying. We utilize tools like automated email marketing and retargeting audiences to continually nurture them to apply through sharing our most powerful stories.
We developed two essential tools for this express purpose:
- We began retargeting prospects on social media after their initial inquiry.
- We developed automated email campaigns customized to users’ application status: Prospect, Inquiry, Application Started, Application Completed.
On social media, we retarget prospects to ensure we stay relevant throughout the admission cycle. We target prospects who have engaged with us on social media or visited our website and ensure they see our videos to keep Milken top-of-mind.
While many schools send an admission newsletter filled with current highlights and upcoming events, we developed an email campaign that we have slowly optimized over the years. When a prospect completes any form on our site (including event registrations and inquiry forms), they receive evergreen emails with our most powerful stories. An essential element we include is customized calls-to-action buttons based on whether a prospect had applied or not. Customizing the emails by prospect status allows us to continue to deliver our most powerful content to a prospect throughout the admissions process.
We can actually confirm the effectiveness of these strategies in our post-admission seasons data. As we review annually, one of the areas we look at is measuring how many families we remarketed actually apply and convert. We are able to measure this through our platform, Hubspot, which ties a user’s Facebook and email activity together and provides us with a clearer picture of how our applicants are nurtured throughout the admissions process.
Since we started our ad campaigns, we regularly see 5–10% of our contacts are created through digital ads or funnel-broadening activities. Depending on the year, digital ads influence 25–45% of our prospects. Ultimately the broadening of our funnel and the nurturing of our prospects contributes to our enrollment growth, which you can see below:
