Is OOH the missing piece to your educational marketing plan?

Throughout my years here at EMC Outdoor, I have assisted a number of agencies working with Higher Education clients in achieving increased web activity, more actions on campus and increased enrollment numbers for registration periods.  This has been done through the use of local, highly targeted Out of Home Media formats.  Clients have seen enrollment increased up 34% with the use of OOH!

Here are 3 ways Out of Home (OOH) can help drive enrollment for your Higher Education clients:

Target and Reachability – OOH has the ability to deliver your message directly to your target audience in a geographic and demographic manner.  We have always been able to cherry pick billboards, transit shelters or bus systems in the cities and towns close to universities or cities where Higher Education clients were looking to recruit.  To strengthen our location selections even more, we now have the ability to recommend geographically focused units that are highest in targeted impressions to the audience you are looking to reach.  This is possible through the use of OOH impressions.  Through this metric available in 203 DMAs, we can review data for each location specific to Age, Gender, Race, Income and Employment. What does that mean for your educational marketing plans?  Not only can we place out of home in areas close to the School or University, we can hand select units where future or current students, their parents, or alumnae live and play.

Mobile Connection – There is a proven strong connection between OOH and Online Activity.  24% of consumers who viewed any billboard or other out of home media in the past month used an online search engine to look up information about the advertiser, and 17% of those consumers visited an advertiser’s website directly (Source: Nielsen 2016).  The link to mobile is even stronger with 35% of consumers in the past year using their phones or tablets to do an online search about the advertiser after viewing the OOH ad (Source: Nielsen 2016).  This makes a solid case for Higher Education Brands to use OOH to drive immediate web activity, bumping more actions on campus and inevitably leading to increased enrollment numbers.

Events – “Despite increased digital activity, a recent survey found that the most effective marketing strategies for universities are nevertheless events‐based and involve direct interaction with potential students.” (Source:Trends in Higher Education Marketing, Recruitment, and Technology March 2014, Hanover Research).  Through custom designed and superbly executed experiential campaigns, we have the ability to speak directly to potential students and their parents.  Not only does this provide a platform for the delivery of a more sophisticated marketing message, but through the collection of data onsite we can track the path of these efforts.

For Higher Education Brands, OOH provides the ability to use targeted messaging to reach specific sectors of their audience, who have immediate access to additional information in the palm of their hands.

Stand out from the clutter, deliver impressions to your exact audience, increase one on one interactions, and see enrollment results!