Meta Ads for International Student Recruitment

Universities and educational institutions are constantly seeking innovative ways to attract international students from around the globe. With the rise of digital platforms, the landscape of student recruitment has undergone a significant transformation. Leveraging the power of Meta Ads opens up a plethora of opportunities for institutions to reach prospective students across borders effectively.

Advantages of Using Meta Ads

• Targeted Reach – Tailor your campaigns to reach potential students based on factors such as age, location, interests, and educational background.
• Global Exposure – Showcase your unique offerings on a global scale by highlighting your academic programmes, faculty expertise, campus facilities, and student life to a diverse audience worldwide.
• Engagement and Interaction – Interactive features within Meta Ads, such as the Messenger ads, enable direct engagement with prospective students, fostering meaningful interactions beyond traditional advertising channels.
• Cost-Effectiveness – With flexible budgeting options and performance-based metrics, universities can optimise their campaigns to achieve maximum results within their allocated resources.

Business Schools Targeting Postgraduate Students

Postgraduate students are increasingly seeking avenues to unlock their global potential. For many, the path to success leads through business school.

To give you an example, we took the top 20 universities for business studies in both Nigeria and India. We input the schools in the audience controls under the ad set level of a leads campaign. If we target students aged 20 to 25 years old, from these specific locations, we get an estimated audience size of 421-496K in Nigeria and 1.4-1.7M in India.

Now, between these 2 countries, Meta estimates 7-21 daily conversions for Nigeria and 22-63 daily conversions for India. Those are notable numbers, considering we only took the top 20 universities. These estimates can vary based on locations, age, gender, detailed targeting and placements. The more locations you have, the bigger your target audience will be, while if you want to narrow your audience or target students studying business specifically, you can use detailed targeting to add a field of study, for example.

More Features You Can Use

The abovementioned examples are great for targeting potential students to apply to a specific programme your institution offers. However, Meta Ads offers many features and campaign objectives when you’re not aiming for conversions.

For example, you want to test a new programme but are unsure how it would be received by (prospective) students. You can still run a leads campaign but instead of setting your conversion location to your website, set it to ‘Instant forms’. These work well for measuring interest and will help you generate and qualify leads through form submissions. With the built-in form creation tool, you can easily design and customise your form in a matter of minutes. The best thing about the instant form is that all contact information, such as name, email address and phone number may be prefilled for the person if they have already provided their information to Meta.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive landscape, harnessing the power of Meta Ads and all that it offers is essential for institutions looking to optimise their international student recruitment efforts. By combining targeted reach, global exposure, interactive engagement and cost-effectiveness, universities can create compelling ad campaigns that resonate with prospective students.