How to Advertise for an MBA Info Session Promotion
Advertising for an info session is hard enough for companies looking to recruit soon-to-be graduated college students. However, when you’re advertising for an MBA program, you have an entirely different mountain to climb.
An info session needs to provide prospective grad students with a chance to check out the campus, learn more about the college, and develop enough of a connection that they’ll at least consider spending several years’ worth of money to attend your MBA program. To market your program to students, you need to put yourself in their shoes—what would convince them to take this crucial next step in their lives with you? Here are some quick ideas for advertising your MBA info session.
Maximize Timing
An important aspect to consider when advertising an info session is timing, and you should be asking the following questions:
·When will the program begin next?
·When will students need to have signed up before the semester starts?
·How many steps are involved with securing finances and how long will it take?
·What are your competitors doing differently to draw students to their program?
An info session, especially for a graduate program like an MBA, needs to be done well enough in advance that students have the time to really think about joining the program, weighing the benefits, and getting their finances in order.
Plan a Promotion Strategy
Some students never attend one info session in their entire time as an undergraduate, yet plenty of companies and graduate programs end up with a full house for an info session. The secret is more than just informing a campus’s career service office that you’re coming—you should inform the students yourself. Mickey Garcia, who is the Global University Relations Manager at CH2MHILL, says, “We market specifically to the engineering groups that we want to build partnerships with to let them know that we’ll be there.”
To do this, you need to build relationships with particular departments and groups like honor societies, sororities and fraternities, and clubs in order to find students with the skills and background you’re seeking, as it’ll help you to market directly to the students you hope will join your MBA program.
Use the Road to Your Advantage
Whether they’re going to school, the office, the mall, and another kind of destination, people will get there by highways and roads. While driving, they’ll most likely glance at the billboards passing them by. In fact, people don’t often intentionally look at billboards, but the ads do grab their attention, even if only for a moment.
Billboards, especially digital billboards, are often placed in strategic locations—for one advertising an MBA info session, a spot on the highway close to campus is best. This makes it impossible to avoid them. Catchy slogans and creative designs make ads memorable enough to stick with you for a while, which is why so many businesses use them to promote their services and products.
Advertising with digital billboards is an especially strong marketing tactic for universities, as they have the budget to use billboards effectively to get the results they want. They also, due to that greater budget, have their pick of the land when it comes to choosing prime locations to promote info sessions. By setting up creative billboard advertisements in such prime locations, you’ll grow awareness for your program on a much wider scale, which is what you need to get prospective grad students through the door of your info session to hear your piece.
If you would like to learn more about how Boost Outdoor Media can help you advertise your info session, please click here.
