Nowadays online advertising has become a powerful marketing instrument, and it is difficult to imagine a successful business without online advertising campaign or at least a small website presenting the company’s products or services. The purpose of this paper is to develop an online campaign for XX Online’s BBA degree, with regard to advertising message, means and methods of advertising, public relations strategy and interactive marketing.
The message of the campaign should focus on the convenience of getting an online BBA degree, use of all channels for learning, affordable cost and high quality of education. Sample message can be expressed in the following way: “Getting your degree has become a convenient and fascinating process. We are proud to provide you a high quality educational program. It is optimally designed and will fit your life and schedule. Now you can balance your personal and educational goals by choosing XX online BBA degree. Our unique learning platform, highly qualified professors with impressive experience of online teaching, instant communication with teachers and groupmates, 24/7 online support and a large library of books and learning materials will inevitably lead you to success”.
The form of advertising message should vary depending on the type of advertising and available space. Among the variety of places for advertising it is possible to distinguish traditional online marketing places and Web 2.0 services. Local Internet marketing, contacts with schools and educational institutions and link exchange with educational websites relate to traditional marketing methods. It can be useful to provide valuable business news and sample lessons on e-mail subscription basis, and attach proper advertising to these e-mails. Behavioural targeting and the use of contextual ads is recommended to address target audience. A more advanced technique is semantic advertising (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick & Mayer & Johnston, 2009), based on the preferences of the user and shown when relevant pages are visited. Also the use of search engine advertising, and participation in Google Ads, in particular, is strongly recommended to get more visitors to the main site. Currently it is also very popular to use blogs as a separate marketing channel and a method of establishing public relations (Clarke & Flaherty, 2005). Blog can be used for submitting multimedia materials, exchanging links and delivering news about the project. Also such means of advertising as Twitter are strongly recommended, since they allow to attract a different target audience than more time-consuming websites and messages (Clarke & Flaherty, 2005). Regarding mobile ads and news, they are to be delivered to online subscribers on their request, but no unauthorized suggestions should be sent, since educational services might not be perceived seriously.
One more attractive form of online marketing for educational services is providing free courses, free trial lessons, free webinars and other educational opportunities which might draw interest to the program and its online learning platform. These means of advertising can both be used as a separate marketing decision and can be integrated into social marketing campaigns. Social networks are a separate online world now, and they have their own marketing rules. First of all, public presence of the project in the form of separate groups in social networks and in the short context ads present within the majority of social networks is recommended. Such technique as friendvertising (Tuten, 2008) has recently become popular: in this method, a separate account is created for the company or for the project, then this account adds friends and is populated with all the necessary information, links, videos etc. Basing on all the above-mentioned online marketing message and methods, it is possible to develop a successful advertising campaign for XX Online’s BBA degree.
References
Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. & Mayer, R. & Johnston, K. (2009). Internet marketing: strategy, implementation and practice. Pearson Education.
Clarke, I. & Flaherty, T. (2005). Advances in electronic marketing. Idea Group Inc (IGI).
Tuten, T.L. (2008). Advertising 2.0: social media marketing in a Web 2.0 world. Greenwood Publishing Group.