Education sector has mastered the art and science of advertising on TV and print media. Large colleges / universities spend heavily on advertising in a bid to expand student base and building brand. This generally leaves smaller colleges with no choice but to either match these large spends or settle with lower intake of students.

The key problem here is that small institutions try to use the methods which are suitable for larger players. Smaller colleges need to follow “different / innovative” marketing approach which is suitable for their scale and budget rather than just following the large players blindly.

We believe, “hyper local advertising” can be the key advertising medium which can help achieve them their goals.

What is hyper local advertising?

Hyper local advertising is the approach to target the right audience with customisable messages. This is unlike mass campaigns which are run on TV / Radio / Print.

This kind of marketing is best suited for the needs for small and newly started colleges who have low marketing budgets.

Let’s understand this using a quick example. Normally a full page ad on front page of a newspaper such as TOI can cost more than a crore. More importantly, the shelf life of such an Ad is just one day. Similarly TV and radio ads are quite expensive though their reach is extensive.

But do small colleges really require such an extensive reach? Every college does not have target audience everywhere, but if any of the above mass advertising mediums are used, they have to pay this hefty amount with no option to customise it to their target areas.

This is where hyperlocal advertising is different. Let’s discuss how it works.

In hyperlocal advertising, specific areas where there is most likely hood of finding your potential customer are selected. A customised message is finalised and then the campaign is run for that area.

This approach ensures money is not wasted in targeting audience which are not our target group. For example, if a college knows that majority of their students come from say 3 regions in Mumbai, it makes sense to run customised campaigns there rather than running a pan Mumbai Ad campaign.

How Machadalo can help

As already discussed, colleges know their target areas through the past admission response, and hyperlocal advertising helps in penetrating those identified markets. Machadalo designs a target focused campaign using data sciences wherein the brand gets multiple impressions of their target segment.

Machadalo’s 3 step process ensures the full coverage of identified market in a planned way which helps the institutes in brand positioning in hyper local spaces and getting the leads as well.

• Brand building activity with multiple impressions at hyperlocal spaces like residential societies, corporate parks, and other common places with a customized message media.
• Brand recall activity with a pin code based digital campaign and,
• Direct interaction campaign to measure the responses.

With Machadalo’s hyperlocal approach the advertising and promotions can be refined and will cut down the marketing budget too.

In the end ..

Mass marketing activities may work well for large educational institutes but for the smaller ones a hyperlocal approach is much more economical and efficient.

If you are an educational institute and would like a us to help you in planning your marketing efforts please drop in an email to info@machadalo.com

About the authors

Govind Singh is part of operations team at Machadalo and has more than 7 years of experience in education sector.

Naveen Sharma is one of the co-founders of Machadalo and has extensive experience in business consulting and digital marketing.