The best scholarships out there have two main goals. First, getting lots of attention from the media, universities and the press. Second, getting as many high-quality applicants as possible. Well, the bad news is, even the best scholarships out there don’t just promote themselves.
Even though it takes time and money to launch a scholarship, this is not stopping countless businesses like yours to push out their scholarships. The competition is stiffer, so you need to double down on your promotion efforts – and here’s how.
Push out highly targeted social media ads
More than one billion people are on Facebook right now. It’s the ideal platform to promote your scholarship, whether to other businesses or students you want as applicants. However, successfully using Facebook means a lot more than creating a post with your business’ page and calling it a day. No likes? No surprise there.
To really make an effect, you need to spend some money on promotion. More specifically, you need to pay for sponsored ads on Facebook. Luckily, you can make sure that the money you spend on promoting your scholarship actually gets your scholarship in front of the right eyes.
Thanks to Facebook’s advanced targeting mechanism, you can choose exactly the kind of people you want to see your scholarship ads. For example, you can push one set of ads for people specifically in the age group of 17-23, with certain interests and liked pages. You can roll out another set of ads aiming for the age group and interests of their parents.
Finally, you may want to push out ads to news publishers, marketing managers and company owners of magazines and other publications that you want to see your scholarship.
Once you get the hang of Facebook ads, you can start publishing ads on Instagram too. The good news is, Facebook bought Instagram a while ago and ads on both platforms are managed from a single dashboard. Seeing how the majority of Instagram users are population under 30, it’s the ideal place to promote your scholarship to students. Note the variety of different formats that you can use on Instagram – you can tinker with different formats until you’ve nailed it down.
Make it easy to apply for students
The prospect of getting free money is enough to motivate any student to sit through your application with patience. Right? Well, there are a few problems with that statement. First, people are nowadays used to seamless web experiences and getting what they want within minutes. Applying to your scholarship should (almost) be as easy as ordering a pizza online.
The second issue is that the competition is getting stiffer. Businesses in different industries are launching new scholarships every day. Often times, it’s not the amount of money that will determine the number and quality of applicants, it’s the ease of applying that will make students complete their applications instead of dropping out halfway through.
We’ve outlined some of the main ways to make your applications easier to complete in one of our previous posts. For now, focus on making your applications short, making it easy to save mid-way and most of all, have different rounds of applications. That way, if someone doesn’t meet all your conditions, they will know it immediately.
Have early-bird applications
Do you have several scholarships running at once? You can try introducing an early bird deadline to one of them to encourage more applicants and to make them apply with more haste. What’s more, you can offer an additional, smaller scholarship to everyone who makes the early-bird deadline in time.
Example from ISA LILLE
List your scholarship on relevant websites
There are websites like ScholarshipOwl that allow students to find a variety of different scholarships in one place. While you may have more competition on platforms such as these, there are some upsides as well. First, students can compare your scholarship with others and see what they’re getting. Second, students are more likely to find your scholarship in the first place, since they’ll be actively looking to apply on platforms like this one. That means less money spent on promotions and ads.
Conclusion
Promoting your scholarship may sound like hard work, but with a little bit of time spent on researching ads and scholarship websites, you’ll see how easy it can be. Of course, the hard part is getting the scholarship launched in the first place. However, there is no need to worry! If you use a scholarship management platform like ScholarshipApp, you can get your first scholarship up and running within 15 minutes. Reach out to us today to get started!
