advertising - 5 Horizons

How to Use QR Codes to Enhance Your Marketing Strategy

December 28, 2022

Part 2: The Death and Rebirth of QR Codes

With the rebirth of QR codes, your business can (and should) leverage the QR tool to enhance your marketing and advertising. Diversify your marketing strategy by using QR codes to do the following three things:

1. Drive Traffic to Your Website

QR codes can provide opportunities for prospective leads to quickly visit your website, learn more about your business, or sign up for an advertised event.

2. Optimize Calls to Action

The main role of the QR code is to connect traditional and digital marketing. Adding the codes to flyers, posters, brochures, mailers, postcards, and other print marketing materials is much easier than typing out full destination links. QR codes eliminate the need for URL typing or memorization and connect a lead to your preferred destination on their own device.

Whether you’re selling a product, driving donations to your nonprofit, or generating leads for your school’s information session, a QR code will easily take an interested person to the right page in a matter of seconds.

3. Visualize Promotional Materials

QR codes can lead directly to various multimedia elements, such as images, videos, or music, enriching the customer experience with more than just text. This supplemental material adds an interactive element to your ad, making it stand out.

Translation services, grocery shopping, online orders—these are just a few of the capabilities QR codes already offer. QR codes will most likely transform in the future and become even more versatile, which should serve as another incentive for marketers to hop on this trend now and utilize QR codes in their marketing strategies going forward.

If you or your business needs help staying up to date with the best marketing practices such as this one, let us know. 5 Horizons always keeps up with the latest marketing trends–and you can too on our blog.

Clock’s Ticking

November 30, 2022

4 Ways to Use TikTok for Higher Ed Marketing

What originally started off as three different apps is now one of the fastest-growing influential social media platforms. With a wide selection of sounds, special effects, and filters, TikTok has paved the way for users to easily create content like never before.

TikTok is just over two years old, but doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Though you may be late to the TikTok game, your educational institution can leverage the platform’s success to achieve marketing goals by identifying your audience, tracking trends, finding the organic approach that works best for you, and boosting your videos with a small budget.

1. Identify Your Audience

Although TikTok is predominantly populated with Gen Z, your content should be targeted at a unique audience beyond age. For instance, an older audience is most likely to have financial decision-making power and is susceptible to messaging about getting ahead or changing careers. Utilize TikTok to narrow your prospects to those who may be entering college soon, finishing a degree, specializing with a certificate program, or pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree.

2. Track the Trends

Building your TikTok presence involves more than just producing content. If your school is new to TikTok, start by paying attention to trends that align with your institution’s mission. Some of the trends can be leveraged in messaging on other platforms, but keeping up with what’s in and what’s out is essential. Before you start actively using TikTok, be sure to clearly identify the goals behind your engagement.

3. Take an Organic Approach

One of the common goals of social media marketing is to build brand awareness. An organic TikTok presence is an effective way to accomplish this. Start with people who represent your institution best: mascot, orientation leaders, tour guides, and student ambassadors. They can provide intriguing snippets of student activities, orientation sessions, and other aspects of campus life. Monitor your account for brand consistency and involve students as much as possible to significantly expand your college or university’s reach.

4. Pay to Play

Paid advertising on TikTok is a great way to insert your institution into the stream. The goal of advertising on social media should be impressions and views (not clicks) as they’re exactly what will help increase your brand awareness. Boosted brand awareness can in turn amplify performance on other channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, or even your website, where audiences are more likely to click or inquire. The clock is ticking, but there’s still time to take advantage of all that TikTok has to offer. Combining organic and paid efforts can help your institution achieve the primary goal of growing your audience and driving brand awareness. If your school needs assistance with advertising on TikTok or creating engaging content for the platform, contact 5 Horizons to discuss how we can help you grow.

When Third-Party Cookies Become Obsolete

November 14, 2022

3 Strategies for Advertisers to Use in the Post-Cookies World

Digital advertisers and marketers have used the “cookie” technology since 1995, within a year of its creation. However, the world of digital advertising as we know it is about to change. McKinsey & Company reports that starting in mid-2023, Google’s Chrome browser is expected to block third-party cookies, which are already blocked in Safari and Firefox. Since Chrome is the leading browser in large parts of the world, this policy will directly result in a drastically changed digital landscape, putting an end to cookie-based advertising.

As we head into the new year, now is the time to learn, adapt, and prepare your marketing strategy.

Mixing the Cookie Dough

Cookies are small pieces of code added to users’ web browsers as they visit different websites. This code remembers the users’ previous actions and settings (e.g., location, search history, items you put in your cart, etc.) and uses this information to deliver a more tailored web browsing experience. Advertisers utilize cookies to collect user data that ultimately helps them deliver the most relevant and targeted content to specific audiences.

Cut Out the Cookies

Get a head-start in refreshing your advertising strategy by implementing these three strategies.

1. Use Consumer Points to Collect First-Party Data

First-party data refers to data that is collected passively, meaning with the users’ consent but without their direct participation. Browsing behavior, content consumption, location, device, and time of day are all examples of first-party data.

Your business, brand, or educational institution should intensify efforts to collect data at the consumer touchpoints you control, such as your own websites, and use analytics to fill in the blanks where the data sets are incomplete. If you require information about a user’s intentions, preferences, and lifestyle, you can convince users to identify themselves and share this kind of information, called zero-party data, by giving them something valuable in exchange.

2. Create Partnerships to Leverage Second-Party Data

Since first-party data is not enough to achieve broad reach goals, marketers can build partnerships with other companies to exchange data that users have cleared for certain purposes. Such partnerships are most effective in maximizing the value of data when both parties pursue similar interests but aren’t direct competitors.

3. Learn Contextual Advertising & Interest-Based Targeting

Contextual Advertising

While cookie-driven approaches display ads based on a user’s browsing history and inferred interest, contextual advertising is based on the current content a user is viewing. New contextual targeting tools rely on natural language processing and image recognition, allowing algorithms to understand the context of web pages and apps. This enables marketers to display ads in an environment that is both highly relevant for their potential customers and safe for their brands.

Internet-Based Targeting

A new approach promoted by Google as an alternative to cookie-based targeting, internet-based targeting uses Google Topics. The idea behind this allegedly more private tool is that a browser learns about users’ interests as they surf the web and shares their top interests with participating websites for advertising purposes. When a user visits a website that supports the Topics API, the browser will choose up to three topics on their device from their most frequent ones (one for each of the last three weeks). The website and its advertising partners can then use these topics to determine which ads to display.

Baked to Perfection

Cookies or not, 5 Horizons always strives for perfection and knows how to capture unique leads for your business or institution. With over 9 years of expertise, we specialize in digital marketing and can assist with any of your advertising needs.