Digital Advertising Levels Up for Summer

This summer probably is the busiest time ever for promoting the college. Right now, the Public Relations office is running three digital campaigns to advertise:

• Enrolla, the online quiz that matches prospective students’ interests to one or more of SUNY Niagara’s academic programs
• SUNY Reconnect, the program that provides free college to eligible students age 25–55
• Certification through humanskills.ai, the college’s partner in artificial intelligence training

Another campaign — appealing to recent high school grads who are unsure about college — will begin shortly.

The breadth and depth of this marketing activity — running four concurrent campaigns — is unprecedented at SUNY Niagara. Consider that each of these campaigns includes roughly 35–50 ads. This is more ads than the college placed in all of 2023.

Each campaign includes a variety of placements, too, for example:

• Social media posts
• Online ads through Google
• Videos
• Audio spots

PR also has tailored each campaign to appeal to several defined “personas.” A persona is collection of attributes that characterize one segment of a target audience. For example, one persona of the humanskills.ai campaign is: managers of western New York businesses who want employees to be able to automate repetitive tasks so that they can give more attention to work that will give their companies competitive advantages.

Since June 1, PR’s ads have been seen about 2.4 million times, generating over 40,000 clicks and swipes from people who want to know what SUNY Niagara can offer them.

People often ask: Why don’t I ever see any ads for the college? The answer is that most SUNY Niagara employees usually don’t fit a persona of any of PR’s campaigns. Since the college pays every time a digital ad appears, we want our ads to appear only on the devices of prospective buyers.

However, you’re welcome to have a look at some of the ads, like the one above, in PR’s digital campaigns. Several are uploaded to the Public Relations Intranet. You can find them on the Portfolio Mainstays page, which describes some of the things that PR does to add value to the college.