Advertising
Advertising
UMC’s Advertising team supports brand awareness, reputational advancement, and new audience acquisition for the institution, while providing support and guidance to Loyola’s school-based marketing communications team.
The Advertising team leverages digital marketing strategies, paid social media, analogue and streaming audio, streaming video advertising, environmental placements, and print media. These various channels allow us to connect with key audiences to foster awareness, recognition, and inspire students to begin or continue their educational journey with us.
Please note that UMC negotiates annual contracts with several outlets and media partners. As these are preferred partnerships, please check with UMC to ensure the best rates and most impactful placements.
Ready to get started?
The UMC Advertising team can help you evaluate if advertising is in your best interest, along with the best strategy to support your goal and budget. Before commissioning a new paid media placement, here are six questions you should be able to answer.
What is the purpose or goal of this advertising placement or campaign?
Is your goal to increase awareness among a specific audience, student prospecting or recruiting, event attendance, reputation, constituent affinity? Answering this will be the foundation of your overall strategy. Creating an ad campaign without clearly defined goals leads to ineffective content and wasted media spend. Many elements go into campaign creation, and we choose specific advertising approaches and platforms depending on your overall goals. Defining the end purpose and business goal of your campaign will direct us towards the best media mix, target profiles, and user journey.
Do you have the resources to produce the intended impact?
Have you defined and allocated a budget for this initiative? Paid media can be costly and sometimes a small budget can be better spent elsewhere, as there can be diminishing returns on certain platforms below a specific spend level, while repeated exposure and frequency play a role in advertising impact.
Often budget may need to be allocated not just for in-market media spend, but also to creative development, writing, brand positioning, or external research in order to support your goals.
Is there enough time?
Creating and launching an ad campaign takes time. Additionally, you want to allocate enough time to the actual in-market portion of your campaign in order to accomplish your goal.
For instance, you may want to be in market at least 8-12 weeks before an event in order to increase registration. Advertising assets can be due to release to vendors anywhere from 2-8 weeks before the in-market run. Development of the campaign could take anywhere from 8-12 weeks depending on complexity and team bandwidth. With these timelines, we would need to begin work on the campaign anywhere from 4-8 months before the event, again depending on complexity, budget, and end goals. One rule of thumb: we often work on spring campaigns in fall and fall campaigns in spring.
Who is your audience?
Defining your audience is a central component of paid media strategy. Who are you speaking to? Current students, prospective students, parents, adult learners, prospective graduate students, alumni? Does your audience care deeply about sustainabilty? Do they tend to work in hospitals or private clinics? Are they in the 17-20 age group or 25-34 age set? Are they members of specific groups or associations? Do we have aggregate data of who has attended or joined previous classes/cohorts/events? Often UMC can tease out the needed information from there.
Different audiences use media differently and often want to be reached in specific ways. In addition, different advertising platforms and outlets offer different advantages based on your specific audiences. We like to look at the most recent insights into demographics on various advertising, outlet, and social media channels to help refine our targeting and media mix. We strive to be marketers who serve content to those who are most likely to be delighted to receive it.
Where will you source content?
Advertising relies on video, images, text, stories, and a conversion destination (such as a web page). Where will you source this content? We will often look for people who can tell the story of “why Loyola” or how they were “called” to make a difference. Are you able to lift up several potential interviewees to choose from who may have compelling stories to share? What are the proof points and data/stats that might shape the campaign or help with writing content? Are there events or visually compelling spaces/procedures/people/classes that could lend themselves to photography or video?
Advertising content creation and curation take time and resources. We may work with internal resources to capture and create content, but we may also ask you to set aside a portion of your budget for external creative support.
How will you define success?
What are your key performance indicators (KPIs)? These will likely be defined by your business goals.
If you are solely looking to raise awareness, you may measure this in impressions or how many people saw the ad. (This may be more subjective in non-trackable formats, such as print advertising.) UMC often measures a combination of impressions and clicks, indicating awareness and action taken. You may wish to track specific conversions, such as registrations or requests for information. It’s important to determine goals and measurement early in the process, not just to determine success, but also so pertinent tracking measures can be put in place.
Annual Planning: Work with UMC
UMC works with units across Loyola to raise awareness and grow and capture new audiences. Growth is a long-term, year-over-year process requiring time and collaboration. Please note that UMC works with the Provost’s office to determine institutional priorities for growth.
We encourage you to reach out to UMC Advertising to register all potential advertising initiatives. Even if we are not directly developing or negotiating the placement, we may be able to advise on best practices, ideal platforms to target your audience, or alternative methods to reach your goal.
Please note: Advertising liaisons are those authorized to speak on behalf of a school, department, or other official entity at the University. This is typically the Marcom team member within each school, who already works directly with the Dean as part of UMC. Advertising liaisons may be provided with campaign collaboration and monitoring tools. They can work directly with the UMC Advertising team, which may advise on annual strategy or review advertising placements to ensure they adhere to the University's policies and guidelines. UMC Advertising will also reach out to managers as needed to discuss solutions for advertisements that could use additional support.
Benefits of registering
- Get the inside scoop on upcoming campaigns.
- Be evaluated to receive access to campaign collaboration tools.
- Access insights on audience targeting, research, and best practices to increase the effectiveness of your audience growth strategy.
Requirements
- Advertisers must have a demonstrated, strategic need in alignment with the Provost.
- Advertisers advance their area’s goals, divisional priorities, and the University brand.
- Advertising administrators must be able to commit to long-term planning, which may include research and brand development in support of an audience acquisition process.
- Advertisements must follow Loyola brand guidelines.
- Advertising partners must enter the process with clear goals and budget.
Best Practices
- Start with your end goals and defining your audience. Then, work backwards to tactics and placements.
- Try to gather data before meeting with the UMC Advertising team. For instance, if you are looking to advertise an event, gather information on who has typically registered for this program over several years (demographics, locations, previous schools, current places of work, typical work titles)?
- Are there publications, associations, or national/international events that align with this subject matter and might provide additional lift or opportunities?
- Who are key competitors? (This can be anecdotal competitors, such as leaders in research/innovation, published rankings, or peer institutions.)
- Print placements are not always the best, or most cost-effective, method to reach your audience.
- Focus on visual consistency and exposure. Audiences are pulled in a lot of directions and exposed to more media than ever before. Audiences need repeated touches over an extended period of time before they fully understand, evaluate, and take action.
- Keep it simple. Viewers don’t spend a lot of time reading content on an ad. Even for radio or television ads, you only have a few seconds to deliver a concise message and call to action.
- Don’t forget the call to action! What do you want your audience to do? Visit a website? Fill out a request for information? Register now? Make sure you’ve thought through the path you want your audience to take, including identifying and developing the digital path you want them to take.
Please contact us:
The UMC Advertising team can help you evaluate if advertising is in your best interest, along with the best strategy to support your goal and budget. Before commissioning a new paid media placement, here are six questions you should be able to answer.
UMC works with units across Loyola to raise awareness and grow and capture new audiences. Growth is a long-term, year-over-year process requiring time and collaboration. Please note that UMC works with the Provost’s office to determine institutional priorities for growth.
We encourage you to reach out to UMC Advertising to register all potential advertising initiatives. Even if we are not directly developing or negotiating the placement, we may be able to advise on best practices, ideal platforms to target your audience, or alternative methods to reach your goal.
Please note: Advertising liaisons are those authorized to speak on behalf of a school, department, or other official entity at the University. This is typically the Marcom team member within each school, who already works directly with the Dean as part of UMC. Advertising liaisons may be provided with campaign collaboration and monitoring tools. They can work directly with the UMC Advertising team, which may advise on annual strategy or review advertising placements to ensure they adhere to the University's policies and guidelines. UMC Advertising will also reach out to managers as needed to discuss solutions for advertisements that could use additional support.
Benefits of registering
- Get the inside scoop on upcoming campaigns.
- Be evaluated to receive access to campaign collaboration tools.
- Access insights on audience targeting, research, and best practices to increase the effectiveness of your audience growth strategy.
Requirements
- Advertisers must have a demonstrated, strategic need in alignment with the Provost.
- Advertisers advance their area’s goals, divisional priorities, and the University brand.
- Advertising administrators must be able to commit to long-term planning, which may include research and brand development in support of an audience acquisition process.
- Advertisements must follow Loyola brand guidelines.
- Advertising partners must enter the process with clear goals and budget.