Most people who want to further their education usually apply for a scholarship. Scholarships make education easier to access. About 58% of families paid for college in 2020 using scholarships.
But while scholarships are beneficial to recipients, brands can also gain from funding scholarships for others to further their education. This noble act of philanthropy promotes your business as much as it gives back to the community.
So, how does offering a scholarship benefit a company?
1. Lowers Advertising Costs
Major companies, including Walt Disney, Alphabet (Google), and Facebook spend billions of dollars each year on ads so you can buy their products.
Small and medium-sized businesses, on the other hand, rely on outside-the-box advertising tactics and solutions—and scholarships are one of them.
Scholarship programs are effective advertising tools for businesses. Applied well, they can increase sales and provide a strong return-on-investment (ROI).
A case in point is Taco Bell. The American-based fast-food chain gave away $7million in scholarships (dubbed Live Más Scholarships) to passionate students. In return, the company increased its sales and generated a quantifiable return on investment.
2. Boosts Social Media Marketing
As a marketing tool, scholarships can market a brand on social media.
To drum up attention on social media, ask applicants to create and share videos of the scholarship on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other social networks. Then make the scholarship easy to apply, attract more applicants and make it go viral.
Duck Brand Duct Tape, for example, set up a Scholarship Contest offering scholarships to students using Duck’s products to create the best prom outfit. The social event created a major buzz on social media, marketing the brand’s overall image.
Setting up a contest can dent your pocket, you may even need extra money to make it successful. If that’s the case, you can use search terms like “auto title loans” or “auto title loans near me” to find a short-term secured loan with lower risks and interest rates.
3. Tells Your Brand’s Story
Scholarships are a great way of telling your brand’s story.
And we all know a well-told story can powerfully market a brand’s culture to potential employees who may want to work for your company in the (not too distant) future.
In other words, scholarships can also be an excellent hiring tool that paints your brand as socially-responsible, and which exclusively cares for the needs of its workers. Who wouldn’t want to work for such a company?
4. Impacts SEO Efforts
Funding scholarship programs won’t directly influence your Google ranking. But it can positively impact your website's search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Look at it this way: When you run scholarships and people get wind of your generosity, all eyes will focus on your brand—in turn, generating massive traffic to your site.
In the SEO world, traffic is everything.
As soon as you start awarding the scholarship, popular sites will be directing traffic to your site in droves—helping you score links from top and authoritative sites with .edu domains (attracting a higher SEO value).
There’s no better way for a company to positively impact students’ lives than funding scholarship programs. Scholarships guarantee students’ future will remain brighter, and the company’s sales levels insurmountable.
Read more:
How to Get a Scholarship to Harvard University?
How to Get a Scholarship to Study Abroad?
