12 of the best School Marketing Strategies
Looking for student enrollments? Confused in terms of marketing? Here are 12 tips on how to market your school. This will surely increase enrollment numbers and garner admiration from the potential target audience.
Marketing should be done to create value in the off-season.
The Best School Marketing Plans Start With a Goal
Schools that wish to create a strong marketing strategy must start with a solid base. Moreover, a marketing strategy, centered solely on an implementable plan. Before planning an email "drip" campaign, redesigning your website, or creating new content, you must integrate these creative choices into a coherent concept that pinpoints your strengths and weaknesses. Each school district has a unique narrative because of its setting, competitors, or demographics. Therefore, to surpass the competition, you must match your approach to appeal to your demographics. The secret to developing a successful digital marketing plan will be to examine your internal strengths and weaknesses and external difficulties.
This strategy must thus include a core element.
2 Prepare your parents' enrollment journeys in advance.
Marketing funnels are essential for illustrating the path from prospect to lead to the client (or enrolled student, in our case).
- You need to connect with potential pupils at the top. The awareness phase is when your SEO approach will be most effective.
- Prospective parents might be drawn into the curiosity phase when they want to know more about how to join after the tendrils of your SEO reach them.
- They enter the action phase, and when they enlist, at that point, you have them.
However, there is one crucial aspect of your school that you need to examine before creating your master marketing plan: your website.
Tailor to Mobile Devices
An outdated website might have attracted students to your doors before the outbreak. In addition, the family locked their doors in response to the deluge of covid and rushed to their phones.
The National Center for Education Data's learning statistics for February 2021 confirm this startling reality:
- Of the pupils, 21% participated in in-person instruction.
- 35% of students were taking hybrid classes.
- 43% of people were enrolled in online courses.
Districts have had to adjust to a new norm—the significance of digital trends—due to the unfortunate growth of variations and the pandemic's resilience. Because families increasingly demand convenience and speed, you must make sure that your school website is designed with mobile devices in mind.
Your enrollment rates might stagnate if your website doesn't seem accessible.
You'd be shocked how many reputable firms' websites aren't mobile-friendly. The percentage is even more shocking for small firms, 91% of which have non-mobile-optimized websites.
Don't follow in their footsteps.
Redesign Your Website
A website overhaul may be necessary if your school's homepage smells like HTML from the late 2000s. Indeed, the aspirations of our tech-savvy youth will not be satisfied by antiquated appearances. Don't skip this step since you can be sure that larger districts will do the same.
In addition to being affordable, a great redesign has a significant financial payoff and helps your school's branding efforts.
Once that is completed, you will have a picture you can use as the centerpiece of your marketing plan. The foundation of every marketing plan worth its salt is content, which is what follows.
Build a blog
Because they make it possible for potential students and parents to find your website through search engines, blogs are the mainspring of organic traffic.
A blog does improve your school's standing with Google. This advances the narrative of your school and makes it possible to cover student success stories, current affairs, or educational trends.
But creating blog material may occasionally be a tedious chore. So, if you want results quickly, PPC is the way to go.
Allocate resources on a PPC campaign
You can spend money to get your advertisements in front of students' and parents' eyes as soon as possible if you feel the need to see results sooner. Paying to rank in Google is a perfect way for schools to avoid the gradual exposure of their information, and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Simply don't undervalue SEO. Regardless of how much you invest in your PPC campaign, measured by conversions and click-through rates, if you put it on the back burner, your rankings will stagnate.
Enlist AIDA's Assistance
You must incorporate one extremely important acronym into your content before you even consider social media marketing: A.I.D.A. Attention: Grab the attention of any potential parents or pupils. Interest: Pique their interest by providing intriguing data, news, trends, etc.
Desire: Inspire their desire by providing them with what they seek, such as the need for more exciting lessons. Action: Provide them with the answer to their wishes to motivate them.
Market Throughout Social Media Platforms
In this tweetin’, reelin’ age, expanding your social media networks will be essential to raising awareness of your school.
Be mindful of the audiences that each social media platform attracts when posting content there. Remember that Facebook users are considered "old" if you publish something there. As a result, you should continue to target parents with your messaging.
On the other hand, if you share anything on Instagram, keep in mind that your students will be able to find you there.
Create Content with a Purpose
Always remember that each piece of content requires perfect purpose, tone, and design. Say, for instance, that you have just finished producing the most eye-catching promotional material for a science fair that will be sent to parents. It's catchy and mocks current fashions.
You close it, hoping that others may learn more about the science fair. But the most crucial component—a call to action—is absent (CTA). You need a CTA regardless of the type of content.
Indeed, the piece of material will merely be empty calories without clear instructions on how to go and register for the fair, contribute, or enroll your youngster.
Make your content succinct, and swift
Get-to-the-point material is more appealing to SEO than anything else. As a result, your clickthrough rates will increase the more text blocks there are on your website.
To make your online copy as clear and compelling as possible, optimize it. Once your social media strategy is established and an editorial schedule is created, you will have enough material to begin filling out your next crucial piece:
your email drip campaign
Plan Your Email Marketing Effectively
Every school marketing team should be excited and thrilled about email marketing since you already have an email list, which many marketers long for.
You've taken the first step toward a fruitful marketing campaign using the large network of connections that parents have. Your content is another excellent asset that you have already developed.
So, with a backlog of material, your school's voice is prepared. You may now send out emails with marketing content. Remember to retain your funnel at the top of your mind at all times. You should present several types of material to people you are contacting for the first time.
If they haven't signed up, you shouldn't promote the science fair. Instead, you could highlight how well your school plans events for its students; this will help them realize "what's in it for me?" better. You need to promote the benefits that your school provides to parents and their children in every post.
Monitor Your Campaign
After you have optimized your website, written your content, and started your email campaign, you shouldn't just sit back and sip old, covid-edition coca-cola from barrels. The largest risk exists during the campaign launch. Your campaign's success will either falter here or ascend to the heights of marketing nirvana. Your campaign will succeed if you track important indicators like
- Users of websites
- Price per lead
- Amount of leads
- Rate of clickthrough
These KPIs (key performance indicators) should indicate to you and your team that a change needs to be made if you notice any of them declining. This will enable your campaign to continue spinning as effectively as possible. Therefore, a campaign shouldn't be run automatically; rather, it has to be looked after, just like you would your students.
The finest marketing plans for schools don't provide results immediately but instead foster long-term parent trust and sustainability. As a result, the digital marketing tree is worthwhile to develop, even though it does so gradually.
