Smart Marketing Strategies For Schools To Drive Student Enrollments

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15 Mar, 2024

marketing-strategies-for-schools

Introduction

Many educational institutions are realizing that to compete successfully in the modern economy, they must implement strategic marketing for schools. This means there is a greater need than ever for educational institutions to establish school marketing strategies. Unfortunately, it can be intimidating for institutions to begin developing a school marketing strategy from scratch.

There are plenty of educational institutions that can relate to you if they lack a marketing strategy for schools. Marketing for schools has never been more important. Schools now compete with a whole world of educational opportunities, parents have more choices than ever before, and digital marketing company for schools are doing everything to make it work for you.

Recent research has shown that 45 percent of businesses examined do not have a school marketing strategy.

If this happens, you run the danger of your marketing staff being disorganized and optimizing based on their own subjective priorities. It's tough to come together and work toward a similar objective if there isn't a set plan in place. Each group may accomplish great things for your school with the help of a well-structured marketing campaign.

Wait, what exactly is a marketing strategy for schools?

An educational institution's marketing staff can be expected to act in accordance with the goals laid out in the school's marketing plan. It's very strategic, with goals, measurements, and the means by which they'll be attained in detail.

We advise keeping it brief and to the point. Writing a school marketing idea that is detailed enough to guide your team but not so long and boring that no one will read it is a fine balance. This article will outline the different phases necessary to develop digital marketing strategies for schools that win over the support of your entire organization.

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School Branding

Branding your school involves more than just designing a logo or creating a trending hashtag; it's a continual process that happens all around you. It constitutes a crucial part of who you are. New to branding? Go for the school branding guide to get started.

A school's brand is a symbolic representation of its educational goals and culture. It's a symbol of your identity, your community's ideals, and your pride in those things. It also fosters a sense of community pride and solidarity throughout your school. If your branding is effective, it can improve people's perceptions and opinions of your school.

school marketing tip

How To Market Your School With A Core Message

After discussing brand identity at a general level, let's dive into the specifics of how to construct it, beginning with your brand's central statement. Your primary message is a succinct statement outlining a local need your institution helps fill. Typically, this only takes a line or two to express.

Start by answering these questions to help shape your central message:

  • What do parents and educators expect and require from the educational system?
  • How does your school system measure student achievement?
  • Find out what other businesses in your industry have to offer by looking at their offerings.
  • Which features of your school district set it apart from others?
  • In what ways do you feel your schools have excelled?

Marketing Strategies For Schools To Promote Your Institution Online

Creating brand-new marketing strategies for schools to promote your institution online? The act of putting pen to paper might be intimidating, so we've outlined an easy process to help you get started.

1. Establishing Your Goals

You should know the goals of your school before you begin writing for them. Your schools' marketing plan is a good resource for determining your marketing goals, and following it will help to keep you on track and in sync with the rest of the school's staff. On the other hand, a marketing plan will typically span a shorter amount of time to allow your team to measure and make adjustments more frequently.

Some typical school marketing ideas are listed below.

  • Raising Product Recognition

One of your goals for marketing for schools can be to improve brand awareness of your institution locally so that more potential new students and their families will be aware of it. Attracting new students to your school relies heavily on this phase of the enrollment process. This is a common goal in the business plans of smaller or brand-new educational institutions that are looking to expand their visibility.

  • Facilitating Recruitment Efforts

The possibility of falling short of enrollment goals in any given year should make this a priority for any school; however, your team may be especially attentive to it. Marketing managers and coordinators can significantly encourage prospective parents to apply by working with admissions staff to guide them through enrollment.

  • Brand Maintenance On An Ongoing Basis

Even if your school is already the best in its region, you must do everything possible to be at the forefront of prospective parents' minds. Ever ponder the logic behind the continued advertising of industry giants like McDonald's and Nike? They want to keep their brand top-of-mind by reminding customers why they should continue to buy from them.

  • Facilitating Better Dialogue With Parents

Every school knows that including parents is a great way to boost students' attendance, conduct, and performance in class. But, no matter how well your school communicates with parents, you can always do better.

2. Plan Out Your Marketing Ideas For School

After deciding what you want to achieve, you may begin marketing your school to get there. In this stage, you will document the steps you intend to take to realize these goals.

If you wish to increase enrollments, for instance, you can decide that it would be preferable for parents to enroll their children digitally rather than printing out and mailing them in a paper form. After you've made that determination, you can look at whether:

  • Your website is now primed for electronic advertising.
  • Your website makes signing up for services online a breeze.
  • Many parents have heard that they can enroll their children in your school via the internet.
  • The enrollment page that your web ads direct parents to is simple and straightforward, which is great.
  • You can tailor your marketing ideas for schools to overcome any objections parents may have to enroll their children online.

3. Select Your Preferred Advertising Outlets

Getting through this next section will be difficult. Think about the digital means at your disposal to direct visitors to the section of your site where they can accomplish the desired goal. 

Advertising channel

We suggest you create a multi-channel prospecting strategy that utilizes a variety of channels to provide your clients with a unified and uniform experience.

When selecting marketing channels, make sure they: 

  • Are you in the range of your financial constraints
  • Bolster your advertising goals
  • Target demographic users
  • You to communicate with your intended audience

With inbound marketing, you attract customers by drawing their attention to your business through material like blog posts, social media updates, and white papers. 

4. Determine Your KPIs

When you know where you want to travel, you can begin planning how you will know when you have arrived. You can use measurements to gauge your marketing efforts' success, known as key performance indicators (KPIs).

Important KPIs

KPIs exist by default for several purposes. With an enrollment goal in mind, it makes sense that applications for enrollment would figure prominently among your key performance indicators. Key performance indicators could include the number of downloads and the percentage of active users of a parent communication app if the goal is to improve communication with parents.

5. Tweak, Evaluate, And Enhance

As you fine-tune your marketing idea for school, don't forget the little things like time, inventiveness, and tone of voice that will make a big difference. Think carefully about whether your promotion will launch during the regular school year, during the summer break, or just before the deadline for new students to enroll. If you want your school's brand to be consistently reflected in all mediums, your creativity and voice are just as important.

You should always test before launching a new campaign if you have doubts about its potential success. You may learn a lot about the success of your marketing plans for schools by using A/B testing to compare variations. 

Also, take advantage of reports to learn from past mistakes. The abundance of available bespoke reporting is an advantage of digital marketing. Learn from your digital marketing strategies results to see what worked and what should be tweaked for future campaigns.

6. Put Your Social Media To Good Use

The best way to find out what parents want from your school is to interact with them on different social media platforms and find out what they already know. You have the opportunity to respond to their concerns, thereby establishing your institution as a modern, open learning environment rather than a closed one that doesn't seem to care about its students' needs.

Each of these platforms calls for its own unique social media approach. Here are some guidelines we suggest as a school marketing agency that can be applied to any medium with success. 

  • Put the finishing touches on your social media profiles by adding captivating photos and text. Your logo, cover image, contact information, and website address should all look good.
  • Update the status bar on a regular basis. Discover what time of day your audience is most active and frequently posts then.
  • Include videos with the latest developments. Facebook users are more likely to share a video than a post consisting of text alone.

high quality images

7. Redesign Your Web Pages

Most marketing efforts revolve around a website's success. Imparting a professional and trustworthy impression of your institution is the goal of having an up-to-date, visually appealing, and mobile-friendly website. Consumers and parents will have difficulty having faith in a school with a website that is both out of date and unreliable.

Your website could use a lot of work if it's anything like the websites of other educational institutions. Here are a few issues school marketing agencies come across on the majority of school websites:

  • Your website is the first point of inquiry for concerned parents. They will form a negative impression of the institution if the necessary information is unavailable, incorrect, or difficult to find.
  • Most school websites highlight school events and student accomplishments, but they completely ignore the site's primary audience.
  • Most U.S. citizens today use mobile devices to access the internet. Your website is broken if it doesn't look good on all devices.
  • Typographical errors misspelled words, and poor grammar should be corrected immediately. The website's copy needs to be flawless.

8. Boost Your Online Presence By Developing A Better SEO Plan

There are three essential components to every school's approach to search engines:

Online Reviews and Ratings: Online evaluations have replaced word-of-mouth as the primary source of information about a school or district, and if they aren't consistently four or five stars, your establishment may never get a click-through to its website.

Pay-Per-Click ads: PPC ads are a potent form of digital advertising that may be used to raise your school's profile and attract more people to your website. If you're in a pinch and don't have time to follow your school's SEO best practices, a paid ad plan can instantly get you to the top of page 1 of Google.

Search Engine Optimization: Many educational marketing departments don't have the time or means to devote themselves to SEO, which is a protracted game. You'll need to do some keyword analysis and work those terms into your site's title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page content, and in most cases, start a blog. Since SEO's returns aren't as immediate as sponsored ads', many academic marketers ignore it.

Your school may need to invest in one, two, or all three of these critical search engine techniques depending on its short- and long-term goals.

9. Email Workflow Construction

An email workflow is a good place to begin if you follow email marketing best practices while reclaiming more time in your day.

As a cornerstone of inbound marketing, email workflows are essential for educational institutions. A subscriber's contact info, actions, or preferences can trigger a series of emails known as a "workflow" to be delivered to them automatically. 

Automated emails, such as those you may send and forget about, have been shown to reduce workload while simultaneously boosting responses. Our school marketing service is designed and delivered to help you find new students and increase the number of inquiries coming in.

10. Promote Your Business With Regular, Insightful Social Media Ads

Put money into social media marketing for your school if you haven't already. Social media is a great (and cheap) way to get the word out to the families who could potentially enroll in your school.

The following are just a few of the many reasons why social media marketing is so effective:

  • Compare this to the typical CPC of search advertisements, and you'll see a huge difference
  • You can expand your sphere of influence using many lists and advertising strategies
  • A wide range of advertisement formats is available for play

Conclusion

Your school's marketing and communications strategy must evolve in tandem with today's parents' rising standards.

Educators have a tremendous impact on the lives of their students and the development of our societies, making schools a very important place. Providing education and marketing are two separate tasks, and few educators are equipped to handle both. A digital marketing company provides access to additional knowledge, tools, and services for a fraction of the price.

The information you gather about your marketing campaign will prove essential when trying to determine your various strategies' efficacy. As long as you're still moving in the direction of achieving the objectives you established at the outset, it's perfectly okay to make adjustments midway through your campaign.

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