As a private school admissions officer or principal, you know first-hand that attracting parent and students takes more than a great reputation alone in today's competitive landscape. With public schools offering specialized programs and online schools providing digital learning options, you need a data-driven strategy – one that leverages metrics, analytics, and insights to guide your marketing.
Continuously tracking and analyzing marketing performance enables you to optimize your limited resources for maximum enrollment impact. This allows you to gain a competitive edge over schools still relying on outdated marketing tactics.
Here’s how to unlock the data you need to take your enrollment to the next level.
How To Uncover the Data Behind Private School Growth Goals
Pinpoint Your Enrollment Goals
As a private school leader, you need to start by clearly defining your enrollment goals. What specific objectives do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts this year? Get crystal clear on the measurable targets you want to hit.
Examples may include:
- Is it to increase website traffic by 10%?
- To generate 2 more leads per month?
- To boost enrollment figures by 10 students?
- Increase applications by 15% year-over-year?
- Grow enrollment in specific grades or programs?
- Improve diversity of the student population?
By having a clear idea of your marketing objectives, you can determine the KPIs that are most relevant to your goals. For example, your main goal is increasing enrollment numbers, tracking key metrics like inquiries, campus visits, and inquiry-to-enrollment conversion rates will help you connect the dots.
Choose Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) That Align to Goals
Now it’s time to determine the KPIs that will serve as your data roadmap for achieving the defined enrollment goals.
For a goal of increasing applications, relevant KPIs might include:
- Website traffic and conversions
- Organic traffic vs paid traffic
- Application submission rates
- Website traffic and conversions
- Number of inquiries submitted
- Traffic from digital campaigns
- Click-through-rate on emails
While for improving enrollment diversity, you may want to track:
- Demographic info of interested families
- Event attendance in target communities
- Traffic from diversity-focused digital campaigns
The right KPIs allow you to measure marketing performance and pinpoint any problem areas. You’ll spot gaps, make connections, and find opportunities for optimization.
Collect Data With Analytics Tools
The next step is gathering the data. social media analytics tools such as, Hootsuite, Buffer, or Vista Social, will show who engages with your content. Look at followers, clicks, shares, demographics. Email marketing software tracks open and click-through rates for campaigns.
Google Analytics should be central to understand your website traffic.
- Is your qualified traffic increasing?
- Are people staying on pages?
- Are they bouncing or leaving quickly?
- Are the pages converting?
Established Private School Website Traffic Growth
This chart demonstrates the power of leveraging data to drive strategy. Before Cube Creative was helping them with SEO and digital marketing, they had an average of 253 monthly visitors, four years into working with us they have over 1,100 monthly visitors! By tracking website traffic and using insights to optimize content and SEO, together with the school administortors we helped increased organic monthly visitors 335% in four years.
New Local Private School Traffic
When launching marketing for a new private school, metrics are crucial from day one. This chart shows how we were able to take a data-driven approach to help this new school in a competitive market generate nearly 500 monthly website visitors within the first 10 months.
Online Private School Traffic Growth
For online private schools, website traffic is especially vital. This chart illustrates how an established online school used data to refine their approach and achieve nearly 130% organic traffic growth over 2 years.
Crunch the numbers regularly to diagnose your marketing health.
- Is traffic declining on key landing pages?
- Did that social media ad yield more diverse leads?
Making data-driven decisions gets easier as the insights roll in.
Be Flexible and Willing to Tweak
The key to optimizing your private school's marketing strategies is to be flexible and willing to tweak. The marketing landscape is continually changing theregor you need to be ready to maximize outcomes. Private schools have to be flexible and open to making changes. By simply staying open to changes based on data insights will increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts long-term.
If data shows that website traffic is low or social media engagement is minimal, it may be time to reevaluate the marketing plan. This may include updating the messaging, adjusting the SEO strategy, trying new social media platforms, and developing new campaigns or advertisements.
Change Course When The Data Says So
Now that your school has collected KPIs and tracked marketing performance data, the next step is to make data-driven adjustments. These changes are essential for optimizing your school’s digital marketing strategies. Regular evaluation of data can provide your school with insights on what to change to guarantee favourable results.
If the metrics show decreased performance in website traffic or social media engagement, there may be a need to refine the messaging, improve website content, redesign social media campaigns, or enhance online advertising efforts.
For example, data may show that a postcard campaign costs significantly more per acquisition than other campaigns but doesn't generate the desired outcomes. As a result, school administrators can re-allocate those resources and invest them in the campaigns with a higher return on investment (ROI). This not only saves cost but also allows you to focus limited resources, budget, and time on the campaigns that will deliver significant results.
Start Small And Scale Up
Don’t get overwhelmed trying to capture everything at once. Focus first on tracking the KPIs most tied to your goals using one or two key tools. As you get into a groove of monitoring the data and making changes, you can expand your focus.
Let the data pave the way to the enrollment growth you seek. With the right KPI insights, you'll be equipped to refine messaging, improve conversions, reallocate marketing spend, and ultimately meet your student recruitment goals.
Conclusion
Regularly tracking performance data and being willing to adjust course empowers you to connect with prospective families when and where it matters most. While change can be daunting, it’s necessary to thrive in today’s digital-first education landscape.
If you're looking to take your school's marketing to the next level, we offer a free 30-minute consultation. On this call, we’ll assess your current approach, identify opportunities for improvement, and provide customized strategies to help you start optimizing enrollment metrics with data-driven marketing.
Don’t leave your school’s growth up to chance. Schedule your free consultation now and learn how data-led marketing can deliver the edge you need to achieve your admission goals.
