If your private school's enrollment has been declining recently, it may be the best time to consider automating your marketing campaign. Around 50% of school leaders say that enrollment has been dwindling during the pandemic, adding that the phenomenon is observable in the pre-school level up to the secondary level.
With a marketing automation tool, you can free yourself from attending to smaller tasks and focus on the part of your funnel that needs more of your attention.
Faced with this challenge, you need to boost your private school marketing campaign, and one of the ways to do it is to automate your processes. Salesforce reported that nearly 70% of marketing leaders depend on marketing automation, and 1 out of every 5 of them plan to use a new marketing automation platform soon.
Advantages of School Marketing Automation Solution
Here are ways you can use marketing automation to grow your school, attract more students, effectively communicate with parents, and prosper.
1. Marketing Automation School – It Enhances Your Productivity and Helps You Effectively Use Your Time
If your school staff works on the same tasks each day, they can be losing time, which they can spend doing more important tasks. Putting your energy into tasks like publishing blog posts and social media posts can make you lose precious time you can spend nurturing leads and maximizing profits.
With a marketing automation tool, you can free yourself from attending to smaller tasks and focus on the part of your funnel that needs more of your attention. For instance, you can focus on the lower part of the funnel where conversions take place.
The software also helps to make marketing through multiple channels manageable. How long does your staff send personalized messages? It takes hours perhaps, or even days.
Next, imagine the amount of time they spend to convey the same message via different channels. Overall, it can take seemingly forever, and the use of time is inefficient.
With an automation tool, the process of engaging with your audience across multiple channels will become easy and fast.
Effectively marketing your school does not only require knowing where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. It also requires knowing their level of knowledge about your school.
2. It Allows Creating Highly-Targeted Campaigns through Segmented Personalization
Marketing automation software as a tool for lead generation for private schools also helps school marketers to target the right audience. That is because it allows audience segmentation. In segmenting your contacts, you define the settings in the software, and it will automatically move contacts across segments as needed.
Such a feature will ensure that you send the right message depending on where your contacts are on the buyer’s journey. This feature also guarantees that you do not lose contacts simply because your email blast was not timely.
In marketing, the segment is a fundamental concept, especially in email marketing: a group of contacts who share the same interests. At this level, personalization gets to be more relevant because it provides more data to act upon, such as sending an invitation or discounts to top students from the last school year.
Effectively marketing your school does not only require knowing where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. It also requires knowing their level of knowledge about your school. With such information at hand, you can implement personalization by showing them that you understand their needs and are willing to help them with their questions.
Because of the personalization features that marketing automation for schools offers, you can engage with your prospects far better than without them. A report published in 2019 by Zembula showed that 72% of potential customers engaged more with personalized content than content without a personal touch.
3. It Provides Ways to Supersize Your Inbound Marketing
Direct mail campaigns, billboards, and print ads are typically the focus of school marketing efforts, with marketers putting little effort into word-of-mouth and inbound marketing strategies.
While these outbound strategies can help augment brand awareness, school administrators should also look elsewhere to increase enrollment.
Today, buyers are more empowered. They have more choices, and they can use the internet to search for products. It is beneficial for buyers, but it makes the job of marketers more challenging.
Inbound marketing can engage these empowered buyers and can help to avoid wasting resources on uninterested customers.
First, you need to have a website and an impressive website it must be. Many schools invest in a new website, but unfortunately, other schools are lagging. They need to upgrade their site to create an impression of excellence among its visitors.
Your school’s website is a big part of your marketing strategy. This part is where you must allocate a portion of your budget targeted to increase enrollment. Poorly designed websites, static content, and outdated aesthetics will prevent parents from taking the next step.
Together with the use of marketing technology for schools and putting up an impressive website, use different inbound marketing strategies, including:
Make Your Website Informative As Well
Your website is the best channel of interaction, and its visitors look for information. Provide the following details:
- Scholarships
- Fees and payment structure
- Admission process
- School performance
- Co-curricular activities
- Alumni
- Motto
- Success stories
- School ethics
- Principal’s message
Provide valuable and reliable information to lure parents into taking the desired course of action.
Independent School Marketing Requires Prioritizing Online Presence
A shift in the way people search for schools occurred in recent years due to social media and search engines like Google, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Parents and students in the modern world know that these channels can give answers to their pain points. They turn to Facebook to get information about schools and read reviews that can enlighten them before making that crucial decision.
Thus, powerfully use social media. You can run ads to target local communities, and you can even send personalized messages directly to parents’ mobile devices.
Manage your social media pages to boost your market’s interest. Post updates, educational content, and anything helpful to your target audience.
If you need help in implementing strategies to increase your online presence using automation software, your provider will provide you such support.
Create a Community of Parents and Students
Create a Facebook community where parents can communicate with one another and ask their questions. This channel is open to everyone and utilizable 24/7 to address concerns quickly. That will help you build trust in your organization and portray it as a relevant source of information when stakeholders direly need information.
Q&A Live Sessions
Live streaming is a popular strategy that online courses, businesses, and influencers use. With this strategy, you can:
- Boost interaction
- Grow online presence
- Improve content marketing
- Quickly answer student queries
- Get new ideas on nurturing your content
Use Calls to Action (CTAs) to Generate Student Leads
Marketing automation platforms offer tools to make it easy for schools to convert prospective students. Landing pages and CTAs are some strategies you can use in this regard.
You can grab your audience’s attention by using CTAs and prompting them to take the next step in the admissions journey. CTAs also function as mediums to lead users to landing pages, where they can either fill out an application form, or register in a webinar, or post their questions.
Check out if the automation platform allows monitoring and gauging CTA buttons’ performance. That feature enables users to make the most out of these small but potent marketing devices. You can place the same CTA device on multiple pages or incorporate them in emails and forms.
4. Use Admissions Marketing Automation – It Helps Streamline Enrollment Processes
Admission marketing automation is the umbrella term for an amalgamation of technology and processes for growing enrollment fast. For this part of your marketing, the tool to use is CRM software that provides a system of engagement. The system empowers you to use student information (behavior and demography) to help them interact with your institution and build a personal connection.
Upon deployment as an integral part of your automation plan, the CRM performs repetitive tasks on autopilot and allows your staff to spend their time connecting with students one-on-one.
The benefits include:
- Saving Time
- Increased personalization in admissions outreach
- Leveraging analytics to analyze what works best for increasing engagement and enrollment
- Maximize the use of budget for admissions marketing
Take advantage of these specific upgrades on your admissions:
Automatically store all data on the cloud
You can access your data anytime, anywhere. With such a system, there is no possibility of losing data. Your multimedia, pictures, files, and documents remain safe in the cloud. The control and access are via role-based authorization.
Streamline application processes
Students will no longer stand in long queues to turn in paper forms. All they need to do is apply online, and the system keeps track of status updates. That is made possible by the system’s online tracking system.
Efficient recruitment of students
Get the benefit of managing the whole process from a single dashboard – from inquiry to registration. Sophisticated technologies such as mobile and cloud solutions help you accomplish these tasks with less effort and fast.
Transparency and Interaction
Engage students with transparent information. For instance, details about student selection are vital for students and parents to know. Also, leverage web channels to interact fast with students. Students prefer web and mobile device interaction in today’s high-tech world.
5. Leverage Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Local SEO is another automation strategy to use for marketing your private school. It can help you promote your school to local families in and around your location using marketing strategies such as local keywords and creating optimized content.
Local SEO is the best way to improve local search ranking and drive traffic to your website. The immediate goal is to place your website and its content in the most visible spots in local searches.
If you are new to this strategy, your marketing automation provider will give you the details. They will teach you how to do local SEO to make your school and your site appear on top of search lists that searchers see when they type in a phrase on search engines.
You need to include local SEO strategies when crafting a plan for marketing your private school.
Specific ways to improve via local SEO automation include:
Create a Google My Business (GMB) Account
By creating this account, you will optimize the Google listing of your school and rank your school higher in Google local search results.
To help you rank higher, you must verify the ownership of such an account. Next, provide up-to-date information, and include the ff:
- Working hours
- Logo
- Payment methods
- Services you provide
- Images
- Address and contact info
Publish posts, news, and special offers in your account.
Get Regular Reviews
Happy parents’ reviews encourage more students to enroll in your school. Do not forget to respond to existing reviews personally.
Optimize Mobile Capacity of Your Website
Make sure you have a mobile-friendly website.
- The website should load quickly on any device.
- Make your content legible. Use large fonts.
- Use images sparingly and create pages that load quickly. Sparingly use copies and graphics.
Use Local Keywords in Your Content
Much of SEO is based on the notion that searchers use the same or similar words when using search engines. First, you figure out keywords applicable to your website and then proceed to take steps to improve your ranking using those keywords.
Targeting local keywords proves effective, and by volume, searchers are more likely to use general keywords than geo-optimized keywords. Consider the keyword high schools. Many websites worldwide want to rank for this keyword. On the other hand, only a handful of websites use geo-optimized variants, such as “high school in Asheville.”
Include local stem words, such as near me, close to, located in, etc. It is a practical approach to catching potential local families and students.
Automating your marketing will benefit your team by enhancing their workflow efficiency and avoiding wasting time on menial and tedious tasks. For your entire organization, it means providing a cost-effective way of improving accuracy and consistency in operations.
Other aspects of your school operation where automation software are valuable include:
- Social media engagement
- Sales
- Analytics
- Administrative activities, etc.
Final Thoughts
If your private school's enrollment has been declining recently, and you think it might be time to consider automating your marketing campaign or you need help marketing your school, then reach out to us for a free consultation. We would be happy to help you!
