In the old days, private schools bragged about dedicated faculty, excellent student-to-teacher ratios, and strategies in educating the whole child, which was the focus of marketing a school.
Nowadays, employing only this approach may fail to attract students to enroll in these institutions. In addition to this strategy, one also needs to use other marketing approaches.
Social media engagement is one such strategy. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more are available platforms you can use. Increase your branding and improve your parent engagement by choosing the most suitable social media platform.
One of the best private school marketing strategies when using social media is to reach out to just a few people. Do not adopt a cluttered approach that reaches out to the highest number possible. Instead, target a few ones who already have an interest in your school.
Then create a wildfire of interest that you can grow from there and proceed using other effective methods that work for word-of-mouth strategies, SEO strategies that work for most types of business and organization, and competitor analysis.
How to Market a School
Marketing for schools, especially private school marketing, means helping families find your private school as they initiate searching for institutions that give the best academic services like what you provide.
It also means information about you and your institution is readily available, and such information is not hard to find. Also, it means it is clear that you are trying to reach out to them to let them know you have the best services to offer in terms of their needs.
To make sure your school marketing produces results, here are some tips:
Be specific and decide how to gauge success
Measuring success in school marketing requires seeing what you need to achieve in the first place.
What types of families are you trying to attract? Low-income or high-income? Families with a medical background or an engineering background?
This kind of information works for schools with particular goals and missions related to fields of knowledge. Are you a medically-focused institution or an engineering-focused institution, and are you trying to build a strong reputation in these kinds of educational fields? Decide early on because that influences how you should strategize in your marketing plan.
Compare yourself with other similar institutions around.
If you are trying to do independent school marketing or getting the services of a marketing agency using their tried-and-tested website design and SEO strategies, you would want to know the competitive advantage of similar institutions that operate in the same locality.
Your marketing agency can help you gather information on what works for others, but you are not doing it yourself.
- What do parents say about you compared to others?
- What improvements do they suggest?
- How do social media platforms play a role in the business competition? Do you need your agency to help you draw out a plan to maximize your K-12 education marketing Facebook strategies or Instagram, or Twitter, for that matter?
For sure, they can help your private school to optimize your campaigns on different social media platforms.
Reinforce Your Message.
Private schools have their brand story successes to boast of, and undoubtedly, you also have yours.
Learn how to make your school’s message heard and let people know the values you want to impart to your wards/students. These are the elements that you want to put into your message throughout all your marketing efforts.
Build a Website for Your Private School
While building your social media and web presence, you want to make sure your audience has various channels to engage with you, and here is where a website is valuable. If you still do not have a website and no one in your team knows how to build one, it is time to consider hiring a web design agency. They have the expertise in creating websites for educational institutions and other businesses and organizations.
For the most part, you will decide what information to include. Then you will categorize that information and organize it on your website.
Here are tips for such a project. If you already have a website, incorporate the suggestions to make changes you deem appropriate.
Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
Your website should be responsive. That means it can adjust to fit any device, and users can have a good experience using it, whether they are using a tablet, a phone, or a desktop to access your site.
What is a non-responsive design? A non-responsive design on a website means that it cannot adjust to the screen size of the user’s device, making it very hard to navigate. If the visitor scrolls right and left and zooms in and out constantly to view a page’s content on your site can be a tiresome experience.
Consider this a crucial aspect of your project because many young people are using mobile devices, and such usage is steadily on the rise. You want to capture everyone, so make sure your website is easily accessible to your target audience.
Encourage Sharing
You will want your website’s content to be shareable for you to reach more and more of your target audience. One of the best ways for you to achieve that goal is to make use of members of your audience who already know you and are already getting your services.
Create interesting and valuable content not only for interested students but also for interested parents. Make sure that your content stands out and is worth sharing with others.
This strategy is an easy way to build your social media presence among your target audience because you need such a presence on the internet.
One of the biggest tips that we can offer for your campaign, besides creating great content, is to make it easy for anybody to share your great content on as many platforms as possible. So, along with your blogs, articles, images, and announcements, put buttons and links that lead to Twitter, Facebook, etc. Those are the great tools through which your visitors can quickly introduce you to the audience that matters to you.
A Brief Word on Competitor Analysis
When you already have a website, consider using a competitor analysis tool. The tool is also great for search engine optimization (SEO), a technique that can make your website rank for people who do not know you yet but are searching for good educational services like what you offer.
SEO works for local and non-local searches that potential parents do when searching through Google and other similar search engines. For SEO ranking, the most effective strategy is to use the right keywords in your content.
If you need a good idea about keywords that work in the education industry, use a competitor analysis tool and know the keywords that drive conversions for your competitors. Get their original idea, and based on that idea, develop your strategy, or for a start, use the keyword strategies your competitor currently uses.
Word of Mouth as a Marketing Strategy for Your School
Since your business is a private school, you are most likely targeting a local audience in the community where your institution operates. Word of mouth marketing is a good strategy in such a situation, through which people recommend your school to their family and friends.
In your industry and elsewhere, word of mouth influences up to 50% of purchasing decisions. With that leverage of the word of mouth strategy and the fact that local marketing is critical to your business, you ought to seriously consider this strategy and make sure to allot a considerable amount of resources for that.
How do you do that exactly?
For instance, be mindful of corporate social responsibility when promoting your school. Create social events that give social benefits like sports events, local academic contests, and so on. Let people know you stage such events and that they are welcome to participate.
Showcase the best talents that your school has. You can do this by creating subject days for math, history, science, etc., and present the brightest minds in those areas. Debate events are also great for showcasing the quality of your students.
Another way is to work with potential media partners. Work with these entities to identify opportunities where your school and your students can add value to the community.
Of course, student security, safety, and general welfare are critical as well. Provide images in your website and social media accounts of comprehensive services that cover these crucial aspects of student education.
Build credibility and a positive reputation. Most parents would always consider a school that delivers quality education, resulting in more confident and well-rounded individuals.
If you need help marketing your school, then reach out to us for a free consultation. We would be happy to help you!
