You may think that your school has been doing all the right things. However, how sure are you that people that matter have heard about your school or the things you have been doing? Merely doing the right things does not guarantee that your target audience is aware of your existence. Your target audience – families in your community, as well as the surrounding areas of your operation – need to know!
Suppose this is the case with your private school, and your entire organization agrees that you need to come up with a more effective and robust marketing strategy to lure more applicants in. In that case, one of the proven techniques you need to consider is using inbound marketing, together with other tested methods.
Inbound Marketing Explained
So, what is inbound marketing, and how can it help private schools?
If you haven’t heard the term before, here is how inbound marketing works.
Well, by now, you may already be familiar with private school marketing as you may have been involved in both the online and offline marketing efforts of your school. However, you may feel that something is still missing, and you need to learn and focus on particular strategies that are more effective and will be more beneficial for learning institutions like yours.
One of these strategies is inbound marketing for schools, which may sound new to you, but it is actually nothing new.
Simply defined, inbound marketing is the process of marketing to target customers who may have already reached out to your institution. The reason it is called “inbound” is that, as the term connotes, your target audience has come to you on their own, usually after having read and engaged with your content. When applied to your school, inbound marketing is the process of attracting potential clients – parents and students.
This is opposed to attracting cold prospects, which is the goal of outdated outbound marketing strategies. Some examples of these traditional strategies are brochures, direct mails, and billboards.
On the other hand, inbound contacts are referred to as warm contacts. This means your potential clients – students and their parents or guardians – who have engaged with the content of your school’s website.
Inbound Marketing for Independent Private Schools
Now, you may ask: how can this inbound strategy help with marketing your independent private school?
Your school, in all likelihood, runs a website where you upload images, videos, and other types of marketing materials. Like your school, other similar institutions also have their own websites.
These other schools are obviously your competitors who know how to take advantage of the power of their online presence – their website content – to lure more applicants and consequently, drive more revenues to their business.
The specific thing that they do with their website’s power is what is known as content marketing. This type of marketing plays a significant role in inbound marketing for learning institutions and other types of businesses in general.
The key is to create content that people who browse the net are looking for. As applied to your school, this means developing the type of content that your target audience – parents, students, families, the local community, as well as the surrounding areas – are searching for.
A private school inbound marketing campaign begins with well-thought-out strategies that are compatible with how Google makes searches work for various businesses. Complying with Google and taking its algorithm into consideration is important because most people today search for particular products and services through the giant search engine. Now, to use Google for this purpose, related keywords are used.
If you don’t know yet, Google is a sucker for keywords. Let’s say a user makes a Google search using a particular keyword that happens to be one of the keywords you used in your content. When Google crawls through your content with the keyword, your page will be included in Google’s search results page. The idea is to make your page land at the top of such results pages. This will drive more traffic to your site. And this is why it is called “inbound marketing.”
Significance of Keywords in an Inbound Strategy
You are now familiar with the basics of Google searches, keywords, content marketing, as well as how you can take advantage of these things and use them as tools for your school’s marketing campaigns. The next step is to learn how to find the right keywords to use and what you should and should not do when using these keywords. After that, you can proceed with other aspects of inbound marketing.
Research. This is the key to coming up with the appropriate keywords for your school. The idea is to come up with the right keywords for your business. That keyword must be used frequently or at least used in your target locality or area of operations.
However, you must also take into consideration the current saturation levels in the digital content market, which is relatively high. Thus, it may be necessary to search deeper for keywords you think do not have a lot of competition.
Once you have determined the appropriate keywords to use, the next step would be to create your content for these keywords. For instance, you intend to write a blog post based on your chosen keywords – “private Lutheran school in East Lansing, MI."
You want to optimize the post as much as possible for search engines using your preferred keywords. Once done, you are now ready to post your content online with the hope that potential customers in Lansing and surrounding areas will come across your post while they are searching for private Lutheran schools near them.
Distributing your keywords evenly throughout your blog post is only a part of the strategy you can implement. Just make sure to insert keywords naturally. This means your sentences with the keywords must read smoothly and not be forced. You must also avoid stuffing your article with keywords because search engines like Google frown on this practice. Worse, search engines may even punish your site, which will only put all your efforts to waste.
Following are some parts of the blog post where you can include your keywords:
- Title
- Headers/Subheaders
- URLs
- Alt texts found in images
- Meta Descriptions
Inserting your keywords in these places will allow your post to be found more easily among the massive number of blog posts on the net.
To make things clearer for you, let us cite an example. Let’s say that your private school is located in East Lansing, Michigan. You may be tempted to use keywords like “school in East Lansing, MI,” which is obviously logical.
However, you should not just take it with a grain of salt and use the keyword phrase right away. It would make a lot of sense to first check if this, indeed, would be a great keyword idea. So, how do you do it?
On the Google search box, type in the keyword “school in East Lansing, MI.” As you are typing the phrase, a pop-up box would show a few suggested search keyword phrases similar to what you are typing. In our particular example, you may find “high schools in East Lansing, elementary schools in East Lansing, and trade schools in East Lansing, among others in the list.
The suggested keyword phrases are the most popular ones that are most closely related to the search. It wouldn’t hurt if you also include these other keyword phrases in your blog posts to help improve your chances of landing on the top pages of Google’s search results pages. Just make sure to choose ones that are applicable to your business.
Now that all keyword-related matters are settled, publishing or posting your blog is the next step. Keep in mind to use a variety of social media platforms. This will not only help keep you relevant (which is, incidentally, another aspect to consider for a well-planned inbound marketing campaign for your school.) Using several social media platforms will also make it easy for your followers using different platforms to share your content if they are compelled to do so.
Solidifying the Inbound Marketing Strategy for Your Private School
You may think that everything you need to do has already been addressed, so it is time to rest for a while and celebrate. Not so fast! You have only completed the basics, and there are more important things that you still need to do.
Remember that marketing is an ongoing process; thus, you have ongoing tasks. Particularly for inbound marketing, there are some aspects that you need to pay close attention to.
If you talk to experts and ask them for some of the best ways of marketing private schools, you will most likely be offered a few other strategies you can try. These include:
Having a Responsive Website
You have to have a responsive website design. This way, you can ensure that your pages will register well when viewed on various devices and screen sizes.
Having a responsive website design ensures that all elements included in your pages adapt well to the screen size used, regardless of the device like tablet PCs, desktop computers, and smartphones. Both parents and students can then navigate your website seamlessly to get the particular information without waiting for a long time for your pages to load.
Using a Content Hub
Also called a pillar page or hub page, a content hub is a web page that has the content about a central topic or, in the case of private schools like yours, the related services you offer. Several pages link back to the central hub.
Some of the benefits of using a central hub include the following:
- Increased user engagement
- Improved website traffic
- Lead generation
- Increased time spent on your website
When site visitors want to quickly know how your site works and how they can find the specific information they are looking for, they will just refer to the central hub and click the appropriate link there.
Applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Keywords play an important role in search engine optimization. SEO is the process that makes your website and individual web pages visible and relevant to both users and search engines. However, keywords are not the only consideration when optimizing your pages for search engines.
SEO today likewise puts a lot of premium on content relevance and quality, social media branding, and website user experience, among others. Therefore, it is important to provide high-quality content that your audience will find relevant and informative.
Using Video Content
One powerful and compelling way to promote your school to prospective clients is by using videos. You can tell the story of your school through a well-prepared video presentation. It would be a more effective way to send your message across than merely listing your school’s past milestones and achievements in text.
Local Directories
You can find a lot of these directories online, where users can write reviews and feedback about your private school. Try to sign up with a number of these local directories. Keep in mind that it is important that you only provide updated information about your school and its services. You can encourage parents of your current students to continuously provide positive feedback and reviews.
Check out Great Schools and Private School Review for more information.
Final Word
All your past efforts in promoting your school may have resulted to some success. However, things evolve fast, especially in the information age. We made sure to provide you with evergreen content or a long-lasting guide that you can hopefully use for the inbound marketing efforts of your private school.
If you need help marketing your private school, you can always get in touch with us. Contact us for more information and set a schedule for a free consultation.
