Attract Prospective Parents: Private School Ad Strategies

With increasing competition, as a K-12 school principal or administrator, you’re always searching for effective advertising strategies to reach prospective parents, their children, and ultimately stand out. This article outlines four research-based advertising channels that may be beneficial for private schools to explore to boost enrollment numbers and maximize their recruitment budget.

Private School Advertising Tips and Ideas 

Although you can use different educational advertisement ideas to attract parents and their children and build your private school brand, sometimes you need aggressive marketing strategies to be effective. This calls for using current tools and technologies to create engaging educational content to make things easier. This is why private schools are investing in school advertisements. A typical educational institute should spend the equivalent of at least 1-2 students tuition per year.

According to HubSpot, the general rule of thumb for a marketing budget in a business-to-consumer (B2C) market is typically between 5-10% of your goal annual revenue. This is also in line with The CMO Survey, sponsored by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Deloitte LLP, and the American Marketing Association, which found that about 11% of a B2C company’s annual revenue is spent on digital marketing.

Translating that to a private school budget, your total marketing budget should be 5-10% of the total tuition revenue you want to collect. In other words, you should budget about 1-2 students tuition costs for marketing. 

For example, if we take the average annual tuition per student of $12,350, the total marketing budget should be between $12,350 and $24,700 for a small private school.

How Are School Advertisements Different From Other Ads?

Your school’s promotion strategy should also include school advertisements, digitalization, and adopting modern trends of transforming and moving online. School advertisements aim to create awareness of your school’s existence and entice prospects to enroll. Investing in practical education advertisement ideas helps to maintain an excellent reputation for your school.

Below are four effective school advertising ideas for k-12 private schools.

4 Effective Education advertising ideas

1. Facebook Ads

(Image Source: Statista)

Many schools use Facebook and Instagram to promote and interact with parents and students. However, Meta ads can help you reach parents looking for private school options. According to Statista, Facebook boasts roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023. Out of these numbers, nearly two million can be reached with ads. 

With Meta ads, you can get more enrollment, cost less than traditional TV and print ads, and have exceptionally high impressions. It can expose your school to a bigger audience that will fit your school well.

The content for school advertisements on Facebook and Instagram includes admission dates, open days, open houses, and school events such as fundraising activities etc. The list is endless. These ads for k-12 private schools can be targeted using your parental persona, ensuring you reach the perfect audience for your school.

There are different ways to advertise on Instagram and Facebook, such as:

• Carousel Ads: These allow you to display about 10 images in one ad, helping to generate more engagements.
• Lead Ads: These are lead-generation ads that help you get more prospective students
• Page Like Ads: This helps drive users to like your school’s Facebook page. This is great for driving awareness.
• Engagement Ads: This ad type helps to boost your page posts and increase engagements such as likes, comments, and shares.
• Image ads: These ads are designed to drive users to websites or apps.

Below is an example of a Facebook and Instagram for our fictional school, Greenfield Academy.

Meta Ads for K-12 Private School Strategies

1.  Set the Right Goals for Your Private School's Advertising Objectives

The first thing you need to do before using Meta advertising for your k-12 private school is to have a goal in place. Your goal can be to create awareness for your private school, reach more students, get more traffic to your website, reach more prospective parents, etc. Selecting the right objective and goal will increase your chances of success on Meta’s platforms.

2. Choose the Right Audience

Meta offers several ad targeting options: location, interests, demographics, connections, and custom/lookalike audiences. Private school marketers report that custom and lookalike audiences based on existing parent data tend to generate higher conversion rates than general targeting parameters.

3. Set the Right Budget

Meta provides different budget plans for ads. You can use pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-impression. You will want to choose the number of days you want your ad to run and its specified budget. Meta can adjust your budget for you depending on the interest your ad is generating. Thankfully, it will not exceed the total amount you planned to spend.

2. Google Ads

Google Ads can be another practical private school advertisement idea you don’t want to miss. They are seen online on websites, Gmail, Google search, YouTube Videos, etc.

Industry data shows that Google Ads has the potential for significant returns on ad spending. According to Google, businesses make about $8 profit from every $1 spent. Additionally, studies indicate that most prospective parents use Google as an initial research tool, engaging with hundreds of digital touchpoints during their search process. It should also be noted that they do this before they fill out a lead form.

There are several different Google Ads, such as:

• Search Campaigns: According to Oberlo, Google has 8.5 billion daily searches, so you will reach people searching for private schools in your area. Search ads effectively drive traffic and leads to your private school website.
• Display Campaigns: These ad types allow you to reach parents with engaging images as they browse other websites. The most significant selling factor for these is that they will enable you to retarget audiences appropriately. However, I don’t recommend them for a variety of reasons.
• Video Campaigns: With these, you can show ads on YouTube. This helps boost your school's general awareness and get more prospective students.
• Smart Campaigns: These ad types allow you to create ads with Google. Their automated system helps you to get the best targeting for your ads.

Google Ad Strategies for Private School Advertisements

1. Use Automated Bidding to Help Save Time and Money
2. Use Location-Based Bid Modifiers to Target Your Prospective Parents Locations: For instance, if we use Greenfield Academy as our example, and they are based in Asheville, North Carolina, they can use the location-based bid modifiers to set a higher bid for parents looking in the area. This would help them to get more conversions from their location.
3. Target Parents by Using Demographic Targeting: Google allows you to target your parent personas (age, gender, status, and household income). Ensuring your parent personas are accurate will help with the accuracy of your reach and the quality of leads from your ads.

Find an example of a Google search ad for Greenfield below.

Clicking on it leads to a landing page, directing traffic directly to the website.

3. Video ads for Education

Educational video ads can be an impactful tool for reaching prospective students. Market research indicates that many internet users now watch online videos regularly. The 25-34 age demographic tends to have the highest viewership. Additionally, studies show that video content can help drive prospective students and parents further down the enrollment funnel. For example, one report found that relevant program videos make prospects 60% more likely to complete an application after viewing.

With videos, you can expand your reach and attract prospective parents and their children to apply to your k-12 private school. The content for school advertisements you can use for your school video is:

• School performances and events
• Curriculum video tutorials
• Teacher vlogging
• Video from charity events
• Award ceremonies, etc.

Video content can be displayed on your website, Instagram, Facebook page, TikTok, YouTube channel, and video emails.

Video Strategies to Help You Create the Best Educational Ad

1. Effective Video Planning for Private School Advertisement: First off, you need to prepare your key messages, style, and the people to feature. Feature staff, students, or parents in your school education ads.
2. Plan Your Video Filming: The location of your video shoot is essential. Use clean and distraction-free areas in your school. Ensure you use a good camera that can shoot at least that will give you good shots in the video.
3. Edit Your Videos to Be Short and Snappy: Statistics show that 5% of video watchers can switch off after a minute and 60% by 2 minutes. The visuals used should captivate and reinforce your school's brand and theme. Adding music to the background of the video will also enhance it.
4. Share Your Videos on Your Different Platforms: This includes YouTube, emails, social media platforms, and your website.

4. Advertisements on School Websites to Create Awareness and Interaction

Having an up-to-date website for your private school is critical. Today’s modern society allows anyone to search and be directed to school websites. Therefore, you must have an information-rich website showcasing your school’s name, contact information, application instructions, and other relevant information.

The strategies below will help you get the best from your website.

• Ensure Your Website Has a Responsive Design: Mobile devices are everywhere, and parent routinely use their phones to browse the internet. If your site doesn’t look good there, you have lost them before you even had a chance to show off your school.
• Ensure Your Website Is Search Engine Optimized: Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to drive targeted traffic from search engines to your website. This is where you need a proper keyword strategy to create valuable content for your audience, and it will also rank on search engines.
• Share Your Website Content: It’s a lot harder for the content on your website to generate any results without promotion. Ensure you promote your school's website in emails, social media networks, and other relevant places to drive traffic back to your website.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive landscape, implementing a strategic advertising approach is vital for K-12 institutions looking to boost enrollment and remain top-of-mind with prospective students and parents. This article outlined the top data-driven best practices across four high-potential channels – Meta, Google, Video, and school websites. By leveraging these tactics, private school administrators, marketing managers, principals, and admissions coordinators can build greater awareness, generate more leads, and stand out.

If you need help developing or optimizing your school's advertising strategy, reach out to me. I offer complimentary strategy calls to assess your current efforts and provide recommendations tailored to your school's specific goals and budget. Let me know how I can help take your recruitment efforts to the next level!