As a private school marketing or admissions professional, you know that a well-crafted marketing plan is essential to meeting your enrollment goals and ensuring your school's long-term success. This post will walk you through the key steps to creating an effective marketing plan, including clarifying your goals, assessing your resources, developing strategies, and measuring your results. By following this roadmap, you'll be well on your way to attracting and retaining more of your ideal families.
A school marketing plan is a roadmap to your organization’s success. Yes, you are getting it right to be gathering at a table and preparing an effective plan to keep your school’s marketing initiatives on track through the coming years.
Your Mission and Vision as Your Guide
Before we delve deeper into school marketing plan 101, just a few words about your mission and vision. Your organization is guided by two mission and vision statements, which communicate the direction and values of your organization.
Thus, whatever you do and all the plans you make are made with your mission and vision in mind, which especially applies to your marketing planning.
This will prevent you from including marketing activities and initiatives that do not align with your organization’s mission and vision in the plan. This must be clear to everybody participating at the table.
Challenges in Making Marketing Plans for Schools
From planning to implementing marketing plans, schools face many challenges. The uncertainty around next year’s enrolment, especially during COVID-19, can make it challenging for all schools to create a marketing plan and find resources to fund its implementation.
Nonetheless, you must create a plan and ensure that it will generate results when implemented. You would want to ensure that you have a steady flow of income and that all your operations will be supported by the funding that will come from student enrollment. Making an effective plan can help guide you on what strategies to use in those particular aspects.
But how can you make an effective plan? That’s one more challenge you need to consider and probably the most important question in this subject.
A private school marketing plan should be:
- A carefully crafted so that it can help keep an organization on track
- A measure for performance and progress achieved in marketing
- Help identify marketing efforts that drive the best results
- Provides a map or a guide on a possible re-execution of components of a marketing campaign proven to be effective.
When these components have been carefully considered in the plan, you have probably created a good one. Remember that plans need adjustments at some point during implementation depending on various factors such as the availability of resources and staffing, natural disasters and emergencies, changes in educational policies, and so forth.
For now, the important thing is to begin the process and take this process step by step.
Steps to Creating a Marketing Plan for Schools
A school marketing plan template can help you significantly when creating such a plan. Some online services provide free sample plan templates and other marketing services for schools and other business types.
It is best to check out these services and, if possible, develop a collaborative partnership with some of them.
Once you have a template in your hand, start the planning process with these six steps:
Identify Your Goals to Set a Clear Direction
You can input several goals based on different information, documents, and details into the plan. You can ask your school to provide you with the following documents so that you can establish enrolment, event attendance, after-school programs, donations, communication with parents, etc.
Based on this information, proceed to write specific goals such as:
- Increase enrolment by 15 percent
- A new after-school program with a minimum of 20 students
- Develop a newsletter with a 40 percent readership
Note that goals should be realistic and attainable.
Prioritize Objectives to Use Resources Wisely
You can only achieve some of your goals at a time. Some can be achieved over a short time, while others can only be achieved over a longer duration. It may require you to divide a larger goal into subsets of smaller goals that are attainable in shorter periods.
For example, it is unlikely that you can double enrollment figures within two years. A sub-goal for that is increasing enrolment inquiries by 10 percent or 15 percent.
Make that a sub-goal under the overarching goal of increasing enrolment by 8 percent to 10 percent, which is probably more realistic and attainable in your particular situation.
Assess Needs and Resources to Inform Realistic Strategies
Here is another critical aspect of marketing a school effectively and realistically. First, you cannot have a plan without a corresponding budget that should accompany its implementation.
Obviously, as you draw up a plan, you also have the amount of money you will be spending on it at the back of your mind. With money, thinking about available time, tools, and talents is also logical.
For instance, it is one thing to say that you have a goal of revamping your online marketing by mainly focusing on SEO optimization in your website’s design, which is a nice strategy to boost your presence on the internet.
The question is: Do you have available talent for that? Or is outsourcing the only way to make that goal a reality? If so, you will need considerable funding.
If a goal is unrealistic due to budget constraints, seeing it in the plan may be frustrating, knowing it's not feasible. Everything should be realistically and financially coverable for them to be included in the plan.
Brainstorm Strategies to Achieve Your Unique Goals
Too often, people think that once goals and resources have been identified, they are already ready to implement their plan. No, we disagree.
Sandwiched between the prior steps and implementation should be the often-forgotten step of brainstorming strategies. This is the most fun part for many who love to show creativity with their original and/or modified but borrowed ideas. Nonetheless, it is someone’s opportunity to shine with their creative muscle.
Here, everyone is invited to show the particular strategies they can suggest. It can be a traditional strategy that works in your particular setting at this particular moment in your history of educational service. Or it can be something fresh that you have just read about in an academic magazine.
Whatever it is, put it into writing, make sure that you have a clear example to illustrate it, and explain how that particular strategy applies to your school.
Write targeted strategies such as:
- Discounts and free coaching for students who love sports
- Home visits to provide regular feedback on performance, needs, and areas of improvement
- Security – sending the message to the parents on how perfectly safe your campus is for their children with details on the security program
Visualize the Plan in Action to Stay Accountable
Here is the part where you illustrate the timeline and the tools you will use for each of the goals you have set. The more details you put in this part and the more you can explain why you are doing a certain activity, the better.
Visualizing the plan in action also helps you commit to finishing a particular task in a given period and avoid doing other things that may be requested during the implementation phase. You can respectfully deny any request that will cause you to deviate from the task at hand, per what is written in the plan.
In this part also, you can put in the plan snippets of plan Bs just in case something happens that will prevent you from implementing a certain part of the plan. Visualize what you can do on that occasion as alternatives.
If you have a manpower problem and a specific task can’t be accomplished because of it, do you have a replacement you can tap and temporarily use? The same applies to tools—the plan should outline alternatives if they are not available.
Assess and Improve to Optimize Future Results
Any plan has its strengths and weaknesses, so it is not enough that you build a marketing plan, implement it, and you are done. You have to review it repeatedly to check that all courses of action have been completed. After completion, you should also have tools in place to measure results.
How effective was the plan and also its implementation? What are the bottlenecks or limitations you came across during implementation? What parts of the plan should be analyzed and deeply scrutinized in the next meeting, and what parts should be downright removed?
Final Thoughts
Creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your private school may seem daunting at first, but by following these strategic steps, you'll gain the clarity and confidence to allocate your resources and achieve your enrollment goals effectively. Remember, the key is to start with a strong foundation by aligning your plan with your school's mission and vision, setting specific, measurable objectives, and developing targeted strategies to reach and engage your ideal prospective families.
As you implement your plan, stay flexible and open to refining your approach based on data and feedback. Regularly assessing your progress and making data-driven improvements will help you optimize your results and make the most of your marketing investments.
With a well-crafted marketing plan as your roadmap, you'll be empowered to share your school's unique value proposition with the world and build a thriving community of students, families, and staff who are passionate about your mission. So don't wait - start putting pen to paper and watch your school's success story unfold!
Ready to take your school's marketing to the next level but need expert guidance? Let's chat! I'm here to help you develop a customized marketing plan that will attract, engage, and retain more of your ideal families. Contact me today to schedule a free consultation and discover how we can work together to grow your school's impact and success.
