Blog: Marketing Your Private School

Are you struggling to attract and retain students in today’s competitive education landscape? Are you worried about enrollment for the 2023-2024 school year? If so, you’re not alone. With so many options available to families, standing out from the crowd can be challenging. But fear not because effective marketing can make all the difference.

Therefore the question becomes, how are you marketing your private school? Are you using your “tired and true” methods of marketing your private school, such as bragging about student-to-teacher ratios and strategies for educating the whole child?

If you answered yes to those questions, you need to evaluate your thinking. Frankly, your private or independent school is under a new microscope. The communications and school marketing strategies that used to work for your school didn’t work during the pandemic years, and they won’t be working in 2023 and beyond.

The way parents find private schools has completely changed. Your ideas must be modified, reimagined, or even abandoned to accommodate today's families' expectations.

Here are seven ideas of how to market a private school.

Any private school marketing message aims to get prospective students’ parents to commit to a tour, so you can show them how good your school is. But what happens when you get them to your school’s website? How do you get them to engage more and ultimately raise their hand for a tour? To do this, you need effective call-to-action items.

According to Statistica, In 2022, global content marketing industry revenue was estimated at roughly 76 billion dollars, projected to increase to over 88 billion in 2023. Suffice it to say the worldwide content marketing sector has snowballed in recent years. Therefore, content marketing will remain essential to your private schools’ marketing mix.

Private schools like yours must use many different types of content outlets for marketing your school effectively; these include but aren’t limited to:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• E-books
• Email Newsletters
• Print Newsletters
• Social Media Posts
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Testimonials and Reviews
• Paid advertising (PPC and Social Media Ads)

Private school marketers and administrators that can anticipate content marketing trends and changes in audience behavior will be able to alter their marketing strategies and make the best investment in resources and time. To increase growth, private school marketers must be aware of the ever-changing world of content marketing.

When done correctly, digital and content marketing attract new parents and caregivers to your site and increase searches and questions. So how can you market your school the right way with content? Here are the top seven content marketing trends that private school marketers should be aware of.

It has happened to me countless times, private school marketers and administrators obsess over the school’s home page. While this is somewhat justifiable, you must realize that most searchers are unlikely to see your private school’s homepage. The reason is that the search engines will serve the page most likely to match the searcher’s intent. Therefore, you need to consider your website and each page of it as more like the books, chapters, and pages of the Bible. When you pick up the Bible to read, you typically don’t start in Genesis and read it straight through to Revelation. You jump in and around, and your website is no different. This is where landing pages come into play.

In this post, I will give you a basic understanding of what a landing page is, the different types, and how they can be used for your private school digital marketing campaigns.