The goal of private school marketing strategies is to entice potential students to attend and apply to your school. Having cohesive strategies is crucial for making your educational brand relevant to your demographic both in the short and long terms.

If you want your school to be at the top of the educational spectrum, staying up to date with the latest school marketing trends and implementing them constantly is important. Fortunately, agencies such as Cube Creative Design exist to meet your needs. With its slew of sophisticated services, We can be your school’s reliable partner for meeting its digital marketing needs.

This post looks at three major trends to monitor how to market a school and how to ensure its continued growth. We’ll discuss the rationale behind what we think should be your focus demographics, how you can effectively reach out to them, and how you can maintain their loyalty to your brand of education through a solid online presence and digital marketing strategies.

1. Your Key Demographics

Despite the many biases and assumptions levied against millennials, many of them are quite inaccurate. The idea that they are high school teenagers or college freshmen whose whole world revolves around dating and social networking is maybe the most pervasive of these myths. It's plain to understand that this stereotype doesn't bear water now that millennials are between the ages of 21 and 37.

Simply stated, millennials are already the majority of the working population, and all of them have started or are about to establish their own families. This suggests that the majority of the parents of your prospective students would be from this age group, and a focused new parent marketing campaign centered on this audience has a high chance of increasing the school's enrollment rate.

Furthermore, new moms account for 46% of all women in their age group, as well as a sizable and growing portion of the millennial population. When it comes to money management, mothers are often more familiar with day-to-day family expenditures.

Fewer students intensifies the competition

The fact that 56% of people between the ages of 25 and 35 are childless is a fascinating recent statistic regarding the ongoing generational breakdown. This indicates that, despite being one of the most populous groups, they have not contributed to population development. If you will see, there are simply fewer students competing for your places, intensifying the competition regarding independent school marketing.

Because of the smaller number of private school applicants and the public perception that private schooling is a privilege rather than a requirement, persuading parents to enroll their children in a private school has been extremely challenging.

As a result, you must research this particular audience — millennial moms — in-depth, as this will significantly increase the scope of your school's new parent marketing. Giving their general behavioral patterns any consideration will lead to a stronger understanding and, as a result, a better likelihood of them enrolling their children in your education.

2. Focus on Online Presence 

The pervasive usage of technology and social media has caused a huge change in how people regard private schools and how they respond to school marketing. Millennials are generally adaptive and digitally literate. With the internet, the world has become intertwined, and millennials use it to find solutions almost anywhere. They use more social media platforms and devote more time to them. As a result, focusing on millennials and their online habits is one of the only logical ways to advertise your school in the current day and age.

When browsing for a new service or device, the bulk of millennials use Google, with just around a quarter using the official website. For example, instead of searching for individual products and blog entries,  46% of millennial mothers switch to Google while looking for updates on maternity leave and child care.

As a consequence, the school should strive to develop its online presence. More than 80% of all internet queries begin with unlabeled keywords, such as "best North Carolina kindergarten," rather than the actual name of the facility. To keep up with the market, your school's website must expand, and it can rely on relevant search terms to obtain a better ranking in the search results.

Use personalization

Users have been personalizing the internet for years thanks to social media and commercial websites. In today's world, personalization is required in all of your digital material. There are many types of schools to choose from, as well as a wealth of knowledge about them. Customization is the process of making the content interesting and personalized so that it can be shared.

Digital personalization, on the other hand, involves more than just applying a prospective student's or parent's name to an email. Personalization refers to the building of advertisement strategies and user experiences around the interests and personal habits of your target demographics.

You'll need to consider the target audience's web behavior, challenges, expectations, and behaviors to do so. This entails determining the kind of material they want to see and how they want to see it. Surveys may be an effective way to do this. Keep in mind that the more information you have, the more precise your customization can be.

Think big, and don't limit yourself to text. For example, you might personalize the headlines that visitors see as they enter your page, recommend the most appropriate articles for their educational objectives and desires, or invest in multiplatform videos that your community will share.

Invest in video

The amount of individuals who associate with video content has never been higher. Using video in a marketing strategy has now become a must. These days, it's not only about having a kind of video service; it's also about diving into genuine video material. Nothing creates bonds with a viewer more than sharing personal stories in this regard. People like items that make them feel good because when they get them, they're more likely to purchase, participate in, or desire for more.

For example, a video about campus move-in day will make new students feel relaxed, encouraged, and excited for the opportunity to be a part of it. The same video will even make current and former students proud to be a part of the school community.

K-12 education marketing in Facebook, specifically Facebook Live, for example, is a great place to start. Fortunately, campuses make excellent beehives for capturing compelling live videos. Any school event, in-class encounter, or lecture may be streamed live. It's also possible to use a brief live chat about a popular topic or a day-in-the-life clip for actual student characters. Live-streamed videos from school activities may also be repurposed as future material.

You may use live content on a variety of social networking sites, including Instagram and Snapchat, in addition to Facebook Live and YouTube. These networks are especially popular among millennials and their children, who are the core part of your educational institution's target demographic.

You can use the platforms to share photos and short videos, which you will then organize into longer "Stories." For example, you might turn a campus tour into an event or use it as a forum for students and faculty to share their perspectives on campus life. Since Snapchat, like Instagram and Twitter, uses hashtags, do some research on your student characters and see which hashtags can help them find your Snapchat material.

3. Tap Into the Influencer Culture 

Word-of-mouth promotion has always been an essential part of every school's marketing strategy. Most schools have relied on word-of-mouth and their achievements to recruit and maintain students for years. Marketing for schools that center on social networks has changed the way this marketing approach works.

It seems logical that one out of every five millennials will seek advice from others. It's just normal to get counsel before making a decision. Millennials, on the other hand, are unique in that they use social networking sites twice as much as those over the age of 37.

So, instead of one parent asking another for advice, one parent uses the Internet to reach out to thousands of other parents via their social networking or Facebook accounts. Also, one study found that 37%of millennials use social media to make purchasing choices. As a result, social media and the internet, in general became a much more powerful platform for school marketing.

A parent from this age will almost certainly do a fast Google search of your school and compare it to your competitors. A slew of other factors, including the website, online reviews, and social networking interaction, come into play at this stage.

Using influencers in the independent school advertisement is close to word-of-mouth marketing, but it has a few advantages. Word-of-mouth is particularly valuable when it comes from a third-party source whom prospective parents can respond to and trust. Prospects are aware that you are biased as an advocate, although you are providing accurate and relevant information.

Influencer marketing aims to identify someone that fits your profile, has a broad following, and has a huge effect on your shared target audience. Influencers can aid in the distribution of the articles or the creation of material relevant to the marketing of private schools.

Final Thoughts

As I said, the goal of private school marketing strategies is to ultimately get parents to enroll their children. Be sure to look at your parental demographics and develop strategies to target them with your online presence. Also, don’t discount word-of-mouth and small networks of people with influencer marketing.

If you need help marketing your school, then reach out to us for a free consultation. We would be happy to help you!