How important is Parent Persona to your school’s marketing strategy?

All successful marketing starts with buyer personas – Author Anonymous

Yeah, you’ve got that smashing billboard yelling to motorists and pedestrians about great things about your school and telling them why they should consider your school. You also have all sorts of beautifully designed (by a designer who is probably not a parent or not the type you expect in your school) flyers garnished with your marketing messages (also put together by a copywriter who is as guilty as your graphic designer).

No matter how impressive your marketing messages and materials are, your marketing strategy will fall flat if it doesn’t speak directly to the heart of mission-appropriate families who are most likely to benefit from your school community. A good school marketing strategy starts with a firm handle on your Parent Personas

What is Parent Persona?

A Parent persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal parent based on market research and real data about your existing parents. The good thing about parent persona is that it works for you, independent of how low or high your marketing budget is.

Now that we have established the importance of parent persona to our enrollment,  the next thing is ‘How do we go about this?’

 

To create parent personas, get the list of all parents/families who have spent at least two sessions in your school (based on the assumption that they have paid for your services at least 6 terms ). You may create a spreadsheet for this. Find out the following information about them and populate your spreadsheet.

1. Name: Bring it to live, give it a real name – Mr Ojo, Mrs Yusuf, Ms Uche etc. It helps you to connect and make a realistic guess where it requires
2. Demographic Details Include information such as such as age, income level, education, employment details, marital status, gender etc
3. Interests and desires. Do they enjoy travelling, clubbing, etc?  What is their level of internet savviness?
4. Pain Points: Identify why they choose your school over others, why do they leave their previous school?
5. Customers’ journey: How do they find out about your school when they first visited?

These points are inexhaustible and not one-size-fits-all, you can tweak them to suit your specific purposes.  At the end of this exercise, you will have something like this for each record of parents:

After understanding your parents and where they hang out, you’ll get a better sense of the channels that will work best in advertising to them.