If you can get a prospective parent to visit your school, their likelihood of applying skyrockets as high as 80% (according to research). But you have to make them WANT to visit you in the first place. And therein lies your biggest school marketing challenge. This is where inbound marketing shines.
World’s leading marketing agency Hubspot defined inbound marketing as a marketing strategy focused on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and adding value at every stage in your customer’s buying journey. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.
In context, Inbound marketing is an internet-based marketing strategy that involves creating relevant, engaging online content that draws potential families to your schools, establishes a relationship with them, and in so doing, convinces them to enroll.Have you noticed that most schools no longer print flyers to distribute (randomly ) to prospective parents and the number of newspaper (and other print media) adverts of schools are not what it used to be before?
The idea that the traditional means of advertising are falling by the wayside with today’s audiences (i.e., parents of little ones) in favor of non-intrusive online engagement. Outbound marketing which is the traditional marketing is not only expensive, it is intrusive, not effective, time-consuming, energy-sapping, and non targeted.
In simpler terms, Inbound marketing is an online marketing strategy. We all engage in it every time. NO big deal! If your school has a facebook & Instagram page, SchoolsCompass page, Whatsapp group of prospects, blog page etc, you are already implementing inbound marketing.
The big deal is:
- How well do you use it?
- What type of contents are you churning out to who?
- What medium are you using?
Your ability to answer these questions correctly determines how effective your inbound marketing strategy would be.
SchoolsCompass is a startup that specializes in carrying out inbound marketing strategies for schools, so we are understandably biased towards the decision to use ourselves as an example in this blog. But there is a reason we exist, and why we’re passionate about helping schools like yours achieve your enrollment goals and project their brand through inbound strategies: because to do it right on your own takes an immense amount of time and possibly costs more. And just as many schools are tight on money, we know that their staff is likewise pretty short on time to handle it in-house, too. In order to identify a good inbound marketing strategy for your schools, let us examine some of its characteristics
1. Targets parents through online platforms such as blogs, social media and search engines:
Any inbound platform that is not accessible through consistent blog posts, social media, and most importantly, search engines cannot be said to be very effective because these are places you can target parents genuinely looking for schools.
SchoolsCompass has all these in excess -arguably, it is the most visited school-related website in Nigeria and the most optimized website for school-related keywords
2. Attention is a Finite Resource:
According to a recent survey by Microsoft, the average human’s attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to eight seconds. Good inbound marketing strategy understands that attention span of online readers is very short- therefore it pushes ONLY what is relevant in a non clustered form preferably in bullet points with the right spacing so that eyes can rest before reading the next points. Your school’s profile (if well done by you) on schoolscompass understands this psychology
3. Earn parents’ interest rather than buying it
Any marketing strategy that is not forceful in approach is considered to be the best. How well would you describe the SchoolsCompass tagline; ‘we guide, you decide’? It is not just in words, but in deeds whenever we are relating with parents.
4. It is permission-based, not interruption-based
Imagine a room filled with parents looking for schools and you are asked to come and pitch (not preach) your school to them. Your chances of conversion is 750% higher than interruption-based marketing.
SchoolsCompass is one of the few places you could advertise your schools where prospective parents are actually looking for you and you aren’t interrupting them. Most social media campaigns are interruption-based. No wonder, SchoolsCompass routes a minimum of 25 families to different schools all over Nigeria via telephone calls and text message on a daily basis.
If you need an effective and non-intrusive, well researched inbound marketing strategy for your school to attract parents, SchoolsCompass is an option you can’t afford to ignore.
