Owning a school is not an easy task, among many of the challenges that come with it is getting prospects and increasing your enrollment. You might even have all the facilities, both human and infrastructure, but if the students are missing, then you not complete.
Marketing a school is different from the one you do for a product, and as a platform that registered more than 3,000 schools at the moment, we can tell you that there are things you are doing wrong when it comes to marketing your school.
If you want your schools’ enrollment to grow, here are three (3) things you need to stop doing.
1. Stop viewing your marketing budget as an expense
In our years of working with schools, we have noticed that many do not even allocate an adequate amount of budget for their marketing. This is because they view it as an expense that is draining their revenue, rather than as the fuel that drives up their revenue.
If you desire growth for your school, get rid of this mindset and start to make the necessary investment to ensure that prospective families come to your school, and not only that, but they are converted to enrollment.
2. Stop playing it by the ear
When schools tell us about their challenges in reaching their enrollment goals, we discover that most of them do not have any marketing strategy in place other than word of mouth where they rely on their current community of parents to spread the good word about their schools.
Don’t get us wrong, word of mouth is effective, but to have a successful marketing plan, it must be outlined and followed in the process right from when you reach out to parents till they make their enrollment decisions.
If you want your school to grow, you need to stop playing your marketing strategy by the ear, and put in a planned effort.
3. Stop using out-of-date tactics
The way people research for schools has changed. Have you? The majority of the schools around now know that the orthodox way of publicizing schools is no longer pulling in parents and students like before. The traditional method of marketing which is also referred to as “spray and pray” that might have worked well in the past is no longer effective.
Television, Radio, flyer, billboard, and newspaper ads are not only intrusive, they are ignored in this age that we are in. If you want to grow your school, you need to put an end to those old ways you’ve always been doing it, most especially if they are not proving to help achieve your enrollment goals.
Focus on method like “Inbound Marketing” which is proven to be less expensive and more effective than your usual spray and pray
