Why your School should break bond with Traditional Marketing

Let me ask you this, how many of the Shoprite fliers given to you do you read? Or how many billboards do you stop to look at daily? Yet companies spend millions to print these fliers and share them with people. Marketing is one of the crucial techniques businesses who are eager to grow employ. The same goes for a school, most especially because of the competition in the private education sector.

Schools spend millions every academic year to reach out to parents conventionally and increase their enrollment. It is no news that everything is going digital. Schools are starting to key into the new innovative way of marketing which is different from the ones we’ve been used to.

What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing comprises of the conventional method of marketing which includes, radio, TV, print, and other forms of offline promotional ways. These conventional methods are hard to ignore as we come across them daily. Some of the common traditional marketing methods include;

• Print (flyers, newspapers)
• Broadcast )Radio and TV ads)
• Outdoor (billboard ads)
• Telephone

Why schools are dumping the traditional marketing method

Even though traditional marketing might still be working, it is not a smart way to make your school known to parents. Technology has made it possible for schools to connect with prospective and existing parents like never before. Here are reasons why schools are breaking away from traditional marketing.

1.   Low level of engagement

Traditional marketing is a one-way communication method where schools can only broadcast themselves to parents without a way for parents to interact back with them. Unlike social media that gives you the option to interact with a post or send a direct message to a school, which isn’t possible via traditional marketing channels.

Your school can only do perform better when you cater to the needs of parents. For example, your social media pages can go a long way to pull in parents by providing visuals/pictures about your school online.

2.   More expensive and less effective

Traditional marketing requires a large investment that hardly yields any return. Your newspaper ad is only effective when parents read it the same day it is published, or else you’ll have to run another ad again. If you are to compare the amount you will spend in running a half-page newspaper and hosting a website yearly, you will understand why they call it “spraying and praying.”

3.   Lower audience range

Traditional marketing limits you to a particular area or region. If you run an admission ad on a local radio station, only those within the range of the frequency can have access to it. This means a parent living far away hoping to enroll her child in your local area will not come across such an ad. This is why you should have have an official website that provides relevant information to parents so anyone interested can access it wherever they are.

4.    Ineffective campaign progress measurement

You can’t know how many parents are reading the fliers you shared, or how many of them are stopping by the roadside to read your billboard ads. You might be doing the wrong thing, but there is no result or statistics to show you that.

A traditional marketing method is a “spraying and praying” form of marketing where you spend a huge sum of money and then pray for parents to come to your school. Investing without little or no gain is no way to run any business.

Don’t be a laggard, go digital. If you have questions to ask, you can reach out to us at SchoolsCompass.