1. Identify Your School’s USP
When you’re creating a marketing strategy for your school, it can be helpful to picture your school as a business. With your knowledge of your school already, you can start to build on this target audience understanding student and family goals, as well as any challenges they may face. Parents enroll their children in schools most time because of a particular service that stands them out, it might be extracurricular activities, proximity, academic excellence, vocational classes, care for children with special needs, boarding facilities, outstanding facilities, etc.
These areas are referred to as USP (Unique Selling Proposition), and they are important to think about, especially for the parents and children you want to attend your school. Successfully marketing your niche can yield great results, with one of the main benefits being increased enrolment.
2. Build Your School’s Brand
Once you have been able to identify your USP, you can start to build your school’s brand because it is one of the crucial aspects to help attract your target audience. Your school’s brand should revolve around answering the questions of your audience; what do they want most? How is your vision going to help their need? If you can demonstrate how your vision & mission can support their need, you have won their trust and loyalty.
3. Communicate Through High-Quality Content
In this age of advancing technology and social media, one major way to stay in the mind of prospective and current parents is by reaching out via content creation. Apart from the fact that you are reaching out to parents, sharing content helps to establish your brand more. Every piece of content you create must be on-brand to avoid inconsistent messaging. Ensure that your logo, fonts, and layouts are consistent throughout, regardless of whether that is on flyers, your website, or social media.
If you’re trying to spread awareness about your school, try creating a social media campaign around this. Engage your audience with a range of long and short-form content, with a call to action at the end. This could be a link to booking a school visit or a button to sign up for your newsletters.
School visits and newsletters are both amazing ways to communicate with parents and allow you to generate loyalty which in turn, hopefully, translates into enrolment!
READ MORE: 5 Marketing Touchpoints for Schools in 2022
- Interesting Website Content
Have you ever visited a website and it looks aesthetically pleasing, but the content just doesn’t complement the design? School website design and content work in the exact same way. While a website can have a fantastic look, the content it contains is what decides if your prospective parents will stay or leave.
You need to ensure that you cover two core types of website content:
- Written content – one of the core ingredients to your website, allowing you to tell the story of your school.
- Visual content – this includes unique photos, videos, and infographics.
Create interesting content that draws in the reader and structure your content in a way that ensures the website is kept clean, fresh, and modern. Think about your headings, where you can add any bullets and lists and any particular colors and fonts you can use from your brand guidelines.
- School Videos
Another aspect of content marketing that schools tend to neglect is video marketing. It is another important ingredient when it comes to implementing a successful marketing strategy. Once you have created your written content, you can move on to creating your visual content. School videos give you the chance to tell and show your prospective parents everything they need to know about your school without having to read every written content on your website.
You can create a wide variety of videos like school tours, events, open days, and school promotional videos.
