Marketing Your School
For schools, marketing strategies typically mean targeting prospective students for enrollment and recruiting quality staff. Whether yours is a private school, a public school, or a charter school, your existence depends on student enrollment and effective staff.
One of the most affordable and beneficial marketing efforts any school can utilize is an effective school website. So, let's talk about how to make your school website more effective.
Website content is the foundation for ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs). That's why many schools use content marketing strategies to show prospective students they're a perfect fit.
What are you most proud of at your school? What are your stand-out programs? Does your school offer amazing extracurricular activities that your students especially enjoy? Are you using your school website to help grow your enrollment?
Parents have myriad choices today about where their children should go to school, and income or location are not the only deciding factors. School marketing, done right, is a multi-prong approach, and putting together a comprehensive marketing strategy is necessary.
Schools thrive on enrollment numbers. Enrollment plays a key factor in everything from budgets to attracting good teachers, so it's important that schools earn the community’s good opinion. And it's essential to share that good opinion with the community.
Parents, if you love your child’s school; if your child loves their school; if you love their teacher, then please leave a review for your school today.
So, what can we do to make our website user-friendly for all? For starters, we can analyze our website. Google Analytics is a great tool designed to help us do so.
While students return to full in-person learning and you scramble to help students who may have fallen behind catch up, this is a perfect time to institute some marketing strategies to increase your enrollment (and encourage any lost students to return to your school).
It requires some planning and processes. Luckily for you, we have a solution that will get you started and help carry you through to success in all the various aspects of effective school marketing.
Often when we consider our various target audiences, we don’t consider the one closest to us—teachers, staff, and administration. These important people are your “internal publics,” and marketing to them is one of the most important things you can do.
One of the ways to increase your chances of showing up, besides having an active school website, is to claim your “Google My Business” listing. Learn how to maximize visibility in an organic search and highlight positive reviews at the same time.
What better way to show other parents what a great school you have than to let them hear it from other parents? Hearing (or reading) a testimonial from someone who has nothing to gain other than from a school employee with a vested interest always adds more credibility.
If you are going to get the attention of potential families, you must do it BEFORE they need you. To accomplish this, you should know what they want, need, and value. Here are three tips on how to create such content and how to deliver it to the right people.
You know the value of a blog for marketing and communications, so now learn how to have a school blog that rocks.
Not sure how to implement school marketing to improve your enrollment, school reputation, or trust? Learn how to use marketing and watch your school bloom.
When you are looking to increase your school's enrollment, positive, uplifting, and inspiring stories and testimonials are the "x-factor." Use it!
Inbound marketing is attracting customers with relevant content–when and where they need it. Learn how your school can create effective school marketing.
Successful schools communicate to their parents and students that they are part of a team, not just observers whose presence matters very little. If you inspire a student with a school program, activity, initiative, etc., your efforts will be multiplied by their enthusiasm to the get the word out to their family and friends. Increased parent engagement through your students is a crucial part of successful school public relations and marketing.
Do you ever feel like your school public relations plan is missing something? Take a look at your school-parent community partnership. How often do your students’ families come to your school? Do they have reasons to look forward to their time on your campus?
In Part 2 of Inbound Marketing for Schools, learn how to create and manage your effective and affordable marketing for your school.
Join us as we talk about inbound marketing, what the benefits are, and how schools can make use of this marketing strategy to increase enrollment and establish a respected school brand.
Marketing your school is essential in today’s competitive educational environment. The good news is that there are so many effective ways to do it—you just need to get started. So, here are 51 ideas to get you moving in the right direction.
If we were to tell you just one thing that private schools do right that most public schools don’t bother to do, it would be to market their school’s differentiators. Maybe public schools see themselves as ubiquitous and feel they don’t offer anything different than every other public school in the country. However, I’m pretty sure that isn’t true.
October is Red Ribbon Month, and schools typically celebrate Red Ribbon Week during the last week of October. This year, Red Ribbon Week is October 23–31. Whether your school pulls out all the stops for Red Ribbon Week or you’re throwing together a last-minute plan, don’t miss the opportunity to market your school.
Whether or not it’s a conscious effort, we seek to imitate people we admire or view as successful. This carries over into the business world as well. While careful not to infringe on anyone’s copyrights, we look to others for inspiration. When you undertake a website design, do you look at other school websites to see what they are doing? So how about seeking inspiration for your school marketing approach too?
Whether you’re managing school marketing for a public or private school, chances are you would like to grow your enrollment. More than a monetary investment, your school is an investment of time and trust for the families you serve. So what better way to show other parents what a great school you have than to let them hear it from other parents?
Foundations are essential for buildings, organizations, relationships, and yes, marketing plans.
As we make our resolution to market our school, the first step I suggest is aligning your school values to your school marketing agenda. Because this is such an essential marketing tip, I’d like to help you with this step. Let’s work together to lay the groundwork for marketing your school by defining your school values, mission, and stakeholders.
If you’re hashing out marketing and school public relations on your own, then a full-blown strategic communications plan can feel overly complicated and time-consuming. Sometimes looking at complex processes in different ways can help with understanding and executing and, thereby, simplifying the process. In this blog, let’s look at your school marketing plan like a roadmap—complete with simple, stops along the way to help you reach your goal.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of information you have to absorb each day? Beginning to think you are merely roadkill on the side of the information superhighway? Are you inundated with far more information coming in than you can assimilate? Well, you are not alone.
Marketing is usually a word used by for-profit businesses and shunned by educators. Most of us don’t enjoy being “marketed” to, so we don’t like the thought of having to market ourselves when we have dedicated our lives to one of service. We might feel we should be exempt from all that nasty marketing/sales stuff. But, we may need to rethink this!
No matter what kind of school you run—public school, private school, charter school, or faith-based school—these three pillars of an effective marketing plan should support your school communications. These elements will not only help you transition throughout the year from one focus to the next, but they’ll bring all your efforts together to strengthen your school brand and messaging and improve your public relations.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and means that you put some strategy and techniques into your school website management to get free online traffic from unpaid (organic) results.
Your school website should be the hub of communications for your school. We understand when complications arise—like ADA compliance—some schools would like to throw the towel in and give up on their online presence altogether. But in today's mobile world and climate of school choice, you cannot ignore your school website—especially if your school is struggling.
School choice doesn’t necessarily mean that public schools have to suffer. One elementary school in Queen Creek, Arizona, is setting an excellent example of how to succeed and excel in a school choice environment. Even if your state is not a school choice state at this time, there is something to learn from this public school that is stealing enrollments from charter schools.
“The very things that held ya down are gonna carry you up and up and up.”
These profound words were said to Dumbo by Timothy Q. Mouse when he was encouraging him to fly. They may also apply to the possible changes with the incoming Trump administration regarding School Choice.
Marketing is a key communications function for schools, and it’s one that is often underutilized or sometimes completely ignored.
Because we think school marketing needs to be a priority this year (and every year), here are three steps that will help you not only make but keep this new year resolution!
There are lots of reasons people decide to do things themselves instead of outsourcing or hiring a trained professional. ...
What makes the difference in a DIY success versus a DIY train wreck?
The answer is having the right foundation and tools.
There is a reason we say, “An image is worth a thousand words.” Photographs stand out in text-heavy websites, draw attention, and increase memory recall. The best photographs communicate without any text; that is the power of visual content.
It's not too late to make a lasting good impression. Whether your school has already begun or has yet to open its doors, there are some important topics that you should address to make sure you are starting each school year off right.
By understanding the reasons people talk and following these four simple rules to influence word-of-mouth marketing, you are well on your way to being the hot topic of conversation in your community.
“You don’t need to brag; when you do a good job, people will notice.”
Dear readers, this is a lie!