Every school manager aspires to improve admissions. Without the admissions of new students, your educational organization cannot live up to its promises and continue to fund your existing programs; it may not even be cost-effective to start the academic year.
Moreover, some schools prefer to take a selective approach and only enroll students who are talented, have incredible potential, or share some other criteria. When your admission rate is low, none of these options is available. So, the question is, how can you improve your brand awareness and increase your student enrollment rate?
One of the most effective ways is school advertisement. You have numerous options to promote your brand. For instance, you can optimize your social media presence, start email marketing, create an eye-catching school website, or run Google ads. But before you do this, you should first learn about marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the best practices for school marketing and different types of advertisement like video ads, google ads, and paid social media advertising methods. We also curated a list of things you should absolutely avoid in order to keep your ad campaign efficient. Ready? Let’s dive in:
Things you should DO!
Here are some of the best marketing practices you must consider when you run ads on any platform.
#1 Start with a Well-Thought-Out Strategy
If there is one thing that never changes about school marketing, it’s the importance of having a clear school marketing strategy. Know your objectives. Know what you want to accomplish, which path you should take, and what methods and tactics work best for you.
Start by setting SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Your advertisement should serve a specific purpose, whether it’s communicating with prospective families, promoting online courses, or keeping your key stakeholders engaged.
#2 Invest in High-Quality Content
Quality content is the core element of any successful marketing campaign. Regularly publishing social media posts or blog articles provides a quick and easy way to capitalize on your existing resources without needing to run an entirely new ad campaign.
Optimized content can be an incredibly powerful tool in your marketing toolbox since it allows you to target high-value leads. Advanced targeting methods in content marketing allow you to reach prospective students with the highest chances of enrollment and offer them a personalized experience.
Moreover, SEO-optimized content drives more organic traffic to your website and social media accounts. This way, you can achieve more visibility and rank higher on search engine result pages. This is an excellent way to showcase your brand credibility and encourage students and parents to enroll in your school.
#3 Use Visual Cues Wisely
Most ads come with an image. You might settle for a simple, unedited, stock photo for a social media post or blog article, but that’s not an option for advertisement. Especially when you are running a paid advertisement campaign, make sure to invest in quality images to make a long-lasting “first impression” on the audience.
There is yet a smarter way to use visual cues—video ads. Many social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram prefer videos for organic content. Plus, videos are more engaging than photos!
Just be sure to consider the platform’s requirements and integrate user analytics to understand how your target audience usually interacts with various types of content.
#4 Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience persona, identity, and online behavior is more than nice-to-have knowledge. This information helps you identify their desires and challenges and come up with the right solutions. Understanding your audience helps you establish brand loyalty and showcase your competitive edge over the market.
The first step is dividing your audiences into various segments and identifying each segment’s pain points, interests, and preferences. You can use data analytics tools to gain actionable insights from your school websites and social media accounts, which is an excellent way to get a more holistic idea of how your audience responds to your online activities.
Remember that your content strategy and advertisement practices should always align with the needs and wants of students, parents, stakeholders, and the school community.
#5 Identify Your Unique Selling Point
Schools and educational organizations share a few characteristics with other businesses across various industries. One mutual quality is that like every other business, you advocate certain values and highlight the unique selling points that give you an advantage over competitors.
Your selling point might be state-of-the-art educational equipment and resources, modern facilities, after-school clubs, charity fundraisers, or top-of-the-class teaching staff. As long as you can provide compelling evidence and social proof to support your claim, your advertisement will bring incredible results.
Download our FREE eBook: How Successful Schools Market Themselves.
But you must also remember that hard-selling is highly frowned upon for educational institutions and schools. So, make sure to keep it honest, friendly, professional, and confident throughout all your communications with prospective students and parents.
#6 Optimize Your Call to Actions
Now that you’ve devised a well-organized marketing plan, identified your target audience, and created a compelling ad, it’s time to take care of the receiving end. The first step is providing an optimized call to action.
A well-optimized call to action helps viewers understand their next step. It will save them and you a lot of time and increase the conversion rate significantly.
The call to action might be a link to your website’s admissions page, a phone number to arrange a meeting, or a contact form for your team to provide additional details. It is an essential part of the customer journey.
#7 Optimize the Landing Pages
There’s probably nothing more futile and damaging than clickbait. If your ads say “Visit Our Website,” while your website is down or incomplete, you are damaging your brand reputation and wasting your investment. Falsely representing your school’s online presence can also negatively impact your enrollment rate.
An optimized landing page will boost your online visibility by encouraging prospective students to interact with your website, see your services, and convince them to enroll.
There are many ways to optimize landing pages. For example, you can improve the content, layout, design, menu, and even navigation bar. And always encourage your current students to share their feedback on your website’s performance.
Things You Should AVOID!
Following the best practices is important. But to run a successful ad campaign, you must also learn not to make avoidable mistakes. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
#1 Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late
Timing is of the essence in marketing. If you want to increase enrollments for the upcoming school year, you must act early and not rely on a last-minute rush for applications.
Most parents do not wait that long before signing up their child in a new school. Plus, a timely school ad gives you more time and freedom to carefully monitor the admissions process and adjust your ads accordingly.
Even if you only want to boost overall brand awareness, promoting your school at the right time is still essential. Brand awareness is useless if your audience has no reason to interact with your brand after they see the ad.
#2 Avoid Inefficient Marketing Methods
Marketing today is a fully-fledged practice and continues to develop new concepts and methods. Approaching school marketing with outdated methods like newspaper advertisements or radio advertisements might give you access to a small portion of the audience out there, but overall, we believe it’s a waste of time and money.
Keep in mind that not all old methods are outdated. Talking directly to your audience can be a huge plus for improving brand trustworthiness. You just have to find the right combination. You can also host a seminar or start monthly live events on platforms your audiences are comfortable with.
#3 Don’t Go on Auto-Pilot
One common way to save money is to follow the same strategies and reuse the same content from last year’s ads. This is often a terrible idea! The repetitive marketing plan or ad copy will not continue generating leads.
In fact, audiences who have already seen the old ad may interpret it negatively as a sign that you don’t care to invest in your online presence.
Moreover, Google’s recent algorithm updates highly discourage duplicate content or black hat SEO practices. Old techniques and ad copies can negatively impact your ranking in search engines and, ultimately, cost you even more than it costs to run a new ad.
#4 Don’t Be a Follower
Ad campaigns don’t work if you are always caught up in your competitors’ activities. Of course, competitor analysis is essential to understanding what practices have been successful in your niche market, but it doesn’t reveal what practices work best for you.
If you want to succeed in your school advertising plan, you must carve out your own distinctive brand identity and image. Do all the research you need, identify your strengths and weaknesses, understand your audience personas, and act accordingly.
Remember that one of the outcomes of market research is gaining a deep understanding of its dynamics. After a while, you should be able to become a trendsetter instead of a follower. That’s how unique brands thrive.
#5 Don’t Overlook Your School Website
We mentioned that landing pages and CTAs are essential factors in ad success. But it doesn’t mean you can overlook the school website. A poorly designed website leads to a poor user experience and a low conversion rate.
Start with a comprehensive website audit before investing in the advertising campaign. If your website is outdated and requires an overhaul, don’t hesitate to put it on top of your to-do list.
When students and parents check out your website, they are cautiously evaluating every aspect of your online presence, from blog posts to school calendars, photo galleries, FAQs, etc.
Make sure your website design and content are consistent with the brand values you promote in your campaigns. Everything from the tagline, fonts, colors, and even layout should reflect the brand personality.
And don’t forget to optimize your website’s navigability. Navigation is an essential factor to ensure excellent user experience and high SERP ranking.
Putting it all together
Digital advertising has grown more and more popular over the years. Schools and educational institutions run ad campaigns to maximize their social media engagement rate and drive more traffic to their websites. Digital advertising also plays a central role in boosting admission rates and building up your brand credibility.
In short, a school ad is a surefire way to give your website the attention it deserves. That said, you need all the help you can get to plan and execute a mistake-free campaign. And we’re here to help!
Here at School Webmasters, we have the passion, experience, and dedication to stand by your side during your marketing campaigns. We offer you the ultimate school marketing solution, from website design to social media management, website maintenance, parent communications, logo and design services, and more.
You can easily get a quote right now or just contact us (call 888.750.4556 and speak with Jim) he’ll help you achieve your school communications and marketing goals.