School marketing is an important part of running a successful school. Schools focus on different types of marketing activities to generate awareness, establish their brands, are increasing student enrolment, or increasing parent satisfaction.
Improve your website experience
Like most websites for business, you have a great opportunity to provide a good experience, leaving the parents with a positive impression.
Your website needs to be a lot of things including:
- It should be responsive. If parents visit the site on their mobile device and it is hard to browse and navigate, they’re not likely going to spend the time to eventually find what it is they’re after and eventually leave unsatisfied.
- It should be fast. If you want to leave a positive impression on potential and existing parents, then you want your web pages to load fast. Nothing annoys us all more than a slow website. Test your website.
- Whether a visitor is looking for a specific form, policy or looking for department contacts, for instance, they don’t want to be spending 5 minutes to find it. Make sure your site is easy to navigate, ensuring that the user can reach their objectives in as little time and clicks as possible.
- Professional. If your site is still running sounds, spinning icons or stock images, then your site is not doing you justice. It doesn’t take much for the parent of a potential new enrolment to make a connection between a poor website and the education their child will receive.
- Proactively encouraging leads. To help you with this, you should investigate the 3rd party tools available. For more information check out this review of lead generation software by the team at MailMunch.
Google Analytics Benchmarks for Higher Education Websites
Improve your online reputation
More traditional PR tactics help to acquire online exposure on influential websites and by influential people. But as an entry point, you should be looking at improving your online reviews.
Some reports out have highlighted that online reviews are as important as personal recommendations.
So by actively encouraging online reviews, you have an opportunity to influence potential parents’ decision-making before they’ve even made contact with you.
There’s going to be many places you want to publish reviews/testimonials.
The first place you should look is at your website. There is every likelihood you are already doing this but know that you can have these testimonials marked-up with what is called ‘Review Schema’. If you do this, Google may use the info to add a structured snippet to your search result – making it stand out from the competition. This fantastic little feature will attract more clicks to your search result.
The next priority for your online reviews is your Google My Business listing.
Let’s test this for you.
Google your school name, and on the right-hand side of Google’s search results you will see what is called your ‘Knowledge Graph’. In amongst the info is ‘Reviews’. Your knowledge graph provides an opportunity to demonstrate a strong position with a large number of reviews and of course, when the parent of a potential student checks out the reviews, the overall sentiment is positive.
Tip: Sharing a link to parents to leave a review on Google is not as easy as you might think. But we do have a solution for you. Use our Google Review Link Generator and in seconds you will have a short link to share with your parents.
Consistently acquiring reviews will be a huge bonus for you, not only for your Google performance but for helping to influence prospective parents. I should warn you though, be careful with how you encourage the reviews.
The team at Oho Interactive released a study looking at website traffic for a number of higher education websites. Their findings indicated that mobile traffic continues to rise and this is having an impact on the average time users spend on site. My takeaway from the findings is that the content on these higher education sites is not as engaging as it should be and it is impacting the mobile experience for the user. For higher education institutions targeting an audience that comes to expect more from mobile experience every year – This should be a huge priority.
Use your offline communication to leverage your online activity
While I have chosen to focus on the online opportunities, it is imperative to integrate online and offline by using your current communication tools to promote your online efforts.
Tip: If you’re going to advertise in the local newspaper then at least include your web address.
For instance, promoting your Facebook page, your e-newsletter, your LinkedIn profile and group and your online videos. Here are just a few suggestions:
- All significant outdoor signage should have your website address
- Envelopes going out to parents could also have social media details
- Communication going out to parents should have an option to subscribe to the e-newsletter
It’s important to remember that the same people you are handing marketing material to are the same people sharing your Facebook post. So keep that in mind every time you produce marketing collateral.
Blog
Maintain a blog and continue to produce valuable and engaging content
Blogging is the perfect tool for establishing knowledge in the marketplace and it provides a valuable tool to improve search engine performance.
The Principal could contribute posts specific to various educational topics. Remember the aim should be to provide valuable information for parents, whether that be parents who are beginning to research, are ready to enrol their students, or have students already enrolled.
Staff and students could be engaged to write guest posts.
Imagine the opportunity to assist in developing students’ journalism prospects and the promotional value in having students published.
Ideally, you wouldn’t stop at just blogging. Understand the information parents are looking for and look to fill the gap. Examples might include infographics, Slideshare presentations, checklists, or more.
Conclusion
Finally, the tools of strategic educational marketing can vary according to the industry and the objective of the campaign. But in this case the tools presented above can be implemented by any institution and can generate positive results in a sustained manner in the long term.