How To Market Your School: A Guide (Part 2)

Welcome to Part 2 of our guide on How To Market Your School. We hope you’ve enjoyed Part 1. If you haven’t already seen Part 1 of our guide, you can view it here. We’ll be picking up where we left off last time.

Foundation

Social Media Overview

Your Social Media profiles are one of the most important ways to connect with people. This is where you show the world who you are as a business, show off your brand, and engage the community. Your growth on social media can directly impact the amount of business you get, as well as how the community views your school.

Marketing through social media is a powerful way for your business to reach potential customers and prospects. The most popular platforms for social media are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. TikTok has also gained popularity recently and can be used to market as well with the right content.

Your Story

As touched on previously in Part 1, your brand story as a school is your introduction to the world. It tells everyone why you started as a company, how this reason has become your purpose, and what your core values are.

Here are a few tips to take into consideration when creating a brand story.

– Problem, Solution, Success

Offering a solution to a problem is at the heart of most brand stories. Sharing how you succeeded inspires confidence. When crafting your story, follow these steps:

• Explain the problem you set out to solve
• Describe how you overcame the problem and found a solution
• Share the success that came from this solution

– Keep it Simple

Don’t overcomplicate things. Simple stories are easy to follow, understand, and relate to. They offer a better chance at gaining the trust of your target audience. Stories that are too complex may seem insincere and untrustworthy.

– A Personal Touch

Your story is a way to form a deeper connection with your audience. Show how you relate to your customers and how you understand them. Creating a compelling story will not only help people remember who you are but develop a more empathetic view of your brand.

Why Facebook?

Facebook is the biggest social media site on the internet with over 2 billion active users worldwide. Statistics show that as many as 75% of people in the United States use it. With a users’ average time spent per day at over 60 minutes, it’s easy to see why Facebook is an attractive platform.

With its massive userbase, Facebook offers a chance to reach a wide audience. Your customers spend more of their time on Facebook, and its parent company Instagram, than any other platform. The number of moms checking Facebook multiple times a day is more than you think. It’s also one of the first places that people will look at when researching your school. There are many ways to not only market on Facebook but to grow a community. Putting the right amount of time and effort into your Facebook marketing strategies can yield incredible results for your business.

Website UX

Building your website is another important part of your foundation as a business. It’s where a majority of your customers will interact with your school, especially if your curriculum is based online. Your UX (or User eXperience) design is crucial for success.

In addition to style and looks, having a website that is intuitive, responsive, and easy to navigate will keep people coming back for more. It is especially important to optimize for mobile as well. Internet browsing through phones has become more popular than ever. A good amount of your website traffic will be through mobile devices.

Optimizing for SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is yet another way to get your business out there to the world. SEO focuses on optimizing the visibility of your website and content on search engine results. It’s a great way to grow organic traffic and potential leads. At its heart, SEO is about what people search for online.

The goal is to rank higher in results when searched for on sites like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. The higher you are ranked, the more visible you will be. Being ranked #1 will mean your website or article will be the first result for a given search topic.

Achieving a higher ranking can be done by optimizing your website’s content. If you can figure out what people are searching for, you can include these keywords or topics in your content. You or your writers can achieve this through the use of several SEO-oriented apps like WriterZen, Surfer, or Ubersuggest.

 

Building a Community

Why It’s Important

Having a healthy community is one of the best ways to drive growth and brand recognition. Humans have an innate need for connection. Building a community capitalizes on that need. Companies with some of the most rapid growth can attribute it to their healthy and thriving community.

Studies have shown healthy community marketing can achieve over a 6000% ROI. In a time where customers vote with their wallets and view their brand choice as an extension of themselves, building a community is more important than ever.

Positioning Yourself as a Market Authority

Being a market authority means your business has vast experience and deep knowledge and understanding of its target market. By positioning yourself as an authority, you stand to gain the trust of your community.

Establishing yourself as an authority can be done in a few ways. Creating content, opinions, blogs, articles, or posts that express expertise in your field are all good ways to start. Providing your community with an exhaustive amount of quality information and resources will solidify your school as their only choice.

Being Active in the Community

Making content isn’t all there is to growing a community. Engaging and interacting with your community will not only inspire confidence towards your brand but show your customers that you care. Respond to comments, help out with questions, offer advice. Every little bit helps improve the community’s outlook towards your school.

Providing Value at No Cost

Make people’s lives easier by providing resources, help, advice, and tips at no added costs. Providing free useful information is a great way to win over potential customers. This can be done through multiple channels and goes hand-in-hand with being active in the community.

Share articles, videos, blogs, and general knowledge through your social media channels and website. Help people asking for help in your community by directing them to relevant resources. Sending out a weekly newsletter with updates to your platform and useful articles is also a great idea. The goal is to make people feel like they’re getting more than they’re paying for.

Setting High Standards

One of the keys to success is setting and keeping your standards high. Setting high standards from the start will lay the foundation for your business going forward. Discipline and consistency will keep your operations running smoothly. If you aren’t careful and set your standards too low, everything from your brand image to the quality of your business can suffer.

 

Promotion

Designing an Effective Offer

Crafting an effective offer starts with understanding the needs of your target audience. If you know what your audience wants, you can offer an effective solution to their needs. Formulate your offer around this solution. Make sure that what you are offering is clear to your audience. You don’t want any confusion on what you’re trying to sell.

Keep your offer simple and easy to understand. People don’t spend much time looking at ads so the simpler they are, the more likely they’ll keep someone’s attention.

Finally, make sure what you are offering gives value to your potential customers. If people think they’re getting a good deal, you’re more likely to close more deals.

Explain Benefits For Both Students and Parents

Naturally, parents are going to want to know why they should enroll their kids with you. It’s your job to be informative about the benefits your school, academy, or camp can offer. Examples include:

• “Our academy offers the widest availability coding courses available anywhere.”
• “Your kids will have fun learning code while playing with Roblox and Minecraft.”
• “We offer flexible schedules and a personalized curriculum for each student.”
• “Set your child up for the future with our innovative STEM courses.”

Making these benefits clear will raise interest from parents who may have otherwise been uninformed.

What Do You Do Better?

What makes your school stand out? What do you have to offer that others don’t? What makes your academy unique? These are all questions that you should be answering in your marketing campaign. Your advantage could be anything from location, courses offered, ease of billing, cultural or community values, pricing, quality of education, etc. By showing parents that you’re the better choice, you can gain more interest and more leads that way.

Ways to Reach Customers

One of the most important parts of any successful marketing campaign is customer reach. How are do you reach customers? There are multiple different platforms to reach and engage with more potential customers. These are:

• Social Media
• Blogs
• Articles
• Email Campaigns
• YouTube Videos
• Improving SEO

Make sure your marketing plan for each platform is consistent and quality is the same across all content.

Facebook Ads

Ad campaigns on Facebook have the potential to greatly increase your inbound leads. When creating graphics for your ads, make sure you consult your style guide. Ad graphics should aim to grab attention, and should then be followed up by a clear and concise marketing pitch.

You can also save Facebook Ads, which allows you to monitor your ad performance, adjust your targeting, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your results.

It’s a good idea to experiment if you’re just starting. Create multiple graphics and run them on a smaller scale first. Analyze which one performs the best, then try to replicate that success.

Measuring Success

How effective are your marketing plans? Is your strategy working? Checking in on your progress and success is crucial to maintaining growth. For ad campaigns, this is easy since most sites will give you analytics on reach, interaction, and ROI. For community growth, it’s a bit harder to quantify, but post engagement and page/group likes are a good place to start.

Make sure you have set goals and milestones to achieve, and that you’re consistently hitting them. If you aren’t achieving your goals, look into the reasons why. Come up with a new strategy to fix the problems and get back on track.

End of Part 2

Part 3 will be coming soon and will go more in-depth on the following: Retention and Referrals, Planning for Growth, and Growth Hacks

Questions and Contact

If you’d like to know more about us and what we offer, or have more in-depth questions or feedback about this blog post, feel free to contact us at info@gobrite.io or 425-665-7799 and we’ll be happy to get back to you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s blog post!