In an increasingly competitive market it’s essential to market a school strategically to ensure a solid return on investment (ROI).
I regularly talk to principals and school boards who simply don’t understand how to:
get a positive message out to the community
communicate effectively online
reduce marketing budgets whilst increasing ROI
compete for pupils and highly qualified staff with other schools
How Do Parents & Pupils Find a School?
Traditionally it was enough to trust a school’s reputation and word of mouth to bring parents and pupils in to the school. It still, of course, counts a lot these days, as will excellent teaching, outstanding grades, and student care help build your brand.
But nowadays word of mouth has moved online; a lot of parents who are the key decision makers when it comes to the choice of schools are on Facebook. Social media discussions have become one of the biggest ways in which we connect with people we trust. As a result additional traditional marketing activities like sprinkling adverts in the local and or national press in key competitive marketings like the boarding school sector or private sector just aren’t enough.
Because marketing has also moved online and in so many forms and channels, School administrators in many ways need to be adept online marketers and communicators, as well as educationalists, able to discern between effective marketing channels and those that simply eat up the school budget with little or no ROI. The risk is, that get your online marketing wrong and it can cost you a fortune and more importantly fail to get you the results you need.
“I’m totally confused”
Something we typically hear from schools is that they simply don’t know:
where to advertise,
how to market a school
what channels to prioritise
who to trust
or even what kind of marketing materials need to be produced, how they should look, and what the copy should say.
Advertising sales people for newspapers and magazines offer the world – at a considerable price but you never know exactly what you’re getting. It’s impossible, after all, to measure how many people come through print adverts. What’s more even their recommendations are hard to rely on because the only experience of the education market advertising sales people actually have of the needs of the sector is their own school experience or parental experience.
Here in Sweden where we’re based, the upper-secondary / senior high school market is extremely competitive. And I mean extremely! Schools receive funding for each student they recruit thereby creating a situation where schools are desperate to recruit students to remain in business. This applies to both so-called free schools and the state school sector. Schools often offer incentives like free MacBooks, driving lessons or trips to get students just to get them to sign-up. Others are tightly niched to appeal to specific groups: sports kids, nerds or the arty crowd. The end result is the same: a startling percentage of school budgets are poured into marketing and the annual Stockholm high school recruitment fair – Gymnasiemässa – is like a major rock event with stands and stalls filling up Sweden’s largest exhibition centre.
But it’s not just in Sweden that a whole industry has grown up around marketing schools, it’s competitive around the world with a advertisers pushing school management to invest in a web portal, magazine or newspaper advert to “ensure” they reach their target audience. Having handled school marketing accounts I know firsthand what it’s like to be called practically every single day in the run up to recruitment fairs and weekly throughout the rest of the term by sales people trying to prey on the insecurities of school staff who typically don’t have a clue when it comes to marketing.
“We send out magazine to every household in the Stockholm region,” is something I regularly hear from advertisers here, who naturally charge a premium. However, the data I’ve collected from talking to first year senior high school students reveals that less than 1% actually remember receiving anything, let alone being able to name the magazine.
“Oh, but parents are key influencers,” I’m told when I politely decline the majority of offers to participate in these mailshots on behalf of clients.
“Sure,” I tell them. “But only when it comes to junior high school or primary school. Sixteen year olds want to make their own minds up! Their friends are the biggest key influencers. Not what mum and dad say. And friends are online.
With school management often not having a clue where to invest or how to measure the success of marketing campaigns, many end up pouring sizeable budgets into campaigns that provide little or no return on investment when the money could have gone back into the school to provide better resources. One school, for example, I know chose to invest in computers for students as it would appeal much more to prospective students rather than providing legal number of toilets!
Our Story
Having worked in the university sector for almost ten years, I started JontusMedia, a creative marketing agency, back in 2004 because I was passionate about the web and communications. I have, however, always retained a strong interest in education given my previous career and many of our clients have been in the university and school sectors.
In 2005 we were one of the first agencies in Sweden to implement a social media marketing campaign to help >Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet, part of Internationella Engelska Skolan (Sweden’s largest educational provider in the free school sector) grow their brand in the Stockholm region.
Over the course of 8 years we helped them significantly reduce their marketing budget, negotiating the treacherous campaign of print and online marketing, whilst simultaneously increasing their intake from from 225 to over 720 students.
During those eight years we built and ran the school website, handled their external communications both offline and in print media and made a variety of marketing materials from banners, newspaper adverts and brochures to social media branding, Spotify adverts, videos and web banners. We ran their Twitter account, Facebook page and produced a podcast for them.
Web banner for IEGS, 2012-13
I realised how important social media marketing was in this sector when a single tweet led a prospective student to visit the school Open House and ultimately ended up studying there for three years. Sure, the tweet alone wans’t enough to convince her but it got her into the sales funnel. In real terms this generated more than 100, 000 SEK per year ( approx., 15,000 USD, 9000 GBP, 11200 Euro).
On the back of our success with Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet, we helped International English Schools with a year-long campaign to market one of the very first so-called “free schools” in the UK, as well as their British headquarters. Again, this meant helping them create a strong visual brand, designing websites, brochures, and newspapers adverts in the national British press.
In 2013 we reduced the work we were doing for IEGS, handing all but website maintenance over to IEGS, as I felt we couldn’t take them any further after so many years. Nevertheless, we had learned an incredible amount about the sector over the almost a decade.
Since then we’ve been marketing Sweden’s leading boarding school, again running both online and print campaigns, helping the school increase recruitment both from Sweden and abroad, improving their ROI across the board. In the first 6 months we helped increase applications by over 200 %.
Specific Actions You Can Take to Market Your School Successfully
It’s pretty difficult to summarise everything we’ve learned but if I had to narrow it down, I believe every principal or school management team needs to at least know five key strategies to market a school successfully.
Identify a specific goal
One of the biggest problems I come across is schools trying to communicate too many things at once with their marketing messaging. For example, it is much harder to recruit boarding students AND day students with exactly the same marketing materials. They’re different segments of your audience. A paid banner, for example, on a website advertising the school for day students that when clicked directs visitors to the school’s home page is much less likely to convert traffic into customers than if the link took visitors directly to information for day students.
Another example of typical mixed messaging can be the school website itself. Schools that have to actively recruit pupils often run into online marketing problems because their website is again designed to both speak to existing pupils and parents as well as prospective parents and or students. Unless the site clearly funnels each group quickly and effectively to the relevant information there is the risk that traffic to the site will bounce away.
The bounce rate is calculated as visitors who leave your website within less than a second. If you’ve got a bounce rate of over 60% you need to make some changes. A bounce rate over 80% and you’re in trouble. As of since we took over the running of SSHL’s marketing, redesigned their website and changed their content strategy, the bounce rate has been under 1%, which is the best we’ve ever achieved.
Jan 1 – May 1 2013 bounce rate before JontusMedia took over
br>
To check how your site is performing look at the bounce rate for your site in your Google Analytics account (assuming you’ve got one!).
The key takeaway here is that it’s essential that you know what specific goal you are trying to achieve *before* creating any marketing material. Are you recruiting day students ? Are you promoting the IB Programme ? Are you introducing a new focus on ICT in the classroom? etc
By beginning each marketing and communication initiative aware of a specific, highly focused goal you ensure from the outset that you will start thinking clearly and carefully about how to create a marketing message directed to the right audience.
Talk to your target audience
br>
Have you considered how many audiences you have ? Are you appealing to prospective parents or pupils ? 6th formers and juniors? Or both.
It’s important that you are completely aware of your audience if you are to create effective marketing material that will really register with them.
For example, at Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet (IEGS) we were asked to market five number of programmes to help recruit students graduating from 9th grade, looking to start at an ambitious, academic college where teaching was almost entirely in English. The school ran the IB programme, as well as programmes specialising in Arts, Languages & Humanities, Social Science and Natural Science. To put it bluntly, the school was targeting 5 different audiences.
One of the ways we dealt with this was to create a variety of banners that the school could use on their website and social media channels to speak directly to each particular group.
So we set up a photo session with students at the school as we set out to create archetypes (or brand personas) who visually reflected exactly the kind of students we were looking to recruit. Even though we ended up using a science student as the target audience archetype for the arts programme, we wanted prospective students who landed on the site to really see themselves in the faces and personalities on the site and click through a particular series of call-to-actions designed to push them further into the “sales” funnel. NB: I’m using the term “sales funnel” here because that’s ultimately what it was: a series of steps to get the right kind of student to apply to the right programme at the school.
Sample banners targeting different audiences
A similar strategy was used in all the marketing materials we made for Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet whether it was brochures, newspaper ads or web banners.
The strategy here is to always to set out to communicate directly with your target audience. So whereas we were targeting students for particular programmes at Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet, at Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket we created visual marketing materials that would speak to:
Swedes living abroad who wanted to study in Sweden
International students with no connection to Sweden
Students attracted to a more traditional, premium brand education
Students looking for a vibrant, friendly environment in which to study.
The golden rule here is to focus really tightly on a particular target audience: this reduces the likelihood that you’ll send a mixed message to different audiences
Content marketing is Now the Most Effective Form of Marketing
Traditionally marketing was about getting in front of your target audience. Think TV ads jumping out at you, interrupting your favourite TV programme. Or the expensive, glossy adverts scattered through the magazines or newspapers that you read, the bigger and brighter the better.
With so many channels increasingly flooded with adverts over the years we’ve grown blind to them. TV-on-demand like Netflix has disrupted the traditional TV advertising model and advertisers have had to look for new methods of reaching and getting their key value proposition in front of potential clients. The same thing has even happened online with banners often going unnoticed, especially when ad-blockers have been developed for browsers. Newspaper sales are down so there’s less chance of being seen with print adverts, although in some instances they can be very useful.
The best way to counter your target audience’s blindness to your messaging is to create valuable, meaningful content that engages the prospect, beginning their entry into the sales funnel. As an example outside education you could say that those TV ads that are more like a TV show, with ongoing storylines, blur the boundaries between traditional TV advertising and entertainment. By appearing as entertainment that the audience begins to empathise with, following the characters story, the “advert” manages to get its key messaging across.
Content Marketing for Schools
When it comes to marketing schools there are a variety of forms of content marketing that we’ve found really work.
Instead of plastering newspapers and website copy with grandiose phrases such as “leading school” or “outstanding teachers” we’ve learned that it’s far better to show, for example, how outstanding your teachers are by actually showing something they do rather than just talking about it.
Lets say, for example, that an ambitious 16-year old is looking to find a school that will really help her achieve her ambition of studying psychology at university. She knows, however, that maths will be an important subject to as most psychology programmes require a good grade in maths, but unfortunately this is one of her weaker subjects. Imagine she stumbles on your school’s website where there is the following call-to-action: *How to never struggle with fractions again*.
She clicks on the link and finds a short video the head of maths has put together walking clearly through the best way to handle complex fractions. They’re the top tips the teacher has developed during their career and have helped many students. The video is a screencast, recorded using a laptop and a USB microphone. The quality is excellent and it didn’t take the member of staff more than an hour or so to edit. It’s published on YouTube but embedded on the school site. Literally, anyone can view it.
The girl watches about 25 seconds of the video, although not the full 5 minutes.
From watching this screencast she has learned that your school cares about helping students cope with the difficulties they have. In fact, the knowledge and skills the teachers have are shown to be available outside the classroom. This would be reinforced further if there were videos, downloadable PDFs or slide-decks for other subjects taught at the school.
In these 25 seconds you have successfully conveyed to the prospective student that you’re a school that cares about learning and goes the extra mile to make sure they understand. To put it in marketing speak, you’ve got her into the next stage of the sales funnel. We could reinforce this further by offering an email or Twitter sign-up to be notified when another video is released. By capturing her contact details you could then let her know when your next Open House recruitment event takes place.
This is a specific example of content marketing within education. The emphasis here is on showing and not telling. The video shows how friendly and supportive maths teaching can be at your school; it’s not just empty words on a page saying “We really help you learn”.
The girl has seen it for herself and experienced it’s value instead of you telling her how outstanding your teachers are. You don’t have to tell her she should consider applying to you because she can see that in the quality of the work you make available online.
Alternatively, you can just get a camera and get students to talk first hand about their experiences at the school. But remember: the emphasis is on show, not tell. You want the viewer to really feel what it’s like to be involved.
br>
Another good example of content marketing that we’ve found to be really useful is podcasting: recording short audio programmes that are then distributed free of charge online across a variety of platforms like the school website, iTunes, Facebook and Twitter.
Podcasts are a great way of showing (*again, as opposed to telling*) people what it’s really like at your school. Interviews with students and staff reveals the enthusiasm, skills and personality of your community. Podcasts, whether run by students, staff or even outside content creators, can showcase so many aspects of your school community.
Again, instead of telling people how brilliant your school is, you’re giving a true reflection of what it’s like, of everyday life at your school. For prospective students, parents and even staff looking to join a dynamic, forward thinking school, audio can be a great way of communicating effectively.
Develop and Implement an integrated marketing campaign
No matter the size of your marketing budget, to market your school effectively you need to be active across numerous communication channels.
Typically, our customers advertise in local and national newspapers – albeit less than they used to –, run active websites, YouTube channels, Facebook pages, Instagram and Twitter.
With so many channels it’s important you identify where you target audience is online. One of our clients is able to begin the sales funnel by creating and publishing content on Facebook designed to appeal to mothers. Another client uses a strategy of Search Engine Optimization to ensure that they appear high-up in Google search results for their niche to get people to their website and into the funnel.
Only by having identified your goals, your audience and where you can reach them can you justifiably ascertain which channels you should invest in.
Measure Your ROI
No matter what kind of marketing you do you must measure your return on investment. If you don’t you run the risk of pouring substantial parts of your budget into channels that give absolutely nothing.
One of our clients, for example, invested a considerable sum over a number of years in a website that gave 16-year olds looking at high school programmes an overview of every course available at every school in the region. The site also had school reviews and ratings.
We advised the school to cancel their contract with the portal after we saw that the site had sent only 6 visitors during one calendar year to the school website. The trouble is that the school had not used any analytics software until we set it up for them. Very quickly we saw the site wasn’t working but because the school was tied into a year contract there was little they could do. Understandably, they cancelled as soon as they could, but only after sustaining considerable harassment by the sales staff at the site.
The same year that we installed analytics we started blogging for the school, creating a variety of content that included videos and audio.
Very quickly we were able to see what kind of content registered with students and were able to produce even more of it, measuring the investment against the information we gleaned from the analytics we had in place we were able to help the school reduce its costs yet taken in conjunction with content marketing increase their ROI.
To discuss your school’s marketing needs contact Jon