Choosing schools have never been easier for parents but it’s the contrary when it goes the other way around. In the post-pandemic era, schools need to go an extra mile to make sure they are getting plenty of enrolments. From today’s standpoint, branding and marketing is the most effective and necessary way out.
Consider this example – when looking for a café, a doctor or even tutors near you; do you call up 50 friends or you simply Google it out? If you are like most people, you certainly go for the latter. It’s no different for schools in 2021. Parents would actively go to Google and search for the best schools in their respective cities. Thus, you can’t solely rely on word-of-mouth and other traditional ways for promoting your school, especially during an enrolment season.
Then how should you do it?
Well, it’s simple! You can incorporate digital marketing in your strategy at half the cost of what you’d have otherwise spent on traditional marketing.
Here are 5 tips to increase your school’s enrolments with digital marketing approaches.
Study your target audience
Defining your target audience as precisely as possible will give you an insight as to what exactly they’re looking for. Your target audience for a particular admission session can be parents of young children or teenagers who may want to switch schools. To reach out to maximum number of customers (students/ parents) to your school, you need to understand the fundamentals of things. You may then create a plan to attract more students to your school.
In marketing terms, this is known as an avatar of your ideal customer, however, here we can replace ‘customer’ with ‘student’ and expect the same — a tool that’ll upscale your enrolment marketing and provide optimum results.
Upscale your content marketing game
People no longer watch TV extensively these days, nor do they tune in to the radio unless they don’t have a choice while traveling. Newspapers are only read by people of age and word of mouth is too feeble to trust in the era of internet.
So if you’re still blowing your budget on TV and/ or radio ads, you might want to reconsider your strategy. So where should spend your money instead?
The answer is — content marketing.
Content marketing is basically a type of inbound marketing. With this, instead of going after potential students, you can attract them to your school by serving quality content.
How?
There are numerous ways to up your content marketing game. You can start by working on informative blogs with SEO optimization to trigger organic traffic to your website. You can also work on social media content that provides value or has the potential to go viral.
Incorporate storytelling in your strategy
As unlikely as it may sound, storytelling is one of the most effective ways to market anything and everything. A powerful brand story is more likely to attract customers than the product/ services itself.
Why? Because humans are creatures hungry for stories!
Don’t you remember being a sucker for stories when you were young?
Remember waiting for days to find out what happens next on your favourite shows on TV?
We do all this because it helps us find substance in the world. Stories make more sense of the world we live in. They elicit emotions. And those emotions make marketing more powerful.
Use online reviews to your benefit
Studies show that about 93% people scan through online reviews before making a purchasing or subscription decision. And obviously, most are turned off from one negative review.
Now even though enrolling for a school and buying a gadget are two completely different things, reviews good or bad have the same impact on both. Thus, to make your school desirable, start working on collecting positive reviews.
If your school is not brand new, approach your ex-students and their parents to review your school on Google. You can even stand out by allowing your teachers to share their side of the story in reviews to show that teachers are happy and valued. This will increase trust and parents are more likely to buy that.
You can even use those reviews later in emails or brochures to increase credibility.
Make your enrolment process friction-free
How willing are you to work for something that does not interest you a tad? Not many for sure! It is no different here.
Since your target is to get maximum enrolments for your school, you should work on making the process frictionless for parents. Parents have an array of options to choose from, a frictionless process will give you an edge over your competitors in that regard.
If you’re looking for all of the above mentioned services and more under one roof, you can get in touch with us and discuss over a free strategic consultation call.
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