Let’s talk about private school marketing strategies. In the marketing world, everyone wants to sell you on hacks and tricks that will double this or triple that overnight.
80% of what I get for my YouTube ads are gurus selling me courses on amazon drop shipping, something called a virtual vending machine, and stuff where people are making $35,000 a month passively (I say stuff because they never tell you exactly what it is in the ad. You’ve got to click through to their 1-hour free training to get that bit of information).
This post, in fact, all of the content that we post, is never a hack or a trick. We share foundational marketing strategies that are guaranteed to work for years not for days.
Today we’re talking about a few of your not-so-ordinary private school marketing strategies.
Warning: these will be different. This is probably stuff that you’ve never really thought about applying to your independent school. Once you are done reading, let us know in the comments if and how you’ll be using these strategies.
Also, check out this post if you’re looking for trends in private school marketing. In it, we break down the latest private school marketing research to find trends and make predictions for the near future.
Marketing Strategies for Private Schools
Geofencing Advertising
Geofencing is a concept that only about ⅓ of our prospects have ever heard about.
What’s more, only about 10% are actually aware of the HUGE opportunities that are available to them when using geofencing for private school advertising.
The concept of geofencing is targeting people within a certain physical geographic area (hence the fence in geofencing) with online advertising. Yes, technically any online ad could be considered a geofencing ad IF you are targeting a specific geographic area (for example 1 mi radius around your school).
BUT, the real power of geofencing comes into play when you harness the power of a dedicated geofencing platform.
Within these platforms, a few tools are at your disposal. The first is the ability to track people back to your school. What does that mean exactly?
It sounds weird, but it’s helpful in many ways. Let’s take a look at an example.
Say a prospective parent sees your ad on Saturday for the open house. Then, they attend the open house the following Wednesday. The program would recognize that person who saw the ad and physically stepped foot into your school, counting it as a conversion bridging the gap between online advertising and in person visits. This is one of the few available platforms that can connect digital advertising with physical “in-school” visits with such accuracy.
Another benefit is their ability to target the neighborhoods in which most of your students come from. A couple of weeks after creating the campaign you’ll be presented with a heat map of all of the neighborhoods that people who visit your school come from.
With that information, you’re able to advertise to other parents and students who live in the same neighborhoods but don’t already attend your school. This is a great way to find “similar audiences” (people who look like your students but are not yet enrolled).
What’s nice about this type of campaign, aside from its unique targeting options and ability to track physical visits, is that it’s not as competitive as the big platforms.
Chances are the other local independent schools are already advertising on Facebook and Google, but are they geofencing? I’d venture to say that they are not, making this a unique opportunity to get in front of your target audience before anyone else does.
Sound interesting? Reach out to us here and we can discuss how it can help your school.
Lead Generation
Like all businesses, independent schools thrive by having a consistent flow of leads coming into the administration office. Similarly, like most businesses, independent schools struggle to create this consistent lead flow. Having a lead generation system in place solves that issue once and for all.
Essentially, lead generation for private schools is putting out valuable information that a prospective parent or student would trade their contact information for.
If you’ve ever signed up for a webinar with your email address, you’ve been on the other side of a lead generation campaign.
This type of content is meant to act as a magnet for your target audience. See, the old way of advertising was all about awareness and being “omnipresent” (to be seen everywhere your prospects are looking).
However, awareness has a hefty price tag. It’s too broad and should only be reserved for big-budget schools, in our opinion.
By advertising a lead generator (a piece of valuable content) you have the ability to seek out and find people that might be interested in what you have to offer.
See, anyone who engages with that content (joins the webinar, downloads your checklist, joins your email series, shares the post, etc.) is signaling to you that they’re interested.
Now, those are the people that you need to KEEP marketing to. Those are the people that should see more ads, get more emails, get invited to the open house, and shown more of your lead generators.
This is a fundamental switch in marketing. Rather than advertising to everyone who might be interested in your school, you show those people a lead generator and then ONLY continue to market to the people who showed interest. This will save you thousands of $$$ (probably more) and make your marketing efforts MUCH more effective.
Become an Information Source for Parents
People are busy. Parents are unthinkably busy. All every single parent want’s is for their life to be a little bit easier. To have a little more time in the day. For a bit more simplicity. For a little help.
In our opinion, independent schools are the prime candidate for providing that help to parents. In fact, they might even be obligated to by nature.
No, I’m not talking about raising their kids for them. But, I am talking about being a trusted and reliable source of information for parents.
It’s not too well known today but ages ago this was common practice in the local business world. In small towns across America, it was not out of the ordinary for the local automotive shop, shoe shop, or professional service to fund the local paper.
That’s right, your town’s paper was brought to you by Jim’s Automotive. Do you know what that created? A HEALTHY amount of trust in Jim. In other words, people went to Jims for their car repairs nearly every single time.
We think there’s a ripe opportunity for independent schools to be this source of information for parents and students. I mean, you’re already spending 6+ hours a day with their kids. If anyone should know what’s going on in the world of students, schools are at the top of that list.
No, you don’t need to create a local paper, though you could. The printed word has quite the impact these days given how few magazines still exist in the physical world. But, an email newsletter to your parents and students is a more likely route.
Parents could get information like;
- Dangerous apps or trends that kids are using
- How to engage with their kids more
- Unique points of view that the school has
- Etc.
By becoming a helpful and useful source of information for parents, schools are able to solidify their relationship. This alone will increase student retention and lead to a fair amount of recommendations.
Direct Mail a State of the Union From the Principle
One of our favorite ways to break through the noise is with direct mail. No, it’s not dead. In fact, we believe it will never die.
What is dead, or maybe I should say what never was alive in the first place, is JUNK mail.
Junk mail certainly sucks. This is not junk mail. This is delivering an interesting and engaging piece of material into the hands of your parents that solidifies you as the right choice for their child in a way that no other digital media can do.
Okay, State of the Union might not be the right choice of a name but, I think it gets the idea across.
On a consistent basis, be it quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly, we recommend putting together a fairly hefty “newsletter” of printed material to be mailed to all of your parents. Expensive? You’d be surprised at how cheap direct mail can actually be.
But what should the newsletter contain?
Anything that you think is valuable for a parent to know, in short. The point of this newsletter is to be helpful and to present your school as the right choice for their children. You can certainly include news about the school, updates, awards, and accreditations, new programs launching… your typical “we’re good at what we do” type of information. BUT, it should be 20% that and 80% helpful or interesting content.
Maybe you give predictions about what school will be like in the upcoming years. Maybe you cover an interesting discovery made in one of the fields you educate in and how you’ve added that into your curriculum. Maybe you write a couple of articles about what it means to be a parent. Maybe you include some unique points of view that the principle holds about education and the future of the youth.
There are hundreds of article topics that you could cover, but the important thing is to make sure they support the voice of your school, are helpful for parents, and point back to you being the best school for their child to attend.
Let’s Recap
There is a handful of traditional, run-of-the-mill private school marketing strategies that can and do work. And, there are an endless number of hacks and tricks that will probably work for a day or so. But, today we touched on four out-of-the-ordinary (and very effective) private school marketing strategies.
By implementing just one of these strategies you’ll be building a moat around your school to insulate you from losing students to the other local independent school.
We’ve got a great post about social media marketing for private schools if you’re looking for unique ways to use those platforms for marketing your school.
Which of these strategies will you start with? Let us know in the comments below. Follow us on social media to get more content like this in your timeline.
Check out other helpful free tools like our email marketing series’ that teach private school marketing in-depth. See our other posts here on our blog.
Until next time,
Nick.
