Many academics and school administrators hate to think of their institution as a business, so even the thought of marketing makes them uncomfortable. Somehow, they are convinced that attracting leads and customers detracts from their primary objective of providing a quality education.
But the reality is far different. School marketing strategy is just another term that refers to practices for improving your community. School marketing and enrollment marketing will help establish your brand as an authority in the education industry and place you on top of the competition.
Rest assured that every school already uses some form of marketing. The only question is, what methods and practices do you use to outperform others? Here, we’ll explore the concept of enrollment marketing, its benefits, and best practices. Read on to find the answers you are looking for.
What Is Enrollment Marketing?
Enrollment marketing is one of the core concepts in school marketing. It refers to a comprehensive higher education outreach strategy aiming to find, attract, and enroll more students at a school.
A functional enrollment marketing strategy must consider several variables, including customers’ lifecycle stage, marketing data, population-specific needs, and desired outcomes.
Enrollment management tasks require close cooperation with marketing teams at your school. Some of the main responsibilities of enrollment managers are:
- Recruitment and admissions
- Financial aid packaging
- Student retention activities
School marketing teams must also cooperate with the enrollment management team to identify potential students and high-value audience segments. This information allows them to understand the motivations that drive them to attend your school.
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The enrollment management team would then be able to align those motivations with the opportunities you deliver and reach prospective parents and students with a compelling offer. This process requires:
- in-depth data analytics;
- well-planned brand promotion and representation;
- offering exciting educational materials and services;
- effective communication across various platforms, including traditional, digital and social media channels;
- careful management of outreach activities, finding shortfalls and opportunities;
- and constantly improving them.
Best Tips to Increase Student Enrollment
Implementing student enrollment marketing strategies can be challenging if you lack experience or don’t have access to reliable data about new students.
But with a well-thought-out plan, you can achieve your enrollment goals and reach the right students for your school. The following are a few strategies to increase student enrollment:
#1 Run an SEO Campaign
Creating content and choosing the right platforms for publication takes more than time and money. You can do everything right but still not see the desired outcome. So, you must ensure future students and parents can find your school and educational content online. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) can help.
SEO campaigns help you promote your website and social media accounts by delivering high-performance services to customers. For instance, SEO ensures you have used the right keywords and integrated them naturally in blog articles and social media posts to increase your online discoverability.
Moreover, SEO significantly boosts your ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). Ranking high on SERPs with local SEO and other methods will drive more traffic to your website and boost student enrollment.
First, perform an SEO audit to understand how well your website is optimized for search engines based on indexing and crawlability metrics. Once you identify the errors that prevent your site from ranking well, you can hire a team of SEO experts to optimize every aspect of your school website.
#2 Try Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing method to attract customers by creating valuable content and customized user experiences. To see the real power of this approach, let’s first understand the difference between inbound and outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing, like cold-calling, cold-emailing/spamming, direct mail, billboards, and event sponsorships, usually interrupts user experience by offering something they don’t want.
But inbound marketing forms connections that potential students seek and tries to solve their problems. Interactive email sign-up and well-planned content marketing are a few examples of effective inbound marketing. One of the best content marketing strategies to increase student enrollment is starting a school blog—we’ll discuss that later.
#3 Start a Social Media Campaign
There is a chance that your school is already present on various social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram. But have you noticed any meaningful improvement in enrollment numbers? If not, don’t blame the platform! You need to revise your social media strategy and develop new ways to engage with prospective students.
Social media channels are perfect places to foster connections with your target audience and help them understand your values and services. However, you need to regularly generate fresh content and use analytics tools offered by the social media platform to understand how students and parents interact with your content.
And more importantly, keep your accounts active and relevant with regular posts and stories.
#4 Invest in Social Media Ads
Besides the organic traffic from your social media content, you can also invest in paid advertisement. School age parents spend between two to three hours a day on social media. This gives you a great opportunity to reach new students, create awareness, and eventually improve enrollments.
That said, you should research and identify the platforms with high-conversion possibilities to maximize your ROI. Use platforms that use advanced targeting algorithms. This will help you reach an audience segment that is willing and interested in watching what you offer.
#5 Ask Parents to Write Online Reviews
If you want to go to a new restaurant, you probably will search for other people’s opinions about the menu and pricing, staff behavior, location, and environment. And that’s just for one meal! Parents care about their children’s education and need reassurance that you can deliver what you promise.
Online reviews and testimonials will highlight the positive experiences of current students and parents and provide insight for new customers who want an inside look into your school. Plus, having social proof like testimonials will establish your school as a trustworthy institution.
#6 Register with Local Google
Google uses different methods to provide users with the most relevant information about businesses with an active online presence. Google local listing is one method that will show your school on Google Search, Google Maps, and third-party websites and applications via APIs.
Registering on google local listing will ensure that your website and Google Business Profile appear in SERPs when students search phrases like “schools near me.” The whole registration process takes around 15 minutes—and it is a well-spent 15 minutes.
#7 Offer a Mobile-Friendly Website
As of November 2022, 60.28 percent of all web traffic came through mobile devices, and the number is only expected to increase. So, if once a mobile-friendly, responsive website was an advantage for branding, today it is absolutely necessary.
If your school website design isn’t responsive, it will damage the user experience. Moreover, Google will consider responsiveness as a determining factor in ranking your website on SERPs. So, ensure web elements, images, videos, articles, and other information on the website will display perfectly on all devices and screen sizes.
#8 Know Your Online Visitors
Increasing school enrollment depends on targeting the right audience segments. Accurate targeting requires understanding student personas and dividing them into different segmentations based on behavioral patterns and traits they share, such as education, habits, place of birth, and so on.
Knowing your audience allows you to generate more relevant and useful content and find more effective ways to relay your brand message. This is a great opportunity for schools to create tailored user experiences and establish brand loyalty.
#9 Set Up a School Blog
Blogging is probably one of the best strategies for increasing school enrollment and student engagement and driving organic traffic to your schools’ websites. School blogs are the perfect place to share valuable articles and tips to help current students maximize their learning abilities.
But school blogs can do a lot more. For instance, you can share information, images, and videos of school events and important gatherings to let prospective students understand what it feels like to study at your institution.
A school blog is also a great way to improve your school’s ranking in search engine result pages and establish your school as a credible brand.
#10 Start Email Marketing
Email marketing is a fairly traditional marketing method, but it is still one of the most effective marketing resources. Email marketing offers opportunities to target potential customers and communicate with prospective families interested in your educational services.
That said, you should be careful about emailing customers who haven’t signed up for your mailing list. Cold emailing can negatively impact your email deliverability and damage your brand reputation.
#11 Leverage User Generated Marketing
User-generated marketing is any strategy that allows consumers to participate in your marketing campaign. It is the most effective PR exercise you can do on a limited budget, creating an interactive and engaging experience for parents and students.
User-generated marketing can take various forms, including sharing and tagging social media posts, writing blogs and articles about your school and teachers, online reviews and video testimonials, forum comments, and more.
You can even design a section on your school blog or Facebook page to share user-generated content. All you need to do is ask students, teaching staff, and even parents to write short articles and blog posts relevant to school activities and share their experiences in the form of video content, podcasts, or articles.
#12 Use Visual Storytelling
Visual storytelling (virtual storytelling) is a reasonably recent marketing practice that uses graphics, images, pictures, and videos to engage with viewers. It is an extraordinarily effective method of driving emotions, engaging intercommunication, and motivating students to enroll.
To maximize the effectiveness of visual storytelling, you need a compelling narrative that leads prospective students on their journey. For instance, you can help them envision themselves learning in a prestigious university or pursuing a satisfying career after graduating from your school. Ask your successful alumni to share their experiences, making the narrative more relatable.
#13 Automate the Enrollment Process
Now, you can see why enrollment can be so challenging. It involves a lot of different tasks, long hours of work, and collecting reliable and actionable information to help you deal with shortfalls and exploit opportunities. It’s easy to lose track of things when there is so much to do!
Even with a team of professional experts and marketers, you can still enjoy marketing automation methods to lift some of the weight off your shoulders. Automation practices also allow you to dedicate more time and attention to important tasks like finding new ways to increase school enrollment.
Marketing automation also helps you monitor your online communications with prospective students from the initial point of contact to admission and enrollment. This will give you the advantage of helping students have a better experience throughout the admission and enrollment process.
Bottom Line
Enrollment marketing is a relatively new practice in the field. But over the years, we have learned a lot about tried-and-true strategies that help schools and educational institutions expand their reach and optimize their marketing efforts.
The truth is that without a well-thought-out digital marketing plan, you can rarely find a competitive edge in the market. Plus, just because a family enrolls at your school doesn’t mean they will stay until graduation. You must have a plan to keep them interested and satisfied.
These tips can help you avoid getting lost in the shuffle of the thousands of marketing methods and practices. But don’t worry if it still seems overwhelming. Our comprehensive school marketing reference calendar, with tips for successful school marketing and 250 pages of detailed marketing steps for every day of the school year, will help you figure it all out.
And if you need a team of dedicated professionals to help you, we’re here for you. At School Webmasters, we have the passion, experience, and dedication to stand by your side during your marketing campaigns. We offer your assistance with website design and social media management, website maintenance, logo and design services, and more.
You can easily get a quote right now or just contact us (call 888.750.4556 and speak with Jim) and let us point you in the right direction.