6 School Marketing Strategies You Need to Know

We all know how crucial it is for schools to embrace marketing, but it can often be difficult to know where to start, and which strategies to adopt. Fortunately, at Eduprise we know exactly where your challenges lie and have proven expertise in helping our clients across many schools and MATs get the results they need.

Whether it’s to boost your admissions, improve recruitment, or enhance the relationship between your school and its parent community, we can help you through utilising our tried and tested six marketing strategies every school or Trust needs to know.

Plan Ahead with Editorial Calendars

Education is often reliant on great planning and making sure you are always ahead of your schedule; a good teacher will always plan their lessons in advance.

So it makes sense that the same principle should apply to marketers. By planning your school marketing campaigns according to the school calendar, you ensure you’re always one step ahead of the curve. The team here at Eduprise have a huge amount of experience putting together successful and engaging editorial calendars, each individually tailored to our clients’ requirements. So why not get in touch today to find out more? We can even show you some examples of what good looks like.

Engage with Parents on Social Media

Your school or trust probably already has a set of social media channels, but are you using them to their best potential? Depending on the platform, you should always define goals for each.

In our experience, using Facebook in particular, you can generate an enormous amount of positive engagement with your parent community. This will not only help to get the word out about the positive aspects of your school, but will also lead to more harmonious interactions with parents.

For example, we worked with a new school in Bicester to connect with their parent community on Facebook. With increased buy-in from parents, this small school, relatively unknown in the area, was able to grow its reputation around the town through parent word of mouth and networking.

For ideas about how to start communicating with your school community online, speak to Eduprise today and we can share our insights with you.

Build Relationships with the Local Press

From a school’s perspective, a call from a local journalist can often be something to dread rather than welcome. However, with good press relations, they don’t have to be seen as a threat, but instead, as a fantastic way of getting free publicity out for your school.

At Eduprise, we maintain strong relationships with local journalists where our client schools are based. This gives us an advantage in two ways: firstly, we are frequently able to provide journalists with press releases about notable in-school events that help them fill their pages, and help our schools improve their reputation. Secondly, we are able to liaise directly with journalists and are therefore more likely to receive more positive coverage when stories break, whether that be delivering good news, such as the introduction of a new principal, or sharing an unwelcome surprise.

In August, several secondary schools in the south west received glowing features in their town’s local newspapers for their exam results days. These features would not have been possible without the mutually beneficial relationship we helped them foster with local journalists.

Rebuild your Website

Your school website is very likely to be the first point of reference for any parents or teachers looking for information about local schools. It is the best place to store information for your current school community and also to advertise your school to prospective parents.

As a result, your website can have a huge impact on your school’s reputation, and it is certainly worth investing in good web design.

That being said, it’s important not to make the mistake of solely relying on your website for all your marketing. Your school website should act as a hub for communications and marketing across a range of channels.

This is where Eduprise comes in; we can help you to identify the role your website should play, and to ensure it fits perfectly within your digital marketing set up. We can even support you on managing your website content and inbound communication. Interested? Get in touch to find out more.

Use Paid Social Media Marketing

In a sector that generally gravitates toward the more traditional marketing methods, paid social media marketing is often not considered as an option by school leaders. While it’s not the solution for every problem, PPC (pay per click) social media advertising is well suited to the needs of school marketers.

This is because it has the potential to target very narrow audiences obtained through people’s profile information on social media. This sets apart PPC advertising from more traditional methods, which are not targetable and are therefore often significantly less cost effective.

For example, a recent school social media marketing campaign enabled us to target a crucial admissions campaign to prospective parents with children aged 10 to 11. This resulted in a total of 112 applications needed to open a new school with a full Year 7 intake, and generate extremely high levels of engagement within the local community.

Outsource Your Marketing

Is keeping your marketing in-house the best, and most cost effective way forward? We don’t think so.

To run a competitive marketing department, you need a wide range of expertise and skills on hand, and to assemble a capable team would require a significant portion of your school’s payroll budget.

By working with Eduprise, you can have access to the expertise of a fully fledged marketing team, at a fraction of the cost, while easing pressure on your teaching staff to work as marketers as well as teachers.

To see the range of services and expertise available when working with Eduprise, take a look at our services page today or get in touch with us for an informal chat about the challenges your school or Trust faces. You might be pleasantly surprised by what we can do for you.