School marketing today can be challenging to master. With pressure on to boost admissions, it’s crucial schools have the skills in place to gain a competitive advantage. To have a genuine impact on admissions numbers and other school marketing goals, your school marketing department needs to be of a sufficiently professional standard.

Below are six important skills every school should be able to draw on to stand out from the crowd.

Content Writing

Whatever the medium, good content is an essential part of any school communication or marketing campaign. How your school communicates is arguably the biggest influencing factor in how it is perceived by your intended audience.

Good content writers will make sure that all your communications are consistent with your school’s brand, eliminate errors and grammatical inconsistencies, and make sure the right tone is used for each individual piece of work.

Graphic Design

The written word alone is only one part of good marketing. The impact of every communication is significantly amplified when accompanied by great-quality images.

Without an accompanying image, your social media posts are far far less likely to be engaged with. That’s why the ability to produce appealing brand-consistent imagery is invaluable for successful school marketing.

Social Media Management

Alongside sharing your own marketing materials externally, the management of your social media presence is also key. Parents will often go to your social media platforms to air any issues they have with the school, or in other cases, to share their happiness about certain events.

To best diffuse the negative situations, and make the most out of the positives, it’s important to have a trained social media manager keeping tabs on all your accounts so that they can respond constructively to any comments. In other words, stay in control and positively influence the conversation.

For more information about social media management, take a look at our comprehensive social media guide for schools.

Web Design

Even the most engaging and brilliantly put together marketing piece will be wasted if your website is visually unappealing and difficult to navigate.

As the destination for the majority of your calls to action, your school website is just as important as any advertisements you run or social media posts you post.

For more detail about the science of school websites, take a look at these articles:

Digital Marketing

Paid social media campaigns are one example of the many cost-efficient ways to market your school today. The data, and our experience, shows that you can reach a far higher proportion of your target audience — parents looking for a school place — if you can introduce paid social media marketing. For this, you need the required level of expertise. At Eduprise, we can provide this.

Strategy

Do you do marketing when you realise you might have an admissions problem, realise you haven’t communicated enough recently, or suddenly have some spare capacity?

Rather than being organised around whims and circumstance, good school marketing is organised around a plan that fits with the school year and your primary goals.

We’ve written about how planning and strategy enables you to communicate at the right time, and how it can save you huge amounts of time and cost in the long term.

We admit that the range of expertise required to fulfil all of these categories is quite a daunting task for a school marketing manager to carry all on their own.

That’s why, at Eduprise, we offer schools access to the services of skilled professionals in all of these disciplines, when and as they are needed.

If you’ve been looking for a school marketing manager to transform your school’s reputation and improve outcomes, why not give us a call instead?

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Written By
Adam Barker-Wyatt
Producing content and communications on behalf of schools and multi-academy trusts.
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Published 8th March 2021 at 12:00 am