Today, the educational market place is highly competitive. In such environment, Independent Schools have a tough job to do better, by making sure that their value proposition to prospective families and students is well established. The administrators who have been tasked with creating these unique messages will need to use market research to help them build a successful engagement campaign.
What exact types of highly targeted messages or strategies can help your school to build up a wider and sturdier admissions guide? We at Swoop Studios, believe that your best course of action for this type of instance, is Market Research. We believe so because market research is a tried, tested and proven method that gives you opportunities to finding specific answers to your questions.
To that end, we advise that a number of focus groups be carried out by a professional research partner to help you assess and narrow down your school’s position and status. We advise this because we believe that the expertise of an external market research will bring value to your school (or business) by being grounded in objectivity.
Here are some benefits of using a professional research consultant:
1. Help you keep the objectives and focus of the research very clear.
2. Maintain a healthy objectivity from the design stage through to the final details.
3. Initiate a trusting and harmonious relationship with respondents of the focus groups in a neutral environment.
4. They ask questions and delve beyond rationalisations to uncover genuine reasons behind actions carried out.
5. Professional Research Consultants can adapt their approach when new and unexpected queries or problems arise.
6. They are in the best position to recommend methods for the research design.
At the very least, we recommend that two focus group be conducted with the professional researchers, prior to the start of marketing. The first focus group should consist of narrowing down your schools most important targets and the demographic surrounding them. This should include all the prospective families. The second group should comprise of ANC’s (Accepted but Not Coming). Families who were accepted to your school, but chose not to enrol. Processes like these will not only accord you a clearer understanding of your targets and potential students’ needs, they will also help hone your school messages as well as create the perfect niche for your school in the market place.
We will be discussing more approaches to Independent School Marketing in our future upcoming blogs. Stay tuned…!
Written by Gayle Thompson @SwoopStudios
Our intent with our blogs is to publish regular content that will help you improve your Schools marketing. We also aim to provide you with valuable insights, tips and tricks, which will support you. We would welcome your feedback on what you would like to see more of, in terms of topics, guides and data, so please contact us using the form below.
