We are advancing towards a new era of school marketing. The buying journey of a prospective parent is no longer a straight line. It will interest you to know that parents can, and do, locate information online, compare pricing, read and make social recommendations about prospective schools … all before you even know they are in the marketplace. Increasingly, unless you make their final short-list you won’t even know they were searching.
School Heads should look afresh at their marketing function.
The present marketing disruption – primarily enabled by the rise of the internet – is now more than 20 years old. While many schools are still struggling to adapt their marketing to the online paradigm shift, your prospective parents have already adapted. Do you know that the newest generation of parents in the market looking for the right school have never known the world without the internet?
What is the ‘big picture’ strategy for your marketing? Do you have a plan for 2020?
The web isn’t new anymore. More than ever before, it’s time to catch up – and perhaps even lead the way – into a new era of school marketing.
Here are our top 3 marketing changes your school must adapt to:
1. Relationships with prospective parents (and parents) are more complicated than ever. Although differentiation by your version of educational excellence is vitally important, it is no longer enough, it is expected. Today, your prospective parents crave an experience that delights them at every interaction. Take a look at the rapid inroads Uber has made into the taxi industry by offering a superior experience. You know who your driver is (with photo), where they are, how long it will be before they pick you up, and exactly how much the trip will cost … all before the driver has arrived. Wouldn’t you want a similar experience for your school?
2. Information (‘content’ in marketing speak) and experiences have become democratised. It is possible for your school to buy advertising and get noticed, but you cannot pay to have more relevance and value. Prospective parents no longer give time to the school that can simply shout the loudest. We need to get their attention and then hold it long enough so that they can hear our message and determine that they want to hear more. Interrupting people with our messages (a.k.a. advertising) is no longer good enough. We have to be what people are interested in.
3. Marketing has fundamentally changed and your school marketing has to change as well. In the past, the only scalable choices available to reach new potential parents were limited to print (newspapers and magazines), broadcast (radio and television), and ‘outdoor’ (billboards, bus-backs and alike). When you knew the medium and how to access it, you were considered a pretty good marketer. On the contrary, the last decade in particular has seen a dramatic increase in the number of channels available. There is simply no way for your team to scale to address every channel with your brand story. The only way to scale your impact is to transform the purpose of your marketing team to center on the creation and dissemination of content that describes and creates value for your prospective parents.
For many schools, marketing is just a necessary cost center that creates good looking ‘brochure-ware’ while the important work of education is performed by the specialists. The reality is far more challenging. Every person in a school – from the Head to the cleaner – is a marketer, because they all make an impact on the experiences of prospective parents and parents.
In today’s school, marketing and admissions serve as ‘promise makers’ of parent experiences, and the rest of the staff are the ‘promise keepers’. The effectiveness of the promise keepers determines if parents believe we have kept our side of the bargain. This means that school marketers have to expand the scope of activity and influence. Internal and external alignment has never been more important.
But is your marketing team equipped for this new reality? Connecting with prospective parents is harder and more competitive than it has ever been. The strategic vision and technical skills that are required have changed significantly in just a few years.
- 21% of marketers say the skills for which they were hired are now obsolete
- 97% see a dramatic increase in the breadth of marketing skills needed
- 97% are doing things they have never done before
- 45% of organisations can’t find marketing candidates with the right skills
The change in the buying behavior of prospective parents has been understood for the better part of a decade, but very little has changed in how school marketers view their role in creating experiences for the same audience. When the pressure is on, it is easy to default to what is known and comfortable. Unfortunately we live in the real world and the pressure is always on and the required change often comes at the cost of careers.
School marketing is on the cusp of significant change. Will you settle for what you are comfortable with or will you do what is necessary to ensure sustainability in a changed world?
As a school Head, and therefore your school’s Chief Experience Officer, do you know what your school will look like in 2020? What does your marketing need to look like today to achieve that goal?
Written by Rukevwe Toka @SwoopStudios
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