In the first part of “Digital Marketing: Think like a Schools, Run like a Business”, we offered some great tips that could help the head of school prepare their school by recognising and utilising the many marketing tools in the digital world. We explored how schools can take advantage of these tools in database, strategy, analytics and market research, to secure the future for long-term success and the schools’ longevity.
In Part 2, we provide more tips on tools, systems and methods that can help your school further improve on its reputation and build better relationship with its visitors and constituents, ensuring that it gives satisfactory results on enrollment enquiry, alumni engagement and fund-raising activities.
The following tips have been put together as a guiding star for your school’s benefit. Check them out!!
Websites: How Dynamic is yours?
If you have read part 1 of this series, you will remember we talked about how your school’s website can be a deal maker or breaker, in terms of how it is a ‘representation’ and ‘presentation’ of your school’s values and mission. We bring up the subject of websites again in this issue because it is very important to note that although your website may be great, to make it an all time winner, it has to be ‘dynamic’ and by that we mean that it has to push beyond the boundaries of ordinary or even great! How your school utilise video and other content on your websites will help determine how dynamic yours can turn out to be! We cannot stress this enough; in today’s digital marketing, your website is your greatest weapon or tool. It all depends on how you wield it.
Web Content via Video Technology:
Rapidly changing user and consumer attitude, means that the use of Video content is now reshaping the total outlook in digital marketing. Video technology and platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, have really taken over in pulling in consumers.
Businesses who monitored and tracked this changing trend years ago, jumped on board and although some schools have caught on, others are still not using video enough, as the story telling format on their website. If the reason is because your school is worried about costs, then urge your head of school to consider “crowd-sourcing,”. This is the practice of getting the ideas, services and content that you need, from both the online community and nontraditional sources.
A perfect example of this is training students (having given them some guidelines), to shoot videos. In doing this, you get a great first hand experience, while educating students in a critical but awesome new skill. Of course it looks good on your schools website as part of what you offer and is also, a point of interest for prospective students. You can also use this same approach to get parents, students and alumni interested in, and partaking of activities.
Digital Marketing; the ‘all-or-nothing’ approach:
Businesses seriously picked up strategic use of social media, emails and web content, to promote new products or events, and while it is true that some organisations still use printed brochures or newsletters, many have rapidly moved onto online and electronic formats, having being nudged along by the exceedingly rapid growth of smartphones and tablets.
Schools too, can benefit from merging some of their printed publications, including look books and prospectus, to a digital format and their trustees will understand the huge economic benefits of moving the right types of campaigns to an electronic format.
Also, using mobile apps as a marketing tool to reach both current and prospective students is relatively easy to execute. It is also inexpensive because, although a mobile-enabled website is critical, they do not require expensive outlays.
It is also important that school marketing teams be aware of changes and happenings in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Even Google, the worlds dominant search leader, regularly update its algorithms because it knows these updates can greatly affect search results.
In the past, webmasters would improve tags or keywords in order to maintain their school’s web ranking, but now, with Google’s latest big release; the “Hummingbird”, the focus remains on high-quality informative links from notable websites. It also notes the edgy increase in mobile searches by trying to figure out the searcher’s purpose, just in the same way as having a “conversation” with people.
Marketing is evolving and so are businesses, by using strategies that grab the customers attention through relevant and interesting content on blogs and web pages, it encourages engagement and participation in activities through social channels.
Platforms for Technology:
Businesses and Schools are similar to one another in that they both have multiple database needs that always require technology that is cutting edge and effective. Does your school have an efficient platform that tracks prospective and current families, prospective and current students, alumni, registration rates, donations and payments?
If you answered NO to ANY of these questions, then your school is seriously not performing at its optimum capacity.
Take a look at the courses that your school offer. Are they available online? If not, then they need to be made so, ideally as part of an e-learning program that allow students to submit assignment as well as provide a different avenue to channel their creativity.
Schools must also be able to communicate to all their different constituents on many topics including, ongoing newsletters, emergencies, transportation and athletic updates, news, events, and sometimes, very specific programs like, farm trips for year eights, or that berry-picking and jam making project for year ten. Communications like these, help maintain that close-knit society feel while pitching the school at a higher level than others, at least where prospective parents are concerned anyway!
School trustees must have a firm trust in their ability to effectively manage all forms of communications. This is likely to need the combination of multiple databases because there will be a continual high cost in order to achieve effective marketing when using multiple systems. Packages like; training, tracking of opt-outs, market segmentation, personalisation, and consistent presentation can become too complicated and are often prone to error. Integrate multiple databases for a more streamlined and effective communication.
Integration:
It is important to align your messaging across email, the web, social media, fund-raising appeals, printed publications, and other communications. But how can schools achieve this? Especially as it is a proven method for ensuring its positioning and messaging comes across consistently to its target audience.
Unfortunately, many schools are still operating like an old-fashioned storage system where different sections do not integrate or work in tandem with each other. For marketing purposes, this is most common when communications and development are in separate teams. Many teams tend to work in isolation on email, social, and print programs, instead of working together by sharing themes and marketing strategies. This pattern of working in isolation often leads to disconnected programs and inefficient marketing. However, as we mentioned in part one of this blog, getting all your school administrators; faculty, parents, students and alumni on the same page about your school’s vision, mission, culture, and programs will validate and your school’s brand and long-term reputation.
Social Media Engagement:
With some Facebook posts as well as tweets that are of interest and relevant to students, parents and alumni, schools have made good progress recently in establishing a believable social media presence. However, most social media content for schools, moves in a one-way-traffic, this is because most, if not all of the communications comes from the school.
Although Businesses have yet to completely unlock the power behind driving community engagement, a few of their techniques can still be very informative in helping educational institutions.
A savvy business will track what topics generate the most interest and immerse those in the appropriate social media forums. It will also use irresistible graphics to stand apart from other businesses and test techniques across multiple channels as well (and very importantly), pick up interest and delve into mobile marketing. Savvy businesses will also encompass Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare, and Google+, into their media campaigns, because they would have observed and followed the trend with young people who are now looking for alternatives to Facebook. Also, it is worth remembering that Google+ also has the advantage of improving the search rankings for schools’ websites.
Generating and using ‘Leads’.
This particular paragraph is very cool. Familiarise yourself or your schools marketing team with the tips below because it shows you how to become savvy at using ‘Leads’ to generate more business and encourage a “nurture” system!
The art of using “marketing automation” to recruit as well as market to prospects is one that businesses have perfected. The term itself, refers to software systems that can seamlessly perform campaign management and market segmentation.
If businesses can find great success in increasing their conversion rates for leads, then so can your school. Don’t panic, it may sound scary, but it is relatively easy to do. The trick to know is that they do this by following leads they receive from advertisement, their website, trade shows and most often, social media.
One of the major advantage that most schools have over big businesses is that they can handle leads personally, but this will only be successful if they truly focus on the most competent and promising areas by developing “personas” or “characters”. This is where you define your top five market segments in a technical but often playful categories.
Once these segments have been categorised, you can then tailor the content of emails that can be sent in small batches to the right targeted audience.
If your school is a much smaller school, you can help your administrative teams be more focused and successful by dividing leads and creating ‘targeted’ content for each segmented division. Also, try sending follow-ups manually and at regulated intervals, keeping them freshly updated. Don’t forget that staying in touch with prospective families regularly may likely help your school to secure more deals when it comes to enrollment.
Testing of Key variables:
When businesses or organisations understand ‘Direct Marketing’ techniques, they become obsessed with testing key variables in almost every medium they can think of. Schools on the other hand have not tested some of the components that affect how visitors act or respond to their marketing messages.
Consider testing components like; subject lines, topics, tag lines, images, copy content, length and tone by setting up basic tests in emails, advertisements, posts on Facebook and websites, then track it with Google Analytics or built-in analytics packages.
Remember that testing is a crucial part of Strategic Marketing. It is also one of the keys areas of running your school like a business where the board should guide your head of school in making decisions and executing them.
Benchmarking Competitors:
Does your school measure up against other competitors in the industry in order to compare performance rates? How do you know when it’s time to step up your game and what components does your school tweak or change to do that?
Successful businesses always assess their strengths and weaknesses in a variety of specialties by regularly identifying the best competitors in the market.
As a school therefore, you should formally benchmark your leading peers for components such as; social media presence, website navigation, email content and frequency, search engine effectiveness, and community feedback, and although not every business have mastered the art of using each of these strategies and tools, they have however, come a long way in their understanding and application of increasingly complex marketing techniques.
Independent schools can also start now to capitalise on the current boom years as well as prepare for challenging times ahead, the sooner they accept and start practicing correct marketing techniques as a way to improve their reputation, enrollment and overall constituent satisfaction. Trustees can equally, use this method to provide valuable understanding about the importance of “data-driven” decision-making and the power of market research to their marketing teams.
Lastly, remember that there is an enormous amount of opportunities offered by today’s digital, social and data based technologies that can help your institutions long term existence, sustainability and overall success, so long as your institution starts to think like a school, but runs like a business!!
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