Schools often struggle to gain the attention of students and parents. According to the National Center For Education Statistics (NCES), there are about 130,930 private and public K-12 schools. That’s a lot of competition, but the real reasons for low enrollment rates are economic and social factors like rising inflation.
Many schools do not focus on marketing for their admission campaigns; as a result, they are unable to reach their potential audience.
Nowadays, people search for products and services online rather than physically visiting a location. Marketing is one reliable way for schools to build awareness, get more footfall and increase enrollments in any admission campaigns.
Affordable Marketing Strategies For Schools
Let’s have a look at how different types of marketing strategies can boost school admissions.
1. Create A School Website
A well-developed school website makes a good impression on the viewers. Moreover, it enables you to implement many marketing strategies.
Here is how it helps:
- Create virtual tours of your classrooms, gymnasium, and the school campus so parents and students can remotely see the school building, availability of equipment, and other facilities
- Put up images of your school, latest events, high achievers, and more because the human brain process image 60,000 times faster than text, making it easy for viewers to relate to what you are showing them
- Make your website mobile compatible and ready to take advantage of 70% of website traffic from mobile phones. You will likely lose a potential audience if your website is not mobile compatible
- Enrich your website with maximum details; people visit the website to get information for their queries
- Take your website to the next step by adding student/parent portals; in this way, youngsters can get admission to your school online, and their parents can track their progress at the home
2. Use Social Media Marketing
There is no cost to creating social media accounts, but the benefits and reach they offer are massive. There are dozens of social media platforms present today; you can select the right platform where you can find a maximum number of your target audience.
Moreover, schools can take help from online themes and templates specifically designed for social media posts. These themes and templates need slight editing for your school and are ready to use.
Research shows that a person spends an average of 2 hours 27 minutes of their day on social media platforms. Like a website, social media presence also increases your organization’s credibility. You can leverage social media for your school enrolment in the following ways;
- Create engaging and informative content on social media accounts; for example, create back to school posts or similar posts that can grab parents’ or students’ attention. Moreover, social media is also a source of information for visitors. You can post complete details on your social media pages regarding the admission process and benefits to get maximum conversions
- An efficient way to get quick traffic and conversion is to run paid advertisements on social media platforms. Do research first on which platform you can get your target audience; common platforms are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Run custom ad campaigns that target specific demographics and areas. This is an excellent idea because Facebook ads have a 152% ROI. Moreover, with social media, you can directly communicate with visitors.
- With pre-generated themes/templates, it becomes easier to make social media posts. The best method is to use these tools to make school admission posters and run paid advertising campaigns. With these tools, you can create multiple posters at once and run them on your social channels.
3. Use SEO And Local SEO For Your School Website
Search engine optimization is a low-cost marketing strategy that can help your school website rank high on Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). SEO is a method of ranking your website and bringing traffic organically.
Through SEO, you can rank high on SERP, and it will bring massive traffic to your website; studies show that 1st page Google takes 71% clicks and has the highest CTR. You can also use local SEO to rank your website for a particular region; since schools have region-limited target audiences, local SEO is an effective marketing strategy.
For any SEO marketing, use the following tactics:
- Speed up your website
- Build high-quality, relevant links
- Provide valuable content, images, and infographics like school admissions posters
- Use relevant Keywords
- Use school blogs and articles
Infographics and images are essential in ranking your website and satisfying your reader’s needs. Google ranking algorithm works on the quality of content images and significantly improves content quality. Platforms like PosterMyWall can help you create infographics, digital designs, and many other images for your website and social media.
4. Google Paid Advertisements
Google Pay-per-click ads are a fast and effective way to rank your website on top of Google SERP. You bid on your relative keywords so that your websites show first when the users search their query on Google.
PPC also allows you to target specific demographics. You can use Google PPC and SEO collectively to rank your website quickly and efficiently. The best thing about paid Google advertisements is that you can measure and track your traffic, which allows you to tailor your campaigns effectively to bring maximum traffic with minimum spending. It also works well with many other marketing channels.
5. Use Chatbots And Live Support
Chatbots provide visitors with 24/7 customer support on websites and social media platforms. We all know communication is the key to success; you may get traffic from various channels but converting them is equally important.
If you do not offer visitors reliable chat support and necessary information, they will not take action on your campaigns. Trust is essential for school admissions, and you can build this trust using Chabot and live customer support.
It is better to use live customer support during working hours. Chatbots can only entertain visitors to a certain extent; your customer support specialist will take from there and make sure to persuade the visitor to take admission on your ongoing admission campaigns.
Conclusion
The future education system is moving towards digitalization as educational institutes implement e-learning and student portals. So why not market your school using digital marketing strategies to get a maximum number of admissions?
Digitalization has impacted every industry; education, social media, and web presence have become necessary for schools and institutes to give updates and information to students and parents on the activities, development, and admissions. The marketing methods detailed above are affordable and effective at helping you find and register more students.
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