Modern marketing tips for a successful school

For a business to thrive in the modern, digital world, it needs a strong marketing plan to reach audiences through multiple channels. This is the same for schools, with traditional methods no longer enough to ensure success.

However, this can be a daunting process for many schools and educators who are not used to employing these marketing plans.

So, here is your ultimate roadmap for getting your school’s marketing plan ready for action.

Set goals and develop plans to achieve them

Identify which areas of your school need improvement and set goals to improve them. This could be enrolment numbers, events, after-school programs or how you work with parents. Create benchmarks and write down plans on how you are going to reach them.

Make a list of priorities

A marketing plan can be a lot to take on at the starting point. This can be quite overwhelming, so create a list of plans and prioritise which need to be worked on immediately. Then you can tick them off one by one. Don’t expect things to happen instantly – it takes patience and time.

Assess your resources

Resources are not exclusive to budget funding and tangible assets. They also include the people you have available, the talent and skills and the time available to dedicate towards resources. Identifying this will assist you in not getting ahead of yourself and making plans that you do not have the resources to match.

Organise your data and contacts

The education industry is highly transient and there is great turnover each year; there are new students, leaving students and staff that come and go. Ensure your data is all up to date to reflect these changes.

Enhance your digital presence

The modern customer usually needs about six touch points before they make a decision to purchase. A strong school marketing plan should embrace this, with benchmarks geared towards social media, websites and traditional marketing channels that nurture these decisions.

Use teamwork to set your strategy

Brainstorming is a critical and enjoyable part of the entire process. Take all of the above points and get the team together to throw ideas and suggestions out; in some cases, it helps to create an ideas board to group all these concepts together. Then everyone can decide which marketing ideas to implement and they are all involved in the process.

Implement a marketing plan

For each goal, you now need to allocate your timeline for success, the concepts, tools and resources you will use. This plan will give you a concrete roadmap and a tool to show departments why additional projects cannot be sustained in the short term.

Assess your success

At regular intervals, run another group meeting to determine how successful each step of the marketing plan has been. Reflection is important and will help you improve your processes and efforts for future marketing projects.

Not sure where to start with your school’s marketing efforts? Get in touch with Digital Schools now for a no-obligation discussion.