No matter what your budget is, you need to ensure that you are doing everything to maximize your exposure, reach and return on investment, while keeping your marketing goals top of mind.
Social media marketing adds a collection of tools to increase your school’s exposure. Here are some tips and ideas on how you can best use these tools. You can engage in dialogues with students, parents and alumni, and provide a glimpse of your school community to prospective families.
How To Maximize Your Marketing Campaign: For Private Schools
What Works? What Doesn’t?
Many businesses continue to reduce traditional marketing budgets and invest in online marketing. Online marketing has the benefit of being completely trackable, providing you real-time results on your efforts. It’s important, however, to remember that no one is going to go online and search for your school out of the blue. Something has to trigger that. A report by iProspect, concludes that 67% of online searches are driven by offline campaigns, so it’s important to have an integrated advertising and marketing campaign.
Integrating Your Marketing Campaign
- Many schools are getting involved with social media by starting Facebook and Twitter accounts. However, very few are promoting or sharing their efforts in the traditional marketing materials. To have a successful marketing plan, integrate your social media initiatives with other marketing.
- Add your social media links to your school website (Example: Brentwood College School). This shows families you are innovative and engaging in new media.
- If you’re posting information to your website on a weekly basis, share these stories and links via your social network sites. If your website has RSS feeds, add them to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter so that you only have to post your story/event/photo once to your website, and it will automatically appear on all your social sites. This saves you time and effort. (Example, OurKids.net posts the community question RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook so as soon as a question is posted or answered, it appears in these networks.)
- Ask your advertising partners if you can add your social media sites to their websites. For example, on the ourkids.net school profiles, schools can post links to their social media networks, an RSS of their school blog, and a direct pull of their tweets from Twitter.
- Communicate with people that can repost or retweet your information. For example, the Our Kids Go To School Twitter and Facebook pages will repost school postings whenever they can, further delivering your message to a new audience. Do the same back and build your relationships.
Get The Most Out Of Paid Advertising
- Know what you are paying for and what free tools or communications are available. Develop a strong relationship with the media sources you advertise with.
- If you have a listing or profile on an online directory, complete your profile in full. Post stories, events and news to receive the greatest traffic possible. There are hundreds of reports that prove profiles with photos have a higher level of engagement.
- When you do print or radio advertising, ask the media source about an online posting or hyperlink. Most times they will be able to provide you with some added value. For example, radio stations usually have an events calendar where you can post your open house dates.
- Determine what other opportunities are available to get involved with. Perhaps you can submit a story for print, online or newsletter publishing, or maybe the media source has a community or blog you can get actively involved in and become an expert on a particular topic, such as special needs or homework.
Free Tools and Widgets
- Share your activity on Twitter and Facebook with other websites or on your own website. Twitter.com/goodies allows you to customize a box that can be embeded on any website and will dynamically pull your most recent activity. Facebook has the same tool available at developers.facebook.com
- To save time and manage your social media networks, try Hootsuite.com (it’s Canadian!). Manage and post to all of your social networks with one click, schedule posts for later in the day, week or month and receive reports on how many clicks each post receives. You can also provide user access with variable control levels so that your entire team or school community can get involved.
- Monitor who is driving traffic to your website with backtweets.com. This tool allows you to enter a website domain and will display any recent discussion on Twitter that includes links to that domain. Try it for your school and see if you are being talked about.
Successful Email Marketing Practices
- The Direct Marketing Association found that the average email marketing return on investment (ROI) is about $57 per dollar spent. This makes it one of the best marketing tools available and has multiple benefits including branding, top of mind, and word of mouth (WOM) promotion.
- There are 4 main steps to successful email marketing.
1. Grow a quality opt-in database. Quality is more important then Quantity. How? Just Ask! Ask at open house events, fundraisers, inquiry forms, registration forms, when parents inquire via phone. Ensure that you have a newsletter subscription form on every page of your website so you’re utilizing your current website traffic. Also use a double opt-in requirement so you don’t fill your database with non-existent email addresses and spam traps.
2. Develop and deliver timely and relevant messages. Template HTML messages can be very appealing to the eye but will have more difficulty passing firewalls and spam filters than plain text messages. Always watch out for spam words such as ‘free’ and ‘discount’. Here is a list of common spam filter trigger words.
3. For optimal results, segment your database. The information your current families want is different than what prospective students are interested in. By segmenting your database, you can deliver information that is important to that target group, increasing their level of engagement. Email clients such as Constant Contact or Active Campaign have tools available to easily segment.
4. Use an email client that saves, tracks and provides reports on the success of your campaigns. Following each mailing, analyze what was most popular and what was least popular. Look for trends within your group segments and cater the newsletter content to meet their interests.
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