Is your district putting more emphasis on marketing this
year?
Are you feeling the pressure from private and charter
schools in your area?
School marketing is becoming more important as competition
is increasing for public schools across the country. It is time for school
districts to embrace marketing and think of it as an investment to increase
brand awareness and increase enrollment.
Podcast for this Article can be found here:
Podcast Link
In this article, you’ll discover simple tips to improve your school marketing.
What is Marketing?
School Marketing is about using tools to get more parents to
enroll their children in your schools and keep them there. School Marketing is
also about getting more community members to support your schools more often so
your school district succeeds.
Knowing our goal of marketing, let’s look at eight simple techniques to
improve your school marketing. Look for Part 2 coming soon.
1. Using Live Video
for Marketing
You read it everywhere; video is the new “King of Engagement”.
Two years ago Meerkat and Periscope burst onto the scene making live streaming
a reality for amateur smartphone videographers. A year later, those clunky
platforms laid a path for the debut of the highly engaging Facebook Live.
If your district is not using Facebook Live, you better get
started. Research shows that Facebook Live broadcasts create three times more
engagement than the standard Facebook news feed post.
It is very simple to broadcast from Facebook using your
smartphone. There are also software programs and hardware that allows
broadcasts using multiple cameras.
My district (CFBISD) used the platform to hold a live
question and answer with expert kindergarten teachers for interested parents.
The broadcast reached 30,000 viewers and drove many parents to our kindergarten
website. It was a huge success.
Here are some additional
ideas for using Facebook Live:
12 Easy Facebook Live Ideas for Your District
2. Use Google
Analytics to Create Successful Campaigns
Smart marketing is all about data. If you are not tracking
your marketing campaigns, website and social media analytics your marketing is
going to suffer. You have to successfully combine art and science when creating
your district’s marketing campaigns and strategies. Analytics helps with this
science.
“Like a scientist, I collect data, I look at it, and then I
change my activities to reflect what I’ve learned” – Sergio Zyman, Former CMO
of Coca Cola
Installing Google Analytics on your district and school
websites is pretty simple. Here is a step-by-step guide created by Google to
get started:
Google Analytics allows districts to track such things as visitor
page views, time on site, traffic sources, location of visitors, demographics
of visitors and much, much more.
By tracking these statistics, your district has a better
idea of which campaigns are truly working. Waiting three to six months to
determine a campaigns success is a thing of the past. Now we can use real time
statistics, which gives us the ability to adjust our campaigns on the fly.
Marketers can use analytics to determine what is working and what is not
working during important campaigns.
Here are some awesome articles about what stats to look at first:
3. Marketing Success
with Facebook Ads
Your districts Facebook Fan Page is not organically performing
as well as it use to. Facebook is throttling engagement with algorithms that
change daily. Always remember that Facebook is a business. Sometimes you have to pay to play.
In my opinion, Facebook ads are the best paid marketing a
school district can do right now. They are fairly inexpensive, and drive nice engagement
from highly targeted audiences. No other marketing campaign has the ability to
target specific groups, and then provide very specific analytics on the success
of your campaign.
My district has been using Facebook ads for our Open Enrollment Campaign and we have seen
awesome results. We are able to target parents in certain zip codes that have
expressed interest in making a change in school districts.
Our ads have driven thousands of visitors to our Open
Enrollment Landing Page, with hundreds of people enrolling in our district who
live outside our district boundaries.
Our advertisements target very niche audiences, which is
very hard to do using traditional advertising. Especially at the cost we are
paying for Facebook ads. For as little as $25, we can engage with 2,000 parents
with very specific needs. The Return on Investment using Facebook ads is
phenomenal.
Before you start, here is an informative article about Facebook ads:
4. Using the Facebook
Pixel
According to Shopfiy.com, a Facebook Pixel is
used to drop a cookie that will track visitors on your website so you can
advertise to them later. This is commonly called retargeting.
Retargeting is a very powerful technique to
target audiences that have shown interests in your district, schools or
specific programs that you offer.
For
example, you can use a Facebook Pixel to target audiences who have visited a
program page, but have not applied to join the program. Much like Google
Analytics, the Facebook pixel tracks the movement of Facebook users on your
website. It use this data to help you create a more powerful Facebook ad.
Installing
a pixel on your website is simple, and is hidden within the code; not visible
to your audience.
Below is Facebook’s installation guide:
After your pixel is
installed, you can use retargeting through Facebook ads to narrow your audience
to create higher performing campaigns.
Conclusion
All school districts should start thinking about school marketing. It's an investment that all districts will need sooner than later.
With increased competition from all types of educational establishments, it is better to start now to be ahead of the game. Remember, you are investing in the future of your school district.
What do you think? Will you try these school marketing techniques? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
