Why 2:30 PM Was the Perfect Time to Blog

CFB Parents are Happy

In this busy world of high-tech gadgetry, there is little time to have a conversation for more than the obligatory head nod. That is why it is vital to engage your audience when they can fit you into their busy schedule. So when CFBISD wants to send out an article that we think our elementary parents will love like this blog post on STAAR Test Taking Tips, we get very strategic with our times.

That is why CFBISD has utilized the times of 7:15 AM and 2:30 PM to connect with our elementary school parents.  Why those times?  One simple word... CARPOOL.

Here is an article from this blog that goes into more detail:

Riding the Carpool Whale - A Very Useful Tip on Timing Social Media

Let us know how you use social media scheduling in your district. Jot a note in the comment section below.

4 Quick Examples of Content Marketing Ideas for School Districts

The Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District has recently launched a parenting blog called School-A-Hoop. The mission of the blog is to enable and inspire parents to be confident that their child’s educational experience is the best it can be. Hopefully we build confidence in public education, and our district, by showing that we are the experts in K-12 education.

In addition to the blog, content marketing plays a huge role in our communications strategy by building confidence in our district, and the educators that work in our schools.

Here are a FOUR EXAMPLES of CONTENT MARKETING we have used to drive parents and potential parents to our blog and our district website, and ultimately having them signing up for our email list or visiting one of our events:

1. School-A-Hoop Blog

Whether it’s innovative study tips, creative homework solutions, or an invigorating approach to reading, we aim to help you raise a child that is a high-achieving, life-long learner.  The goal of this blog is to enable and inspire you to be confident that your child’s educational experience is the best it can be. Click Here to visit -------> www.schoolahoop.com

2. Bullying SlideShare 

School staff can do a great deal to prevent bullying and protect students, but they cannot do it alone. When your child is being bullied there are steps you can take to resolve the situation. This SlideShare has numerous links to read the full article on our blog and drive people to sign-up for our newsletter.  The SlideShare can be found here ------> Bullying 101: Information for Parents

3. The Scoop Magazine

We created a digital magazine called The Scoop to highlight past articles on schoolahoop.com  The digital magazine is full of visuals which are key in hooking the audience.  The magazine is sent to our email list at the first of each month. It drove tons of traffic to our website and blog.

4. Social Media Posts

Although we don't want to push messages down our community's throats, we do advertise our blog posts on a regular basis.  However, instead of a traditional advertisement, we create content marketing with useful information to drive our audience to our blog and website. This always gets us more sign-ups for our email list.  An example of a post is below.

These are just of a few of our content marketing pieces we have implemented in our district.  Please follow us on Twitter at @cfbisd or our Facebook page /cfbisd for more examples.

Do you have more questions about Content Marketing? Please ask your questions in the comment section below.

8 Classic Basketball Terms that Will Rock Your Marketing

In honor of the NCAA tournament, here are eight basketball terms you can use to transform your marketing.  Follow this advice to score some points for your brand or school district. These will slam dunk your competition.

1. The Layup

The layup is an easy social media post that you know will gain traction. It can revive your engagement numbers by getting your audience to comment or like the post.  This easy shot can be as simple as a cute picture of an elementary student or pictures of an athletic team getting a big win. It’s easy, and it gets you back in the game.

2. The Assist

The assist is a nice blog article or a great social media post that is going to help you score some nice sign-ups for you email list. You have to have quality content to make the big score. Just like The Hoosiers, you might have to pass a couple of times before you can put points on the board.

3. The Free Throw

Sometimes we get fouled by negative comments from our customers and competitors, and then we have to go the line to set the record straight.  Take advantage of these moments, and score some easy points by creating content that will regain the advantage with your audience.

4. The Steal

It’s okay to borrow great ideas. You don’t want to copy something exactly word for word, but it is fine to study what is working on social media and marketing.  Take an idea and make it your own. It’s always sweet to score when you steal.

5. The Timeout

Occasionally you need to evaluate what’s not working and create a new game plan.  Sometimes the greatest ideas don’t work on the court.  Study what’s wrong and make the adjustments.  Marketing is all about constantly refining your strategy.

6. The Instant Replay

Your audience is not always going to see when your company or school district does something special.  That’s why video is such a great tool to showcase your stories.  Upload your videos directly to Facebook for extra engagement.  If your story is engaging, your video is going to get great reach.

7. The Half-Court Shot

Sometimes it is okay to throw up a crazy idea and see if it hits the mark with your audience.   Take some risks.  Be a rebel. It can make you stand out from your competitor who is playing it safe.

8. The Triple Double

It is great when you have content you can use over multiple platforms.  Find ways you can create micro-content from your successful blog posts or videos you have created.  For example, you can create a SlideShare outline of your blog post, or maybe use a quote from the post over a nice picture. Always look for opportunities to repurpose your content.  That way you can score success in multiple categories instead of just one.

Content Marketing in School: How We Started

I got the idea after reading Jay Baer's best selling book, Youtility. The whole premise is you have to help not sell to potential clients or in our case parents. Here is an excerpt from his webpage:

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.

Youtility is marketing so useful, people would pay for it. It's a new marketing model for the age of information overload.

My district has done traditional media, digital and social media, but we have never tried CONTENT MARKETING. At least not to the extent of having a specific plan that focuses on content marketing.

I won't bore you with many details, but here are the 7 STEPS we took to jump into content marketing. Here is how we built School-a-Hoop.

1. Who is Our Target Audience

 

Most of you will say, "Duh, it's parents, stupid!" It is parents, but what do these parents need? What are their pain points. That is the question you have to ask yourself. Then you have to HELP cure their pain.

Brainstorm. Make a list. How can you help them feel confident that they are making the best choices raising their children? Those solutions will be the content you provide.

2. Find Your Experts

 

Who are going to find to help you solve these problems? They have to be experts. They have to be able to help your audience, or cure their pain.

We selected the obvious choice... our teachers. Why? Because they're the best teachers in the State of Texas. They're the experts molding hard-working, life-long learners. Each one of our teachers have their specialty. Use that specialty to create something special for your audience.

3. Find Your Device

 

How are you going to deliver your content? There are thousands of ways to create and disperse content marketing.  You have to find the best vehicle for your audience. You can do Video, SlideShares, White Papers, eBooks, Blogs... there are too many to list. We chose a blog to start with.  Easy to understand, and a great publishing tool for useful information.

4. Create Your Content

We went back to our experts, told them our ideas, and they gave us theirs. We brainstormed. We fleshed out our ideas. In the end, they are the experts, so we let them go and create something special. What they came back with was gold.

5. Revise and Rewrite

 

There is always room for improvement. Sometimes you have to shape your content for the particular vehicle you are going to present the material with. For our blog, we wanted to be more conversational and to the point. We focused on building lists and bullet points. We revised and we revised. Five drafts in some cases. Not necessarily for grammar, but to create the best possible solution for someone's pain points.

6. Choose Our Visuals

 

We know visuals rule in storytelling.  We took several days to choose the best possible visuals to help tell our story.  In the end we chose four pictures.  One to use in our blog post, and the other three were used to create additional material to promote the blog.

7. Getting the Word Out

 

We created an editorial calendar for each one of our posts.  We have a plan each week when we post an article.  It includes social media, interacting with other blogs, traditional media, email marketing and micro-content in the form of smaller content marketing pieces such as SlideShare.

It takes a lot of work for one post on our blog, but we believe in the end our content marketing will make us the respected leader in education in Carrollton, Dallas and the State of Texas.

Do you have any additional tips or questions? Leave them in the comment section below.

What National Signing Day Can Teach Us About School Marketing

Today is the day. All across the land, high school athletes are signing their letter of intents to play at colleges and universities.  This has become a big deal in the past 10 years, even being televised on the national media. Which makes me think, how else could we incorporate national signing day into School Public Relations and Marketing?

Here Are My Three Ideas to Create a National Signing Day for other Aspects of Education

1. National Kindergarten Signing Day

Why not make entering Kindergarten extra special. On the first day of school hold a school-wide assembly to welcome all the new kindergarten students to your school. Have them dip their hand in finger paint and stamp their hand print on a "I'm Going to be Successful" letter of intent.

2. Entering 9th Graders to High School

Do the same for your freshmen as the kindergarteners, except this time they sign a contract to graduate in four years. Have them declare a major and give them a "scholarship" to attend special electives that fit their passions.

3. Post Secondary Signing Day

Why not take the hype and festivities around National Signing Day for Athletes and apply this to every student who is making the choice to do something special after they graduate.  Are they going to college? A Technical Institute? A Trade School? Getting a Certification? Make it special that they achieved something. That the hard work they put in the last four years at your school is celebrated.

Do you have any other ideas to incorporate signing day into your district marketing? Let me know in the comments.

What Am I Reading Now

Here are a handful of books I am currently reading that have helped me implement marketing initiatives for my school district. Click the title before the description for more information or to purchase the book.

1. BORN TO BLOG by Mark W. Schaefer and Standford A. Smith

Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time  

Born to Blog is filled with practical, street-smart techniques and ideas to help you create and manage a winning business blog. Learn how to attract a loyal following, promote your blog, and write powerful content that generates new business.

2. EVERYBODY WRITES by Ann Handley

Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Finally a go-to guide to creating and publishing the kind of content that will make your business thrive. Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.

3.  THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.

4. YOUTILITY by Jay Baer

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new business approach that cuts through the clut­ter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.

Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than seven hundred brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

4 Ways Your Social Media Post Should Be Like InTouch Magazine

When you construct your next social media post, think of InTouch Magazine and how they draw the reader to their publication.

Here are four ways to construct your posts like a tabloid magazine

1. A Catchy Headline - Do you have “Kim Caught Cheating” first line to draw in your reader? Your first words of your post needs to attract your reader to your post. Tell them what your post is about in a sexy, informational way. Think of all the Tweets or Facebook posts that are in their feed… you need something to stand out.

2. An Awesome Picture - We are a visual society. You must have some sort of visual in your post. Think of all those magazines on the grocery aisle. They have vivid, sexy pictures to turn your head to the magazine rack. Find a picture that matches your subject, but make sure it is engaging enough to have your readers stop at your post as they scan their feed.

3. Sub-Headlines are Hashtags - the mini headlines under the main headline are like the hashtags in your posts.  They define your story and give it a category. Look at the InTouch cover I attached in this post. Some of the keywords in the sub-headlines are: Affair, Kinky, Phone Sex and Wedding. Those caught my eye… I know exactly what the article is about. Do the same with your hashtags.

4. Your Link is Your Table of Contents - a magazine’s table of contents tells you exactly where to go to find the main story. You need to include a link in your post to send your reader to your blog post or additional content. You must have a Call to Action. Make that link count.

The next time you construct a post, think of InTouch Magazine.