by Schools start getting busy every admission season. It is time to enroll new students and bid old students goodbye. Even if your school allows round-the-year admissions, most students prefer enrolling at the beginning of the session.
You would not have to worry about marketing your school even a decade ago. Every school made a name for itself and attracted students accordingly. The scenario has changed significantly. Today you have to market and promote your school to bring more students. Schools no longer market themselves, and competition among schools has increased.
The easiest approach to promoting your school is through social media. Social media is free, everyone uses it, and there’s no reach restriction. Today we will learn about promoting school admissions on social media and how to do it effectively.
Inside Contents
Social media ads vs print ads
Schools traditionally use brochures, banners, posters, etc. to announce the admission season. While there are merits to print marketing, these are some of its challenges:
- A limited number of people can see them
- Distribution of posters, brochures, etc. requires manual labor and time
- Print ads are non-interactive – you cannot access more information by clicking on the ad
- Social media allows both free and paid campaigns. Print marketing is always paid (for the printing at least)
That said, print marketing has its own advantages. If you are running a school, you must already use some form of print marketing. Let’s find out how you can do it better with social media.
Promoting schools admissions on social media
In the following section, we will take you through the steps to promote school admissions on social media:
1. Know where the parents are
Schools are essentially targeting the parents and not the kids. You do not need to broadcast your ads directly to the children, but you need the parents to know about your school.
The first thing you have to do is locate where the target audience is. Are they spending more time on TikTok or Twitter? Using social media analytics is the best way to get demographic data regarding this.
Another approach is to target all social media platforms at the same time. Several SaaS tools let you manage all your social media handles from one platform. Then you can use the same advertisement across all your social media handles, reaching parents everywhere.
2. Promote your differentiator
The purpose of schools is to train children. Every school promises quality education. To stand out from the crowd, you need to promise something on top of quality education.
Your differentiator will depend on what kind of school you run. If it’s associated with a religious institute, you can use that as your USP. If sports and physical activities are the forte of your school, that can be your differentiator.
It’s important to highlight the differentiator(s) in your ads. It is the only way of letting people know that you are not like the hundreds of other schools that parents can choose for their children.
3. Look professional
How you design your posters and ads has a huge impact on the success of your marketing campaign. If you are using dull designs and the same old templates, it shows that you have put very little effort into creating them. This is not the impression of the school that the parents should have.
Thankfully, we now have several online poster and advertisement-making tools that can replace professional graphic designers. You can even use some of these tools for free. For instance, designing free school admission posters with existing templates will deliver amazing results with just a few minutes of work.
Professionalism should also reflect on the words you use in your ads. You may not need a professional copywriter for your school admission ads, but using some inspiration is necessary. Look up other schools around the world and how they phrase and promote themselves.
4. Content marketing
Small businesses get a lot of value from content marketing. To put it simply, content marketing promotes content instead of your services (which is education in this case). The idea is to create content around education without directly talking about how your school can provide the best education to the kids.
There are many online tools to create content for your school. The more difficult part is to come up with content ideas and then craft them expertly. You can use different forms of content for your school. Here are some ideas:
- Host a podcast on the changing education landscape and how parents can navigate through it. Invite teachers and educators to discuss the nuances that the average person ignores.
- Start a blog for both parents and kids. It can be an educational blog for children, a resource hub for parents, or a combination of both.
- Create video content showing different events and activities of your school. You can also recreate your blog content in video form.
- Let the existing students of your school showcase their talent through articles, paintings, music, dance, and so on. Then use your website and social media handles to promote their talent.
- Create a weekly or monthly newsletter covering all the important developments in the education sector.
Content marketing is essential for schools to get more student admissions. Nothing builds more credibility than content marketing, especially for educational institutes.
You should also teach yourself basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to use content marketing more effectively.
5. Host community events
Schools are important parts of the local community. One of the best ways to promote your school is to host community activities. It can be a sports competition for all kids in your community (and not just your students), an exhibition by the students, science fairs, play performances, and so on.
Promote your community events on social media to bring them to the attention of more people. You can also use these events as content for your content marketing efforts.
Conclusion
We hope these strategies help you get more admissions to your school. To sum up, here are 4 things to keep in mind:
- Design professional ads
- Create and promote content
- Bring the community together through social media
- Promote what you do best
