With the beginning of the new year, it’s important to evaluate your school marketing strategy and find new ways you could be generating more enquiries.
That’s why this guide will provide you with some tips on how to develop an improvement plan so you can get more enquiries and increase your admissions rate.
Use paid ads
Optimising your SEO can take a longer time to generate traffic to your website, so paid ads are a good option if you want to make an immediate impact.
A paid ad is almost always a win for your overall marketing strategy. When prospective parents are looking for schools they use general terms in search engines like “schools near me” or “schools in west London”.
To generate awareness, a paid ad can guarantee that your school website is number one spot on search results most relevant to your target audience. By putting in place paid advertising, you can yield an exceptional ROI back, as the majority of parents will click on the top results on Google. Recent stats speak for themselves as the page in the position 1 on Google has a 22.4% click-through-rate.
Use social media ads
Let’s make an assumption. You have the perfect content plan in place across various social media platforms. Your content generates even engagement with current and prospective families. But all those efforts don’t guarantee that those families will complete your enquiry form. To target your audience using an immediate call to action, you need to invest in social media ads. This way you can increase the awareness of your specific open days and drive admissions for specific years.
Earn positive Google reviews
By having positive reviews you build trust with your prospective families and progress them further down your admissions funnel. If your school has negative reviews then this might mean that parents never visit your website.
But to solidify your digital reputation, requires a well-planned strategy. For example, asking parents who just enrolled their children to leave a review, isn’t a great idea as they haven’t formed their opinion on your school yet. Perhaps you could ask a parent who has sent multiple children to your school and continued throughout pre-school, prep school, and senior school to leave a review.
Invest in a good website design
An overcomplicated website can leave your visitors frustrated and potentially make them look elsewhere. You need to put yourself in the shoes of your prospective parents and how they will navigate your website. You need to question yourself: is our website making it easy for prospective parents to take the next step and complete your enquiry form? If the answer is no, then you need to focus on redesigning your website.
Simplify your enquiry form
By shortening your enquiry forms you increase your chances of generating more conversions. A busy parent won’t have the patience to complete a lengthy form. Don’t forget, your marketing efforts should be focused on creating the best experience for your prospective parents and leave them content in at every step so they enrol their children.
We recommend to focus only on information that matters like their name, their telephone number, their email address, courses they would be interested in and for which school they want to gain more information about. Key takeaway is to have around 7-12 fields.
With a solid plan in place, you can boost your enquiries, increase your enrolment rates and stand out amongst your competitors. By implementing one or more of these strategies on our checklist, you will start converting your website visitors and stop losing leads.
If you need help with developing your private school marketing strategy, our team can help. Digithrive For Schools has helped many schools increase their enrolments and open day sign-ups. Contact us here