As the school year continues, students, parents, heads and teachers create and share content related to their schools.
Do you know what people are saying about your school online? How they are feeling about your main competitors? What do institutions like you have in common, the value of the qualifications you offer, or the areas and departments to which your courses apply?
Social listening can cause schools to make major changes to student recruitment strategies, digital marketing strategies, and even from time to time their programs, courses, and support services.
Through social listening, you can provide the information and tools to create content that your audience wants to see, showcase new ideas based on what your audience is talking about, and interact directly with them.
Read on to learn more about how social listening works and how to get started.
- Know your competitors
Regularly monitoring your peer schools keeps you abreast of changes in their marketing strategy, and how others are talking about them in comparison to your school. There are many reasons why social listening can be of value to your school. Listening to online conversations can provide insights into your audience’s attitudes, their opinion of you and your competitors, and the general outlook of wider education sectors.
Your school might want to know:
- What pupils and parents look for in a school
- You’re peer schools reputation and what they are doing on social media
- Industry trends
- Content Research
If you want your web content to be visible when parents and students are in the consideration stage, you need to provide useful and search-friendly content that answers their questions rather than advancing your own agenda. The parents and students themselves post and answer these questions online. The use of social listening will help you to identify these questions and then answer them in your content.
As a marketer, you may know that good content has two distinct characteristics:
- The topic needs to speak to your audience, which is to answer their questions and solve problems. To create content like this, you obviously need to be aware of these issues. You need a lot of information about your potential customers and messengers, what they want and their needs.
- The content must respond to normal trends. The content you create should be fresh and relevant, addressing current issues. In our fast-paced world of the Internet, no one wants to hear about events that have been going on for months.
If you follow these rules, you will always get compelling content that will yield results. But how exactly do you make sure your content is relevant to your audience and in line with the trends? Social listening! Social Listening addresses these challenges and allows you to analyse your audience and their understanding of your schools’ brand, as well as the latest online trends.
Social listening is also the perfect remedy for a creative block. Not sure what to say on your new blog or video? Check out the social listening resources and get lots of new ideas!
3. Discover new opportunities for your school
Social media listening is more than just hearing what people say about your school. It’s also about hearing what they have to say about your competitors and the schools as a whole.
For example, you may have heard that parents are looking for extra sports clubs this year and if your school has the facilities to run extra clubs, you can discuss this as an opportunity for your school.
Conversations like this are essential for listening. It will help you to see and learn from your competitors and their audience.
This will help you find out why your competitors are so popular and learn from them. You can also see how they react to negative judgments and avoid making the same mistakes.
4. Increase your school’s enquiries and admissions
Social listening offers a lot of opportunities. Using social listening, you can find out what kind of content your audience enjoys by observing their posts, what they share, and so on. You can then create relevant content that your audience is looking for which will lead to new enquiries.
Your audience will appreciate you solving their problems and social listening will help you to develop relationships with potential customers to your school, whereby you can then nurture these relationships and begin the social selling journey.
Reaching out, making these connections, and sharing all of your best useful information will help you to establish your school’s brand and prove to be an excellent resource when the time comes for parents and students to make a decision.
If you would like more professional tips on marketing your schools do get in touch with the Digithrive For School’s team who are always happy to help. contact us here