Is Your School Ready for the Future of Marketing?
The face of marketing has changed drastically in the past decade and growing digitalisation continues to bring new challenges and opportunities every day. In the realm of digital marketing, being up to date on the current trends can be the difference between leading the way or falling behind, and this is especially true in the competitive world of international education. School marketing and admissions teams must constantly embrace new marketing tools and update their engagement strategies by staying aware of the latest trends.
While trends are changing and the educational landscape is getting more and more competitive every day, is your school ready for the future of marketing? In this article, we will break down some simple steps you need to know to prepare your school for the future of marketing. Here’s how:
1- Implement Trust and Transparency
With many locations having more than one excellent school to choose from, prospective families are now looking for schools that share their values more than ever. They are becoming more selective and it is getting harder to convince them as to “why” they should choose your school and why it is the best option. One of the keys for schools to implement trust and transparency for prospective students and their families is to make use of video content and testimonials. As we previously stressed the importance of testimonials, it is important to remember that they are a great way of sharing real-life examples and experiences of your students and are an essential part of your marketing toolkit. If you do not have any testimonials or video content on your websites or social platforms, this is your time to do it before it gets harder to keep up.
2- Map out Your Prospective Parents’ Journeys
Make sure that you have a clear picture of what an enrollment journey looks like for your school. This will not only help you understand parents more but it will also help parents to have a clear idea of the experience they will have. Journey mapping offers a lot of benefits within the world of education and allows you to provide better support to prospective parents and students.
3-Virtual Tours
Having a virtual tour on your school website is a great way to showcase your facilities and this service will provide return on investment for many years. Nowadays, it is not easy to do school visits for working parents and many families must choose a school before relocating to a new country - that’s why you should add ‘virtual tours’ as a must-have in your new marketing strategy. Virtual tours might never fully replace traditional school visits, but they do fill an important niche - more than 60% of international parents said they were more likely to consider a school if they could visit the campus digitally before arriving in the country!
4-Social Media Marketing
Using social media channels to advertise your school is the future of enrollment marketing. Before, schools relied on print advertising or word-of-mouth to attract new students to their school but social media advertising is the new way to make sure your school is engaging with a wide and targetable audience! All channels are not created equal for school marketing - it’s important to know which channels and trends to invest time and resources into, and which to ignore in favour of better opportunities. If you want to stand out from the rest, make sure to personalise your ads and take time to deeply understand your target audience and what makes them tick.
Need help?
If you’d like to talk more about the marketing trends that will drive the future and how to implement them, our school marketing experts are always available, so you can contact us anytime using our website contact form, or calling us on +44 20 34 55 22 41.
