The 3 marketing metrics that actually matter for your school
Introduction
As school marketers, you work hard to deliver captivating content, smooth admissions processes and innovative marketing solutions for your international and private schools. Months of preparation and hard work from you and your team culminate into strong campaigns and new school value propositions. However, once it’s all said and done, it’s vital to take stock of what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can improve going forward. With the ocean of data available to us as marketers nowadays, understanding what metrics are useful and relevant to your marketing and admissions team is absolutely crucial to building on your past successes and forging a path forward.
Measuring admissions
Of course, we can all measure the amount of admissions your school attains year on year, analysing enrolment growth to gauge how successful and effective your marketing efforts are. But this is only one step in the entire admissions journey, and focusing solely on admissions growth puts you in a weak position to fully understand the efficacy of your efforts. Looking only at admissions growth is like looking only at a final dish, without any understanding of the ingredients that lead to its creation.
Because of this, we wanted to take the time to identify the key metrics that you can easily utilise to gain a fuller insight into your schools’ marketing and admissions, separating the unnecessary from the essential, so you can focus on delivering stronger value for your school in the upcoming academic year.
School Marketing Metric #1 - Conversion Rate
The single most important metric to consistently analyse and stay on top of as a school marketer is your conversion rate. Put simply, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, your conversion rate is the percentage of an audience that takes a desired action, based on your own call-to-action through one of your marketing channels. In school marketing, this includes your calls to subscribe to your newsletter, to enrol in a summer camp, to join a virtual open day, or to simply fill out an inquiry form on your website. To calculate this, you simply need to divide the number of conversions by the number of total viewers of a particular call-to-action, and times by 100. There is no ‘perfect’ conversion rate - it is dependent on the channel, the audience and more factors, but increasing your conversion rate, in a practice known as conversion rate optimisation (CRO), will reap great benefits for your schools’ marketing.
How to optimise your schools’ conversion rate?
To optimise your conversion rate for your schools’ efforts, most agencies would highly recommend utilising A/B testing methods, manipulating your call-to-action between two parallel groups of audiences, to see which manipulation receives the best conversion. However, we understand that schools are short on time, and for many marketing departments, even shorter on budget, and A/B testing methods often require heavy investments in both.
Instead, we recommend a Kaizen method of continual improvement, making gradual changes and measuring the results to consistently improve your conversion rates. The best way to focus your efforts on continual improvement is to focus on bettering your call-to-actions, making them more authentic and compelling. Whether it be a personal video message from your principal, as we’ve produced with Collège du Léman International School, or in an immersive setting like a virtual campus tour, the quality of your call-to-action is dependent on the authenticity of its delivery.
Authentic Head of School welcome video from College du Leman International School in Geneva - Produced by Pupil Productions.
Pupil Productions Pro-tip: Our clients find that, in their marketing metrics, live-guided tours always lead to the highest conversion rates for enrolment inquiries, and the reason why this is the case is due to the personal way a live-guided tour is delivered on our virtual campus tours, whilst remaining conveniently accessible to the prospective families.
School Marketing Metric #2 - Website and Virtual Tour Traffic
Online traffic is often measured to give a general impression of how many people are visiting your website. This only tells a small slither of the full story, however, and to really harness the power of traffic data, you need to understand traffic just like regular car traffic. It’s not simply the amount of cars on the road, it’s their flow, where it’s most busy and where it’s quiet. Behind the wheels of these cars are people, with motivations that drive their collective behaviour, and behind keyboards and screens are prospective families that interact with your digital channels with their own set of motivations and behaviours.
How to best utilise your school’s traffic data?
By analysing the traffic through your website, landing pages, and virtual campus tour, you can unlock a new understanding of your target market of prospective families - and even uncover previously hidden value propositions and insights that you weren’t aware of. For example, on our virtual campus tours, our clients can see which locations are most visited, and this may reveal to you untapped demand for certain services or aspects of your school experience. You may notice a growing number of visitors to your school canteen location, indicating that prospective families are placing a stronger emphasis on their children’s diets, health and eating habits. This insight would have a great deal of value for your marketing team, informing further marketing campaigns, admissions information and more.
School Marketing Metric #3 - Social Media Engagement Rate
Finally, we ask you and your marketing team to look beyond impressions and reach as a metric for success in your digital marketing and social media campaigns. Simply reaching a high number of eyeballs may be seen as a success for your school in the short term, but in the long-term, it does not indicate a return on investment as much as the metric of engagement does.
Engagement refers to your audience actively interacting with your school brand or digital content, and is often measured in the number of comments, likes and shares that a certain post or campaign receives. For schools, engagement is absolutely crucial, as it is the foundation from which prospective families can build enough brand awareness and loyalty of your school to make the high investment of enrolling in your school.
Focusing on engagement metrics will show the true power of your school brand and digital presence, and can be heightened through various techniques, such as creating strong call-to-actions, but is ultimately at its very best when your content is authentic and impactful. Today’s online prospective parents are blasted on all sides with marketing content from hundreds, if not thousands, of sources everyday. These prospective parents are looking for something authentic, that can emotionally move them, and speak to them honestly.
Authentic early years education video from the International School of Zug and Luzern - produced by Pupil Productions.
Our videography for many high-profile international and private schools around the world always is centred on spreading a message authentically, and staying true to the school brand. We have always seen this not only increases positive engagement with prospective families, but also leads to higher website traffic, and this in turn leads to increased conversion rates, and ultimately, admissions growth.
Summary: The key marketing metrics for your school’s admissions
Conversion rate
Website and virtual tour traffic
Social media engagement rate
If you’d like to get personal advice on how to best speak your authentic voice, and increase your key marketing metrics, then please don’t hesitate to reach out! 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.
