Marketing a school requires first and foremost that you understand your target market. But that’s not enough. The level of marketing noise in the world is overwhelming, and it takes a lot of smart choices for a school to market itself within that space. Successfully marketing a school is a never-ending process that requires significant…
A successful School Marketing Plan (SMP) needs a well funded School Marketing Budget (SMB). This is probably the most controversial aspect of any School Marketing Plan. 1. Make the Budget Realistic Various people within each school community have differing views on the amount which should be afforded to the School Marketing Budget. School Principals and…
As an industry, private and vocational schools spend millions of dollars advertising every month – The Apollo Group does that on their own (and that’s just search engine marketing). Most of us, however, don’t have that sort of budget, so need more viable advertising ideas for our school. In this article we’ll cover the two…
Offering time and information for free is very important for schools. Free on-campus seminars accomplish many things for higher education institutions. Doing so demonstrates that you are an authority on the topic and more importantly it gets prospective students into the school, which is your best change and convincing them to enroll in one of…
In a nutshell, tracking your conversions allows you to more accurately create your marketing budget, as well as identify which marketing efforts are working and which are not. One of the biggest mistakes we see in small business is that marketing efforts are not accurately tracked in some sort of CRM (even if it’s one…
We talk a lot about conversions in relation to marketing schools. Here, we thought we’d quickly note exactly what that means, and the various points in the marketing plan where you can actually measure them. The most common conversions for schools to measure are: Website visit to lead (inquiry) conversion Lead (inquiry) to Application conversion…
There are thousands of other private post-secondary schools out there, only a small fraction of them are in direct competition with your school based on your programs and what you teach. All the others who are not in competition re potential partners. There are hundreds of ways to create symbiotic relationships with other schools and…
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the foundation for targeting new and interested leads. If you are not currently running search engine marketing campaigns on Google: start now. Depending on your area of training, the estimated and average cost per click can be higher than what you get on social media marketing, but there’s one reason…
Free email courses have always been one of the most successful ways to pull in new students to shorter programs with a relatively low price point. The key philosophy: people won’t give you their email address unless you give them something in return. If you offer them a free email series on a topic they…
Have a web camera and an Internet connection? Then you’re ready to start broadcasting your school. To get started you need a minimum amount of technology and a good general topic to be the theme of your online show / webcast / webinar. Piece of cake, right? 😉 But why for free? As mentioned before,…