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Marketing Strategies for Schools: Simple Ways to Increase Enrollment Enquiries

Kyla Ball

Is your school looking for ways to increase enrollment enquiries? Are you finding it difficult to stay ahead of changing school marketing trends and make sure your message is reaching prospective families? In this blog post we list some key areas to focus on in your school’s digital marketing strategy that will mean that you can quickly and easily reach more potential students and parents.

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To learn more about what ThingLink can offer to your school, please schedule an online meeting with one of our education product experts below.

Start with a strong brand and a clear branding strategy for your school

Your school’s brand should reflect the unique qualities and values of your school. At its core, a brand is an embodiment of those values expressed in words and visuals. What is it about your school that sets you apart from the rest?

It’s vital that your brand is communicated to all staff members, to ensure brand consistency in all communication pieces. Above all, use clear and concise language on your website and marketing materials. These are the first impressions that give a clear indication of the sort of school that you are and the sort of student experience that you provide.

Invest in high quality photography, video content and written content to showcase your school’s brand, as well as its facilities.

Staying true to these core beliefs will allow your school brand to become recognizable within the educational community. It will also help to create loyalty and inspire pride in staff, students and parents.

Optimize your school’s website

Your brand should feed naturally into your online presence. Optimizing your website design is a key step in cementing your online presence and increasing engagement with prospective students’ parents. Understanding and incorporating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices, schools can help ensure that their web pages rank highly in search engine results. Remember to design with mobile devices in mind, to ensure effective content viewing on all platforms and screen sizes.

Your CTA (call-to-action) for website visitors should encourage further contact – in-person if possible.

Finally, taking the time to measure click-through-rate metrics should be a part of ongoing optimization efforts as this allows for tracking trends over time, helping to inform future website plans.

Social media strategy for your school

Any good marketing plan needs to make consistent use of social media platforms to share news and updates. A quick glance at the age demographics of your your target audience (prospective parents) strongly suggests that they will have social media accounts on one or all of these three platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. So these should be the focus of your social media marketing efforts!

Targetted social media marketing campaigns are a great idea in advance of, say, an open day. Use buttons to take people to a dedicated landing page for further information and sign up.

Email marketing

You should also use social media to encourage sign up to your email newsletters. You can use these to let parents know when the next open day is happening and to send them news and updates via email.

Parent power is powerful marketing for your school

Encourage your current families to refer their friends, colleagues and family members. Online reviews, testimonials and success stories are an authentic and valued source of information for prospective families. You could also consider a small token of thanks for each referral that results in a new registration.

Why not create a virtual tour of your school?

Educational institutions are increasingly providing virtual campus tours to show around potential students and their parents. Initially a response to the pandemic when real-life tours were impossible, they are now common throughout the education sector. This is particularly true for universities and the larger British public schools where many pupils board. In these cases it’s often difficult to arrange in-person tours given the distance from home to school. Virtual tours in ThingLink are self-guided so can be accessed at any time, and shared via direct link, on your website or a landing page, on social media or even via QR code.

Here is a great example below from Loyola High School of Los Angeles, a private school for boys.

Another example of a virtual tour, this time of a medical school: Rochester Medical School created an authentic virtual campus tour presented by current students.

A similar approach is used in this wonderful school tour below by Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools in Edinburgh, where you can click on hotspots to see the history of the school told by some of its young students. Why not take a look around?

NEW! The easy way to create 360 images: Pano to 360

Creating virtual tours, exhibitions, escape rooms and other immersive content just got even easier! ThingLink has now launched Pano to 360 by ThingLink: an easy way to create a 360 photosphere from a panoramic image using any smartphone. For more information, including step-by-step instructions see this helpful support article. 

Try the free Pano to 360 converter

The Pano to 360 photosphere converter is free to use for anyone, no ThingLink account required! Upload a panoramic image to see it in action.

We’ve rounded up our favourite examples of virtual school and campus tours in this blog post: Increase new admissions and enquiries with a virtual visit to your school.

In conclusion

Education marketing has come a long way in the last few years, and traditional school marketing strategies have had to adapt and change. But by encompassing these key cornerstones and working them into your future school marketing plans you should start to see increased enquiries from parents who see your school as the right fit for their child.

Meet a product expert

To learn more about what ThingLink can offer to your school, please schedule an online meeting with one of our education product experts below.

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