Your school is being scrutinized in a new light. And if you were hoping for things to return to “pre-pandemic normal,” you should reconsider. Things will not return to “normal.” The Covid-19 epidemic was not like tossing a pebble into a quiet lake and seeing the ripples go outward until they eventually subside and the serenity returns. Rather, the pandemic was like a storm that permanently transforms and alters the terrain of a lake.
Marketing and communications techniques that were effective for your school or district in the past may no longer be effective in 2021 and beyond due to a shift in the landscape. To satisfy the increased demands of today’s families, your ideas must be changed, redesigned, or perhaps canceled completely.
Understanding the New “Liquid” Expectations of Families
What exactly are liquid expectations? The simplest definition of “liquid expectations” is that customer experience expectations migrate from one sector to another.
As educators, we frequently consider how our marketing compares to that of our immediate competitors – the private, charter, or public school down the street. However, families are no longer merely comparing your school to its immediate competitors. They’re comparing your school’s online experience to any and all online experiences they’ve had, including those with Amazon and Netflix.
After a year of doing practically everything digitally, everyone’s expectations are high.
As we look ahead to the coming year and beyond, it is critical for schools and districts to devote time, money, or resources in the marketing techniques listed below:
- Revise your webpage
- Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy
- Online Performance
- Create Email Customer interactions
- Create a School Blog
- Make Your First Content Offering
- Invest in Frequent, Constructive Social Media Ads
Revise your webpage
Consider the following statistics:
- 79 percent of visitors who don’t like what they discover on one site will return and look for something else.
- A lousy smartphone experience, according to 52% of users, makes them less likely to engage with a firm.
- If a site isn’t mobile-friendly, mobile visitors are five times more likely to quit a task.
- 40 percent of website visitors will abandon the site if it takes more than three seconds to load, and 47 percent expect your site to load in less than two seconds.
- 94 percent of first impressions are influenced by design.
Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy
Every school’s search engine strategy consists of three essential components:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Per Click Advertising (PPC)
- Online Reviews
Depending on your school’s short- and long-term objectives, you may need to invest in one, two, or all three of these crucial search engine techniques.
SEO is a long-term strategy that many school marketers do not have the time or money to pursue. Keyword research and application across your site’s title tags, meta descriptions, on-page content, and, in most situations, the construction of a strong blog are required. Because the results aren’t always as immediate as a sponsored campaign, many school marketers put SEO on the back burner. (Because of how long Google takes to index and recrawl site pages, implementing an SEO plan can often take many months to reap the advantages.)
An SEO plan, on the other hand, is critical to your school’s survival in the digital age. With 90 percent of all online encounters starting with a search and awful click-through rates for any results beyond page one, it is evident that if you want your school’s website to be noticed, you must find the time and/or funds to do it. (This is why so many schools and districts turn to Finalsite’s team of SEO specialists to assist them in developing a successful search engine strategy.)
Online Performance
Online ratings are now your school or district’s first impression, and if you don’t have a four- or five-star rating, you could never even get a click-through to your website.
Even before the epidemic, student reviews had a direct influence on a school’s website traffic. And, after relying on reviews for everything for almost a year, they’re more important than ever:
Before visiting a company, 90% of customers examine internet reviews.
Online reviews are trusted by 84 percent of individuals as much as personal recommendations.
Online search is the most trustworthy source of information on individuals and businesses, according to 65% of people. That’s more trust than any other online or offline source.
Create Email Customer interactions
The 2020-21 academic year was one of the busiest in school professionals’ history, with considerable burnout still present. Email workflows are a wonderful place to start if you’re seeking for methods to save time while boosting your email marketing approach.
Email workflows, often known as a “email drip campaign” or “automatic emails,” are an essential component of any school’s inbound marketing strategy. An email workflow is a series of emails that are sent automatically based on the contact information, activity, or preferences of the subscriber. An email process, for example, can be triggered by a contact filling out a form, but it can also be triggered by a parent’s enrollment year or profile.
These designated emails have been shown to save time while increasing email engagement. They may be used for practically anything, including:
- Greetings to the newly enrolled families!
- Nurture newly inquired-about potential families
- Orient new faculty and staff
- Remind members of the community about forthcoming events and deadlines.
- Publicize an event
Create a School Blog
A blog is an excellent opportunity to provide advice, establish thought leadership, tell stories that aren’t being told elsewhere, elevate the voices of your community, build a solid content library, and increase your organic search results. While a school blog is not as crucial as some of the other marketing techniques on our list (such as your website! ), it is a good place to start for schools and districts wishing to take more control of their online narrative.
Before launching a school blog, consider who will create the site’s material.
Where will our blog material be stored?
What will our editing procedure entail?
Who is our intended audience?
What kinds of themes do we wish to write about?
Make Your First Content Offering
For most private, foreign, and charter schools, the first time a prospect’s information is obtained is through an inquiry form. While inquiry forms are useful for collecting information from people who want to learn more about your institution, consumer behavior tells us that if they’re enquiring, they’ve already done their homework and you’ve made their “short list.” This implies that if you don’t have a content offer, you’re missing out on a large audience of people who are still considering their alternatives for their “long list.”
A content offer gives potential families something useful to help them make a decision, such as a whitepaper on “5 Reasons to Attend an All-Boys School” or “How to Choose the Right Preschool.” It might potentially be a duplicate of your school’s viewbook.
Invest in Frequent, Constructive Social Media Ads
If you’ve ran social media advertising without success in the past, it might be due to a problem with your ad content, creativity, audience, or even aim. For example, marketing your school’s open house to a list of people who have never heard of your institution would fall flat.
Here are three clever strategies to get you started if you want to spend in social media marketing this year:
- A Top-of-the-Funnel Awareness Campaign: Do you want to reach out to new people? To establish a lookalike audience, provide a list of demographic information about your present family. Keep the ad text and creativity light for this campaign, with no heavy-hitting “pitch.” The idea here is to bring the name of your institution in front of new audiences.
- A Campaign to Increase Conversions in the Middle of the Funnel: Utilize a Facebook Pixel retargeting campaign to engage people who have already visited your website. In this case, encourage them to inquire or apply.
- A Campaign at the Bottom of the Funnel to Encourage Re-Enrollment: We’re all aware that your job doesn’t end when a family enrolls. During the re-enrollment season, run social media advertising to current families with value-added material such as student success stories.
While paid advertisements might help your admissions funnel acquire traction, a well-rounded organic social media approach can benefit in overall marketing and communications. If your school or district is battling to manage a slew of rogue Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profiles that are either out-of-date or off-brand, this might be a no-brainer.
There should only be one Facebook page, one Twitter account, and one Instagram profile per school. While Twitter is sometimes viewed as the “exception to the rule” because schools and districts alike utilize it for sports teams and clubs to offer rapid information, it is critical that your school or district maintain a single presence on Facebook, Instagram, and other channels such as LinkedIn.