Creating a marketing plan for a school can be challenging, but if you know the basics of how to plan and execute one, it can mean the difference between exceeding your targets and falling short. A well-researched, expertly executed marketing plan will help your school, college, academy, university or trust achieve its goals.
Before you can create a marketing plan for your school, you need to understand what it is you want to achieve from your efforts. Defining your objectives will help you shape your marketing plan and create a strategy that optimises your campaigns and activations.
Some common objectives for a school marketing plan are:
By clearly defining your goals, you can ensure your marketing efforts are directed towards the same objective.
Knowing your target audience is half the challenge of marketing – and with marketing for schools and education, this is no different. Whether you’re targeting In-Year transfers, prospective students or new parents, understanding how to talk to your audience, and ultimately where to find your audience, is important to creating a robust marketing plan.
You can create detailed audience personas to better understand who you are targeting, including demographics, motivations, pain points and interests. This will help you to communicate how your educational provision can fulfil your target audience’s needs.
Knowing what your school’s Unique Selling Points (USPs) are will help you make it stand out from the rest. Once you know what these USPs are, effectively communicating them to your target audience will transform your marketing efforts into results (such as increasing student enrolment figures).
Examples of USPs for schools include:
Your school may have several USPs, so prioritising which ones you want to communicate to your audience is important. Don’t dilute your messaging, so stick to communicating what your school does best.
With the right information and a solid 360 marketing strategy, you can reach your target audience effectively and communicate your school’s offering.
Customer touchpoints are points at which your target audience interact with your school, and each one forms the customer journey. By adopting a 360-degree marketing approach, you can better understand and optimise this journey.
360 marketing is a complete strategy designed to consistently engage your target audience at each touchpoint across multiple platforms and channels. By combining traditional and digital marketing methods, this approach ensures seamless and consistent communication with your target audience throughout their journey, no matter where they are or what device they’re using.
With this approach, you can ensure you are promoting your school in a consistent way at every touchpoint.
Once you know your goals, understand your audience, recognise your USPs and know how to execute your marketing strategy, it is time to create your marketing plan. A marketing plan for a school can be as simple as an annual calendar with key dates, seasonal moments and deadlines plotted in.
With these fixed key dates and seasonal moments on your marketing plan, you can start to plan your campaigns around these. Got an Open Day coming up in February? Plan a campaign leading up to the Open Day to promote the event. Want to encourage more student applications before a deadline passes? Plot in your marketing communications in the months and weeks leading up to this date.
Once you start recognising these key dates and events to communicate around, you can begin to add elements of a 360 marketing approach. Using the application deadline example from above, you could plan to write a longform piece of content that guides prospective students through the application process, create a social media schedule that communicates the deadline, and run a paid social campaign that promotes your school to prospective students.
The best way to learn and improve on your school’s marketing is to measure results, review them and figure out ways in which you can improve the campaign in future to make it perform better.
For example, you may find that after running a paid social media campaign that the audience you were reaching were not interested in the ad you were serving them, so click throughs were low. Based on the results of the campaign, you could adjust the content of the ad, change the parameters of your target demographic or create a different call to action to try and increase conversions (in this case click throughs). Learning, improving and testing are key to optimising your marketing efforts.