The Impact Of Marketing On School Admissions
Despite the marketing and admissions departments being considered two separate entities, in today’s increasingly competitive educational landscape, compelling content produced by the marketing team has become an essential element of successful admissions strategies.
Schools are no longer just centres of learning; they are brands that need to be nurtured, understood, and trusted by prospective families and their children.
Creating A Captivating Website
One obvious way that marketers can ensure admissions rates continue to thrive is by ensuring that their school website is captivating, informative and easy to navigate. A school’s website should act as a window into the bustling everyday life of the school community and will be the first place that prospective parents go when wanting to learn more about a school. It is for this reason that this first impression, made by the website and your school’s brand, is memorable for all of the right reasons.
Ensuring High Quality Content
This can be achieved by ensuring that you use high-quality and up-to-date media and written content; failing to do so might leave the impression that your school is outdated and unorganised, therefore forcing your prospective audience to look elsewhere. Schools may consider the inclusion of a VR Virtual Tour, to immerse your prospective audience into your campus, regardless of where they are in the world.
Marketers should also ensure that their school’s website scores highly in SEO rankings. if your users are unable to find your school website effortlessly, all of the wonderful assets that make a school shine will be hidden from a large portion of the prospective audience.
Leveraging Social Media
Perhaps one of the most prominent marketing tools in the current day and age is social media. Whether marketers choose to tell their school’s unique stories through centralised main school accounts or a suite of departmental and age group-specific sub-accounts, it’s important that you cover stories including all departments, age groups, and extracurricular activities. This allows your school to celebrate your People, Place and Purpose, as well as to subtly promote the breadth of offerings across ages, curricular and co-curricular offerings.
Imagine yours is a school that mostly posts sports-related content, yet also has a fantastic state-of-the-art Drama facility. In sharing so many stories about Sports, but neglecting to share stories about the Arts, parents of prospective students who have a burning passion for theatre may be prompted to look elsewhere, having not consumed stories about your Drama facility.
The same principle applies when it comes to the representation of different age groups. For example, if you’re a K-12 or all-through school and your High School dominates the majority of your social content, prospective parents of your elementary school may believe that the elementary school is the school’s weakness. It’s especially important that content representing entry-point age groups remains constant, as these will be the year groups most immediately relevant to your prospective audience and will have the largest impact on the growth of admissions.
Promoting Open Day Events
Marketers also play an essential role in helping the Admissions team to drive attendance at Open Day events. Marketers should ensure that reminders and averts for these open days are eye-catchingly designed and prominent on both your school website and social media channels. Common social media content ideas for open days include countdown, behind-the-scenes and live Q&As.
Without the dedicated work of school marketers telling all of the fantastic stories a school has to offer, Admissions departments would have a hard time informing prospective families exactly why your school is the perfect place for their child to flourish. By working in tandem, Marketing and Admissions departments can ensure continued growth and an enduring legacy for years to come.