Private school marketing requires time, budget, and resources that can be challenging to allocate. Traditional marketing worked in the past, but today digital marketing is the best way to gain more students. Regardless of your budget, your school can stay relevant using inbound marketing strategies without having to spend a lot of money. Here are 11 marketing ideas for private schools. Evaluate and optimize your website In today’s online world, many families will have made a decision about enrolling in your school before an application is submitted. Therefore, it’s essential your website is ..read more

Should you organize your independent school website by department or by audience? Here’s my navigation formula for making your website simple for your visitors to use.   When you and I go to a website, we’ve only got one thing in mind: Find the answers to our questions.   It could be a product website where we are researching something we need to buy. It could be a church’s website where we’re looking for information on the next volunteering opportunity. It could be our local news site.   Some websites make it extremely easy to find the answers we need. Others make it incre ..read more

It’s here again! Your advancement department is entering the end-of-year fundraising season. Leverage your partnership for better school fundraising with these helpful tips.   Education marketers and development officers have collaborated on school fundraising since the beginning of private education. (We’re not sure when exactly this happened, but we’re pretty sure there was a banquet involved).   In this blog, we focus most of our attention on enrollment marketing for one simple reason.   When marketers keep their attention on driving enrollment, every school success metric f ..read more

Online video meetings can be an incredible tool to improve your enrollment process. Learn how you can leverage the power of Zoom video meetings to bring more students to your school.   DISCLAIMER: I do NOT get any money or other kind of benefit from writing this recommendation to use Zoom video conferencing. It’s a tool I use myself and recommend to all my clients. I want you to know about it too, in case you haven’t considered it for your enrollment process.    Most people in the world of higher education have heard of Zoom video meetings. And in most cases, Zoom vide ..read more

Too often, the name of the game for education marketers is “do more with less.” In the spirit of helping you do just that, I’m going to show you how to create a virtual campus tour of your school with a free tool: Google Maps.   As we’ve discussed before, one of your biggest distinctives is your campus. No matter if you are located in rolling hills or the busy streets of a big city, no other college or university has a campus quite like yours.   Unfortunately, not every prospective student can make it to your campus visit days, or to your campus at all before they decide to enro ..read more

Your campaigns are humming along, and you need more from your budget. Before asking for more money, ask yourself if the problem might be in your marketing plan.   Education marketing takes money. Everyone agrees on the need for a sufficient budget.   So why is going to the dentist a more pleasant experience than a budgeting meeting?   Marketing budgets can be a headache for both marketers and executives.   Executives wonder where all the money’s going – and marketers wonder where all the money’s going to come from for the next campaign.   There’s always a new tool, pie ..read more

Violent shootings across the U.S. mean that marketing and campus security have to work together to keep students safe. Here’s why. In just one recent weekend, violent shootings erupted in a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas and a bar in Dayton, Ohio. In these two incidents, over thirty people died.   These are just a couple of incidents in a longer string of public shootings that have occurred this year (2019). Wikipedia keeps a list of mass shootings in the United States, and as of July 2019, the death toll is at 246 with 979 wounded.   That’s 1,225 victims of mass shootings… all in one ye ..read more

Fall is a critical time for education marketers. Here are five especially important events for the back to school season and how to get the most out of them.   It’s that time of year again. Students are ready to move back on campus with school starting up in just a few short days.   Whether you work in Admissions, Advancement, Student Services, Marketing or other campus offices, the fall semester brings critical ways to improve your education brand. It’s also a great time to strengthen relationships with students, families, alumni and friends of the university, college, or independen ..read more

Irresistible content is the cornerstone of any inbound education marketing strategy. Here’s how to know what to write for your school website, whether you’re a college, university, or independent school.   As an education marketing agency, we advise schools to keep their websites, blogs, and social media channels full of fresh content because there are so many benefits to content marketing. Among other things, publishing new content helps… Build your brand, Endear your site to Google’s algorithm, and Generate new prospective-student leads. But updates to your school website DO NOT ..read more

Your marketing agency asks you to re-up on another long term marketing contract. Should you do it? Here’s some advice.   First, let me say that contracts are good things.   I use contracts with all my clients. When done right, they are an incredibly useful business relationship tool.   Contracts help all parties involved know what the business relationship is all about, who’s responsible for what, and how much it will cost each member of the relationship.   Transparent, easy-to-understand, and flexible. Those are the ingredients of a good business contract.   Oh. And s ..read more