“I Have No Time” — How to Be More Efficient in Your School Marketing

If you think you have no time for recruitment and school marketing, this post is just for you.

Like a hungry student on pizza day, school marketing can eat up a lot of time.

There are only so many hours during the day, and with announcements, meetings, prospective family tours, and student events, working on your school marketing can get lost in the shuffle — or worse, deprioritized until you are in crisis.

Yet if you never promote your school, eventually there won’t be anything to announce or anyone to meet with.

To maintain — not to mention increase — enrollment, dedicating time to student recruitment and school marketing are a must.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be an overwhelming process.

To maximize your school marketing efficiency, there are a few best practices you can take.

Develop a Plan

“Winging it” and “marketing success” are two phrases that have never shaken hands.

To establish the most efficient path from your current state to marketing success, you need to develop a written, comprehensive plan that lays the groundwork and keeps you on track.

You can break this plan into four stages:

1. Set Quantifiable Goals

“Doing better” or “enrolling more students” aren’t really goals as much as they are ideas.

A real marketing plan is built upon specific, quantifiable goals — like “Increasing kindergarten enrollment by four kids” or “Improving newsletter readership by 40%.”

Making goals quantifiable allows you to precisely track and measure your success. It also helps you maintain focus in the face of vagaries and changing goal posts.

You should take a page out of the corporate world and make these SMART goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

2. Prioritize Your Goals

With a list of quantifiable goals in tow, it’s time to determine their importance and urgency.

If you could conceivably accomplish goal A in one year and goal B in three years, perhaps goal A should take priority. If goal C is more time-sensitive than goal D, maybe goal C should be allotted more resources.

Sometimes a goal might just be too large or daunting to accurately prioritize.

In these cases, try breaking those goals into smaller goals. Is increasing enrollment by 30% too difficult? Start by increasing inquiries by X amount or by improving open house attendance by Y amount.

3. Develop Your Strategies to Meet Goals

With your goals established and prioritized, you can now develop strategies to meet them.

How can you increase open house attendance? How about a push to all of your current families or a series of boosted Facebook posts — or both!

To increase enrollment inquiries, you might combine community outreach efforts with a series of digital pay-per-click ads to reach cold leads and create email templates for warm leads.

If all this sounds like a whole bunch of work you don’t want to do, SchoolMint can help.

4. Allocate Resources

To execute these strategies, you need to determine the budget, time, talent, and tools needed for each.

If one of your marketing initiatives is to distribute school calendars to the community, research how much it will cost, how long it will take, what skills it will require, who has those skills, and what tools they will need.

Consider this:

• If making those calendars requires graphic design expertise, can you use someone in-house, a parent who has graphic design skills, or will you have to go to a third party?
• And if you have someone in-house, do they have editing software?
• And what’s your printing budget?

All of these questions need to be accounted for.

Use Marketing Automation Tools

Executing your marketing strategies manually is a one way trip to inefficiency.

To save you significant time while improving results, use marketing automation tools like SchoolMint Connect to track the status of all of your prospective families, set up reminder tasks to follow up with families, and perform other labor-heavy tasks in seconds.

• Also read Free Tools for Your School’s Marketing and Communications

And let’s not forget social media aggregators.

Browser-based apps like Hootsuite centralize platforms — like Instagram and Facebook — onto a single dashboard.

With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts across all of the different social media platforms you use, create customized URLs to track clicks, and connect RSS (blog) feeds.

This allows you to easily cover all of your social media channels with just one tool. Of course, there are other social media management platforms, and most of them offer a free trial, so you can determine which one you like prior to purchase.

Outsource When You Don’t Have the Skills

Part of being efficient in your school marketing is knowing when to call in reinforcements.

In-house marketing teams can be expensive, and asking staff members to double as graphic designers or social media managers can stretch them too thinly.

To outsource some of this work, first consider any potential parent volunteers whom you can tap. If you don’t have this information, start identifying these skills as soon as a new family signs up.

Modifying your enrollment form to inquire about parental skills or job experience is an easy way to develop a school “talent pool.”

If your parents are all tapped out, you can contract freelancers through freelance marketplaces like Fiverr.

But if you have some budget to spare and prefer to enlist the aid of K-12 student recruitment and school marketing experts, SchoolMint has you covered. Our experts can help improve your school website’s SEO as well as run Facebook and Instagram ads for your school.

Key Takeaways

• Efficient school marketing starts with a well-thought-out written plan that encompasses quantifiable goals in order of priority, specific strategies to fulfill those goals, and an allocated list of resources in which to facilitate those strategies.
• Save time and maximize marketing effectiveness by leveraging automation tools like SchoolMint Connect and Hootsuite.
• If it’s too expensive to hire in-house marketers or you’re stretching your existing team too thinly, tap parent volunteers to help out — or outsource tasks to freelancers or SchoolMint.

Ready to speak to the experts on K-12 school marketing and recruitment solutions? Get in touch here.