Digital Marketing for Independent Schools: Attracting Interested Parents With a Multi-Channel Approach
If you run an independent school, imagine this scenario:
- Your email inbox is full of requests for tours from parents of prospective students.
- Your phones are ringing off the hook from people trying to get a space in your school.
- Every seat in every classroom of your building is taken.
- You have a waiting list of students who are dying to get in.
- You are considering expanding your school to accommodate more students.
- You have 100% clarity on how your digital marketing performance is going.
You might not think all these things are possible, but they are! We’ll explain the process we use to help you execute a digital marketing campaign for your independent school and achieve these dream goals.
We’re a Marketing Agency That Specializes in Independent Schools
We know digital marketing. We have experience in what works and doesn’t work in your field.
We know digital marketing. We have experience in what works and what doesn’t work in your field.
We’d love for you to contact us and set up a free initial consultation — no strings attached.
Proven Strategies for a High-Performing Independent School Digital Marketing Campaign
We have clear processes and strategies to get results for our clients, making us a top-performing Houston Marketing Agency.
We focus on three crucial components of your digital marketing journey:
- Set up data analytics, allowing you to track your campaign’s performance.
- Drive inbound traffic to your website.
- Convert that traffic into customers — or in the case of independent schools, student enrollments.
Pretty straightforward, right?
But your results don’t mean much if they aren’t trackable.
Ask yourself these questions about your digital marketing campaign (and if you can answer them, go ahead and skip to the end!):
- What is your website’s conversion rate?
- How many organic visitors did your site get from Google last month?
- What is your cost per qualified lead from Google Ads?
If you asked yourself all those questions and looked a little like this guy below, keep reading.
We’re here to walk you through our process and help you understand how it works. While we are a digital marketing agency, we’re also a “data agency.” That means we can help shed light on what works and what doesn’t, allowing us to build you a personalized, holistic, and high-performing campaign.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Best practices in digital marketing for independent schools start with data. If you don’t have reliable tracking for your data analytics — or are making decisions based on a gut feeling — that’s a problem.
One important key performance indicator for an independent school’s digital marketing campaign may be the number of tours they give. When parents are looking to invest in a private-school education, they want to see everything that school has to offer in great detail.
If your digital marketing campaign isn’t making it easy for prospective students and their parents to sign up for tours, you’re probably losing money. Consider adding buttons to your website to make it possible to sign up for a tour with a few clicks, as this school has done in the example below.
You may also want to host regular “Potential Student Nights” where families can meet faculty and staff, tour facilities, take sample classes, and more. Sending regular emails with schedules to parents who may be interested in your school or are within the same religious group (if your school has such an affiliation) is a great place to start.
Data Fidelity
Many digital marketing agencies lack data fidelity. When we’ve inherited campaigns from other agencies or freelancers and dug into the data, we have found many issues such as:
- Double counting conversions
- Not tracking every step of the funnel to clearly understand drop-off and conversion rates
- Tracking irrelevant conversions, i.e., someone making a Google Maps “direction request” to your school
At The Houston Marketing Agency, we strive for perfect data tracking that is completely relevant to your independent school’s digital marketing campaign.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
When considering digital marketing for independent schools, it’s important to first consider why people are looking into these schools. For most parents, they want to send their children to private school for one of the following reasons (or some combination):
- They want their children to have an education that falls within a certain affiliation, such as a Catholic School or a Jewish Day School.
- They want a school that lines up with their child’s interests or characteristics, such as a School for the Arts or an All-Boys/All-Girls School.
- They don’t trust local public schools to provide their children with an exemplary education.
- They want their family to have a certain status that comes with some independent schools. This could also include their children having access to an alumni network later in life.
Knowing which of these applies to your independent school can help you focus your digital marketing campaign and hone in on specific strategies to get you the most traffic at the lowest rate.
Let’s look at some areas you may want to hone in on.
Since the name Google has become synonymous with performing an online search, it seems pretty obvious that this is where you start when you’re looking for digital marketing data.
As you see above, over 193,000 people per month are searching for “private schools near me” or other variations including elementary, middle, high, Catholic, Christian, etc. That’s well over 2 million searches per year.
Some people prefer to search using city-specific keywords. You can see above that over 9,000 people per month search for specific keywords related to independent private schools in Houston.
Why do you need to know this?
Because if you’re not performing well in both organic and paid traffic, you’re missing out on potential enrollments for your school.
Organic
There are two places you can rank organically on Google for keywords like “private schools near me.”
The first is known as the Google Local Pack.
You’re probably wondering how your school can rank in the Google Local Pack.
Local SEO is complex and there’s a lot that goes into it, but the basic formula is:
- Have an optimized and highly-reviewed Google Business Profile.
- Have plenty of localized content on your website.
Below the Google Local pack on the search engine results page, you’ll see the organic results.
How can you rank in the top organic results?
Again, we could talk for days about everything that goes into SEO, but you’ll want to start by:
- Creating a content-rich, comprehensive website
- Optimizing your on-page SEO such as title tags, meta descriptions, etc.
Paid
Not every paid channel performs the same. It can depend on factors like your school type, the age of prospective parents, location, and more.
Here are some of the places you may want to consider spending your independent school’s digital marketing budget.
Google Ads
All the SEO information we discussed above also applies to Google Ads, a paid option that helps you rank at the top of the results page. You’ll generally see sponsored links throughout the search results.
And if your digital marketing agency does your sponsored ads right, your target audience will click on these, leading them to your site and a possible enrollment.
Note: There are different types of Google Ads we can test to measure campaign performance. These include:
- Search
- Performance Max
- Display
- And more
YouTube Ads
YouTube Ads for independent schools provide affordable, highly targeted visual ads.
Parents who are ready to invest a lot of money in their children’s education are looking for a campus that:
- Is safe
- Is pleasing to the eye
- Provides a variety of extra-curricular opportunities
- Provides a top-tier education
- Is affiliated with their religious group in some cases
- And more
A high-quality video showing the school chapel, state-of-the-art facilities, a freshly sodded football field, etc. can go a long way in drawing in potential families.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
Regarding Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you must understand that different demographics use these platforms.
While there’s sure to be some crossover between age groups among the various platforms, in general, you can assume that:
- Facebook is a preferred platform for GenX.
- Instagram is a preferred platform for GenX and Millennials.
- TikTok is a preferred platform for Millennials and Gen Z.
Depending on what age group is at your school, you can use this to your advantage:
- GenX parents may be searching for independent schools for their middle or high school students.
- Millennials may be trying to find private schools for their elementary and middle schoolers.
- And the oldest GenZ parents may already be looking for independent preschools and elementary schools for their children.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
Everything we discussed above centered around getting users to your website. And that’s where it starts.
But that’s not where it ends. A big part of your job is enrolling new students and keeping current students happy so they’ll stay at your school as long as possible.
The point of driving web traffic is to get users to convert — meaning you get parents to sign up their children to attend your school. Let’s look at some practical ways to make this happen.
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization can include many practices, including:
- Having a mobile-friendly, easily navigable website
- Ensure your images and videos are high-quality and unique
- Adding reviews and testimonials to your site
We can’t go into every possible strategy here, but these are some we recommend to really give you that bang for your buck.
Split Test Landing Pages
Running split tests is the fastest way to understand if website copy, design, or other on-page elements are increasing conversion rates.
Here’s how it works:
- Landing Page A is the control page.
- Landing Page B is the test page. For this, you take Landing Page A and change one component.
- For example, you may change the buttons on the page from saying “Take a Tour” to “Learn More.”
By comparing your control page to your test page, you’ll know which components draw in more users and, by doing this consistently, you can increase conversions.
Clear CTAs
When someone visits your independent school’s website, they should see clear CTAs — or Calls to Action — throughout.
These may look like:
- Scheduling a tour
- Filling out an application
- Seeking financial aid
- And more
Whatever you want users to do to go down the road to conversion, the process should be simple and clear.
Optimizing the Funnel
There are steps users must take as they go from interested searcher to parent enrolling a student, and you’ll usually get lots of drop-offs along the way as they decide not to click and take that next step.
You can use your digital marketing campaign to take advantage of these trends if you:
- Find clarity on where the drop-off points are
- Optimize drop-off points through data-driven tests
- Monitor performance
- Continue testing
Increase LTV on Autopilot
Once a student is enrolled in your school, that doesn’t mean your work is done. With independent schools, there are a couple of different ways to increase the LTV, or lifetime value, of that conversion.
Students Staying Enrolled
Once a student enrolls in your independent school, you need them to stay there as long as possible to increase their LTV. For instance, if you’re a K-12 school and you have a new first grader who just started attending, your goal is for that child to stay at your school through the 12th grade.
Some ways to do this may include:
- Making efforts to connect faculty with families
- Enforcing diversity and inclusion strategies
- Helping students and parents stay involved through ambassador programs
- “Taking the temperature” of students and parents with regular email surveys
- And more
Donation Email Campaigns
Independent private schools can’t run on tuition alone — they rely heavily on donations from parents and alumni. One way you can tap into this through your marketing strategy is by tagging specific students and their parents in emails.
For instance, if you’re trying to raise money for a new athletic locker room, you can set your email to tag all parents of student-athletes to seek donations for something that will benefit their children.
This would work in many different areas. You could include:
- New students
- Parents with multiple children enrolled
- Students in arts programs (music, theater, visual art, etc.)
- Alumni association members
- And more
You Don’t Have To Reinvent the Wheel With Digital Marketing for Independent Schools
At The Houston Digital Marketing Agency, we help local and national brands predictably increase leads and sales, no matter their industry.
We’d love to help you increase enrollment with our digital marketing for independent schools. We even offer a 100% refund if we can’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact us today to learn how to get started.