Digital Marketing for Private Schools: Attract Potential Families Using a Multi-Channel Approach
If you run a private school, imagine this scenario:
- Your email inbox receives daily requests for tours from prospective families.
- You get multiple phone calls daily from parents requesting admissions information.
- All of the classes in your school are at the max capacity of students.
- You establish a waitlist of students who desperately want to get a slot at your school.
- You are finding ways to expand your school to accommodate more students.
- You have complete clarity on how your digital marketing campaign is going.
You may think these seem like lofty goals, but they are completely achievable! We’ll explain the process we use to create a digital marketing campaign for your private school so your dreams can become a reality.
We’re a Marketing Agency Specializing in Private Schools
You know students, we know digital marketing. Through years of experience, we’ve established what works and what doesn’t work in your field.
We can’t wait to hear from you to set up your free, no-strings-attached initial consultation.
The Holistic Playbook for a High-Performing Private School Digital Marketing Campaign
Our processes and strategies are clear-cut and get results for our clients, making us a top-performing Houston Marketing Agency.
Throughout your digital marketing journey, we focus on three critical components:
- Set up data analytics so you can track your campaign’s performance.
- Drive inbound traffic to your website.
- Convert that traffic into student enrollments.
Seems easy enough, right?
It seems straightforward, but your results don’t mean much if they aren’t trackable.
Consider the following questions about your digital marketing campaign:
- 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 can confidently answer these three questions, then skip ahead to the end. However, if you aren’t quite sure of the answers, keep reading.
If you’re unsure, don’t worry! That’s what we are here for. We will walk you through our process so you can have a clear understanding of how it all works. While we are a digital marketing agency, we are also a “data agency.” This means we can build you a high-performing, holistic campaign tailored to your private school using our knowledge of what works and doesn’t.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
The foundation for digital marketing best practices for private schools is data. If you are making decisions based solely on your intuition and you don’t have reliable tracking for your data analytics — that’s a problem.
A few important KPIs your school should be tracking include:
- Inquiry-to-enrollment conversion rate
- Application conversion rate
- Student retention rate
- Average tuition revenue per student
- Graduation rate
- Parent and student satisfaction surveys
- Faculty retention rate
Additionally, you should also be tracking key digital marketing KPIs such as:
- Number of website visitors by channel
- Cost per channel
- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
Data Fidelity
Unfortunately, there are many digital marketing agencies out there that lack data fidelity. We’ve inherited campaigns from other agencies or freelancers and uncovered a slew of issues, such as:
- Double counting conversions
- Not tracking each step of the funnel to clearly understand drop-off and conversion rates
- Tracking irrelevant conversions, such as someone making a Google Maps direction request to your school
The Houston Marketing Agency’s goal is to have perfect data tracking that is relevant to your school’s specific digital marketing campaign.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
The first thing to consider as you start to develop your private school’s digital marketing campaign is to understand why people are considering a private school. For most families, private school is being considered for one or more of the following reasons:
- The reputation for smaller class sizes, higher test scores, and a challenging curriculum
- Poor experiences with local public schools
- The status associated with private schools, including access to a strong alumni network
- Specialized programs such as religious studies, STEM-based programs, or academic structures such as Montessori, IB, or Waldorf learning philosophies
Understanding the reasoning behind someone searching for a private school and tailoring those reasons to your private school can help you create a digital marketing campaign focusing on specific strategies to get the most traffic at the lowest rate.
Let’s look at some areas you can hone in on to maximize the benefit of your campaign.
In this day and age, Google has become the go-to search engine for someone trying to find answers to anything online. Google is an ideal place to start when you’re looking for digital marketing data.
Based on this data, you can see that over 186,000 people per month search for private schools near them in some form, whether it’s a religious school, elementary school, high school, etc. If you do the math, that’s well over 2 million searches per year.
Some people will also search for private schools based on city-specific keywords. This data shows that over 10,000 per month in the Houston area are searching for private schools. Imagine if those potential students were directed to your private school.
Why is this information important?
If you are not performing well in organic and paid traffic, you are missing out on a considerable number of potential enrollments for your school.
Organic
You can rank organically in two places on Google for keywords like “private schools near me.”
First is the Google Local Pack.
You’re probably wondering how to get your school to rank in the Google Local Pack.
There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and local SEO is complex, but the basic formula is:
- Have an optimized and highly-reviewed Google Business Profile.
- Have a high amount of localized content on your website.
Below the Google Local Pack on the search engine results page is where you’ll find the organic results.
So, how do you rank in the top organic results?
Once again, there are a lot of moving parts that go into SEO, but to increase your ranking in the organic results, you can:
- Create a website that is content-rich and comprehensive.
- Optimize your on-page SEO (title tags, meta descriptions, etc.).
Paid
Not all paid channels perform the same. Factors such as school type, the age of prospective parents, location, and more will influence how successful a paid channel is.
Here are some of the places you may want to consider spending your private school’s digital marketing budget.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a paid option that helps a business rank at the top of the results page. You’ll usually see sponsored links throughout the search results, but most importantly, you’ll see them toward the top of the results page, which increases the chances that your target audience will see them, click on them, and become a potential enrollee.
There are various types of Google Ads we can test to evaluate campaign performance, such as:
- Search
- Performance Max
- Display
- And more
YouTube Ads
YouTube Ads are a great way to visually highlight your school to potential students. Before committing to tour your campus, families may want to get a feel for your school with a short, targeted, high-quality video.
YouTube can attract students by showcasing your school’s facilities, student activities, and daily campus life with visually stunning ads.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
Before diving into Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ads, it’s important to note that different demographics use these platforms.
Of course, there will be some crossover between age groups among the various platforms, but 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.
As a private school owner, you can use this knowledge to your advantage.
- GenX parents may be searching for a private middle or high school, so a Facebook campaign may be the way to go.
- Millennials may be trying to find a private school for elementary or middle school students, so an Instagram ad campaign may be the most beneficial.
- GenZ parents may be interested in private preschools or elementary schools, so TikTok ads give you the most bang for your buck.
- Many incoming high schoolers may also have access to social media platforms, and TikTok and Instagram are highly popular amongst that age group.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
So far, we’ve covered ways to get users to your school’s website. But this is just the beginning.
Getting potential students to your website is a great first step. Now, we have to get students to enroll — and stay enrolled — at your school.
The point of increasing traffic to your website is to convert them into students. Let’s go over some practical ways you can make this happen.
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization includes many practices:
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
- Use images and videos that are high-quality and unique.
- Include reviews and testimonials from students and parents on your site.
There are numerous strategies you can use, and we would be here for days if we tried to cover them all. However, here are a few key tactics your school can use to boost conversion rates.
Split Test Landing Pages
Running split tests is a quick and efficient way to determine if website copy, design, or other on-page elements increase 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 “Contact Us” to “Speak With an Admissions Representative Today.”
Then, compare your control page to your test page to determine which components attract more users. Consistently split testing your landing pages can increase conversions.
Clear CTAs
When someone visits your private school’s website, they should come across clear and concise Calls to Action (CTAs) throughout your page.
Examples of CTAs include:
- Scheduling a tour
- Filling out an application
- Seeking financial aid
- And more
No matter which action you want users to take, the process needs to be simple and straightforward. The easier it is for a potential student to take action, the more likely they are to convert to students.
Optimizing the Funnel
The journey from interested searcher to enrolled student isn’t just going from point A to point B. Potential students go through several steps, and along the way, you’ll inevitably have drop-offs as they decide not to take the next step.
However, you can use these drop-offs to leverage your digital marketing campaign by:
- Identifying where the drop-off points are
- Optimizing those points through data-driven tests
- Monitoring performance
- Continuing testing
Increase LTV on Autopilot
You’ve driven traffic and successfully gotten a student to enroll. Your work is done, right?
Not quite.
Getting a student to enroll is great, but you need to increase the lifetime value (LTV) of your conversion. Here are several ways you can strategically increase a student’s LTV.
Extend Enrollment Duration
Having a student enroll at your school for only one year is better than nothing, but ultimately, you want them to stay enrolled at your school for as many grades as your school offers.
So, if you are a private high school, ideally, a student will enroll as a freshman and remain at your school throughout their senior year. Or, if you are a K-12 school and you have a student start as a 2nd grader, the goal for that student is to keep them at your school all the way through 12th grade.
Ways you can improve retention are:
- Offer seamless grade transitions, especially between elementary and middle school or middle and high school.
- Offer incentives for alumni families to enroll their younger siblings.
- Maintain strong relationships with parents through personalized communication, regular meetings, and a supportive community.
- Gauge student and parent satisfaction with regular email surveys.
- And more
Expand Revenue Per Student
Tuition is only a small part of the funding for running and maintaining a private school. Donations from parents and alumni are a considerable portion of a private school’s income.
Donation email campaigns are a great strategy to increase revenue from students that isn’t tuition-based. The more specific the campaign, the likelier you are to receive funding as well.
For example, if you are raising funds to purchase new instruments for your band program, sending an email targeted to current band students and band alumni can help you receive donations for this specific purpose.
Increase Engagement & Word-of-Mouth Referrals
You can increase the LTV of your students by having them refer new students to your school.
Some easy ways to increase engagement are:
- Sibling referral discounts to incentivize enrolling multiple students
- Ambassador programs where parents can refer friends in exchange for tuition credits or other rewards
- Creating a strong alumni network that will refer peers on your behalf
- Legacy enrollment programs that offer priority enrollment or special benefits for alumni families enrolling their children.
Digital Marketing for Private Schools Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
The Houston Digital Marketing Agency has years of experience across numerous industries, helping local and national brands increase leads and sales with specific digital marketing campaigns tailored to their needs.
We would love to help you increase your school’s enrollment with our digital marketing for private schools. We are confident in our work and offer a 100% refund if we can’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact us today to get started.