Driving Your Brand and Narrative in Schools

In this article series, I am covering two areas of marketing for schools. Often, these areas should be viewed completely separately as the end goal is different, and therefore, the means of attaining are different.

These two areas are student recruitment and student retention. Both are vital to a school's success, but different marketing strategies need to be utilised for success.

We can break down the marketing journey into a funnel to take your prospective students from the start to the end of their journey. Below are the basic barebones of the funnel, over the next few articles we will expand on this funnel to make it more in-depth. This will help you succeed in each of these key areas.

This is the second article in the series. Last week I covered brand narratives and storytelling in your marketing. These narratives drive the thoughts and feelings surrounding your school and can elevate your marketing to new levels.

This week we are still focused on the engagement stage of the funnel. This article is all about executing your brand and narrative. Hopefully, we know what the narrative you want to drive is, so now we look at the actual engagement strategy. These are the pieces that make up the stories and narrative and drive your brand message. In this article we will look at four different key areas of an engagement strategy:

·????????Social Media

·????????Word of Mouth

·????????Website

·????????Physical Print

The goal of any engagement strategy should be signing up the prospective parent to an open day.

Social Media:

Social media can be used for both student recruitment and retention. I’d recommend a 70/30 split in your marketing on these channels. 70% for retention and 30% for recruitment. This might seem strange at first as often recruitment is the priority for most schools, however, the retention strategy is often incredibly effective for recruitment on social platforms (This is sometimes dependent on the narrative being driven).

In this context, we are looking at social media as an interest generator. Often either social media or the school’s website are the first point of call for any prospective parent.

So why is social media great for your school? I can probably keep this section short as social media is already at the forefront and everybody’s marketing strategy. Social is great due to its reach and its cost. I’d wager a bet that 80%+ of your target audience is active on at least one social media platform, but most likely, multiple.

Let’s start by looking at the most important platform for your social strategy. Facebook. Millennials are quickly becoming the largest age group to target for schools. 25% of all users in the UK on Facebook are aged 25-34 and a further 35-44 make up 18.5%. These are the two largest age groups for Facebook, and they make up your key demographics. If Facebook isn’t a priority for you right now, even this piece of information should hopefully change that!

Cost is another reason social should be a priority strategy. Creating a Facebook page and posting regularly is totally free. You can start building your school narrative, without spending a penny. Then with some budget, you can start targeting the right people at the right time. Facebook offers the chance to go beyond standard organic posting. You can target families that are already looking at other schools within their area.

Your social strategy should all be built around the narrative you are attempting to build. Every post, whether it is intended for recruitment or retention, is a story and these stories affect your narrative. If you post something that deviates from your normal style and doesn’t fit with your narrative, your narrative will also start to deviate.

Another key social platform is YouTube. There is no better way to tell a story than video. YouTube is a fantastic medium for advertisement and can be reposted on any of your other social platforms. It's also incredibly easy to see viewer engagement, so you know exactly what styles of adverts are working and what aren't. However, YouTube can also carry some extra risk. Some schools are fantastic with their video advertisements, and your school will be held to a high standard in comparison with these. They hire professional studios to produce their videos with top-of-the-range cameras and microphones. Unless you can do something truly original and creative, it's likely an iPhone video won't cut it for your advertisements.

However, I'm going to contradict myself right away. Sometimes, a self-produced iPhone video is golden. If your narrative is focused around warmth and that family feeling that is sometimes associated with a school. Sometimes a "home-video" style video can add to that narrative tenfold. But if this is part of your strategy, it would be most effective when scattered amongst other more professional videography.

Word of Mouth:

Nobody would argue that word of mouth has a huge impact on schools’ recruitment. Much of this strategy comes down to your student retention marketing strategy. Your audience here is those that will be passing along the school’s name and generating interest. Therefore, I will cover this in more depth in the student retention articles.

After somebody has recommended your school, 90% of the time, the first thing they will do if they liked the sound of it, is checking out your website.

Website:

Most schools have their websites down to a tee. They are of great quality as they realise the importance a website has on recruitment. Often this is the first full picture impression a prospective parent will have of your school. They may have seen one or two Facebook posts, which gives a glimpse into your school, but the website is the first time they will see the full picture.

First impressions last, in this day and age, you may have one of the best schools in the country, but again, I’d wager a bet that if your website was poor, a significantly worse school a few miles away is getting more traction and interest because they have an amazing website.

Physical Print:

Even in this digital world, print advertising has its place. Although it might seem unlikely, millennials respond increasingly well to print advertising. Quad/Graphics conducted some research around this and found that 82% stated they would engage with print literature.

Unlike social media, print marketing is tangible. You’re able to feel it and smell it. Research has suggested that the tactile nature of print marketing stimulates the brain, this means the message you’re trying to get across is more likely to be remembered along with the school itself.

For schools, although mass mailing leaflets can be effective at generating interest, it is also a very expensive method. So, if conducting this type of physical marketing, you need to make sure you’re being selective over where you’re sending it. However, this again is rather challenging.

The more common and effective type of physical marketing for schools is a physical prospectus. These will often be ordered after the school has been found through social media adverts or word of mouth and the prospective parent has looked at the website. There is some basic interest there, but they want something tangible they can look at, rather than scrolling through your website.

And who can blame them! Schools are a huge commitment; they shape your child’s life. With a physical copy, they can more easily make notes, highlight areas of importance, compare with other schools, and keep coming back to their top choices.

So those are a few reasons why it might be beneficial for the prospective parent, but what about for you?

The biggest benefit for your school is the ability to tell your whole narrative. You have as much marketing real estate as you want and you can tell your stories in the right order to create the narrative you want for the school. Opportunities like that don’t come up in a lot of industries, even when physical print marketing is used. These prospective parents are genuinely interested in what you have to say and will likely read or at the very least, skim from cover to cover.

Secondly, print has a higher trust value than any form of digital marketing, especially social media. People are far more likely to believe what they see in front of them physically than anything they see on a screen. This means your audience will have a higher chance of believing the narrative you’re telling and associating the emotions you want them to, with your school.

Not only is print marketing more trustworthy, but it also makes retaining information a lot easier for the viewer. Some recent research suggested that the part of the brain we use when reading on a screen is different from the part, we use to read printed text. When we read print literature, we use something they refer to as the “deep-reading” part of the brain. This allows the reader to better retain the information in front of them and have longer attention spans.

The School Engagement Flow:

?This diagram gives an outline of what the engagement flow should look like for school marketers looking to increase student recruitment. More channels could potentially be added to this, but these are the key drivers of success. If you nail these areas, you will see the success follow. The objective of any engagement strategy should be to get the prospective parent to sign-up for your open day, at that point they enter the nurture stage of the funnel.

Next week's article will look at the nurture stage of the marketing funnel. How does a school keep the excitement leading up to the open day and keep the prospective parent engaged? This is an area that I often find overlooked, but it is crucial in such a competitive industry.