How to create the perfect marketing strategy for your certification school
Is this your current situation???
You’re a course provider that wants to scale your business this year. You’ve relied on lead generation strategies up to now that have likely been a mix of:
Word of mouth, referrals, networking, your contacts, sending cold DMs and emails, posting on social media and hoping to get enquiries, doing live exhausting launches, going into Facebook groups every day and leaving value.
You’re looking for sustainable, scalable, hands-off way to get more meetings into your calendar every single month.
You recognise that you need help in scaling the business and want to work with a trusted expert to help you get more paying students.
The best way to promote your certification school in 2023 is to address real market needs, create compelling offers, and deliver value to specific groups of people. It's important to establish these basics before diving into promotional strategies. That is what sets apart a successful school from the others.?
To stand out, you must actively promote the programs you offer and clearly highlight your differentiators. The goal when marketing your course is to help prospective clients find your school more easily and see if your program is a good fit for them. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a digital marketing strategy. Ready to find out how your school can improve its educational marketing efforts to increase recruitment? Read on for key tips for greater impact.
Here are some steps to take into account when launching your student attraction funnel:
Step 1: Positioning. What happens when there are tons of similar courses out there?
The audience gets too spoilt for choice.
The MAIN reason you don’t have students is that there’s not a clear positioning of your offering in the mind of the consumers.
You need to start with clearly defying the brand from these points of view: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, capabilities, target market characteristics. You need to get laser focused on why these people would pick YOU over anyone else and why would they trust you. What we came to observe is that low sales are tied to a positioning issue of the product rather than marketing.
Identify your program’s unique value proposition
Leverage the program's unique value proposition to create compelling admissions marketing ideas. Your unique value proposition essentially summarizes your program's benefits. This is the number one reason prospects should choose your school over other competing schools. Developing a concise and unique value proposition can be daunting at first, but starting with the right questions can make the task easier and easier to tackle. Imagine:?
What benefits can prospective customers expect??
What makes you different from your competitors?
What exactly does your program offer??
Who is your school for??
Once you have your answers, you can start building a powerful list of compelling elements to attract prospects and pitch across a variety of digital marketing channels.?
Step 2: Create an irresistible offer. You either:
Have too many courses (offers) targeted at essentially the same people
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Have an offer but it’s vague and you’re not 100% confident in it
Have an offer that you’ve sold before but know it can be better
For an offer to sell to a completely cold audience that have no idea who you are and have 3 seconds to capture their attention, it has to be IRRESISTIBLE.
Step 3: Launch a lead magnet such a free session/webinar on a high-converting landing page.
This way you gain the trust of your target audience, and also you’re demonstrating that your school has enough knowledge and understanding of its audience’s needs to provide solutions that help. In addition to being cost-effective and low effort, lead magnets are also highly effective at turning interest into action. Lead magnets can create a reason for people interested in your business to become loyal customers.
Step 4: Launch your highly converting ads.
This highly targeted form of advertising allows you? to reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness, increase conversion rates, cost-effective marketing, as well as flexibility and personalisation.
Personalise your content marketing?
Personalising your content gives you the opportunity to engage prospective customers and have more meaningful interactions. You can start by looking at the data and developing accurate personalities in your students. If you don't have data to work with, start by interviewing students to identify their needs, motivations, concerns, interests, and behaviors. With this information, you can start crafting key messages that resonate with your target students.
It can easily be seen as a way for you to create more of what your audiences want to see. The key message you create can be used across all your digital marketing channels, from content creation to social media marketing.
Step 5: Create your nurture sequence. Once someone books a free session, it’s important that we nurture the prospect and get them excited to show up to it. Equally important - keep in touch with them AFTER they booked and keep them engaged with free value until they convert.
Email marketing is your strongest ally?
This is a great way to showcase the school’s expertise, share key resources and exclusive content, and highlight program benefits and course content. Use an attractive email subject line, that makes the reader not waste a second in opening the email. Your email copy needs to be engaging, and also full of value. Always outline the benefits one gets from opting to enroll in your certification program. Make them feel like they’ll miss out on the best opportunity ever if they don’t enroll now, or in the future. And no marketing strategy is complete without email ;)
Here are some extras to keep in mind:?
Showcase the success of your past students
Real results and real success stories drive conversions. It shows the actual value you’re bringing to people’s lives. And how enrolling can change their lives for the better. The strategic use of these stories can help your school establish social proof, a phenomenon that shows that your school provides value to other prospective customers. Don’t believe us? Take a look at retail, for example, they’re living proof that social proof works ;) Take a look at Zara, you’ll see what we’re talking about. So, why can’t your school incorporate social proof in every marketing tactic you use?
Go live to increase hype?
Live streaming can help draw more attention to exciting new developments, such as new program launches. You can host live instructional sessions and FAQ events on social media or Zoom to spark interest in new initiatives. These events allow you to generate more leads and showcase your program's unique selling points to a larger (and more engaged) audience.
So, what are you waiting for? Are you ready to take your certification school to the next level and boost your success? If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We do have the necessary experience to handle this. Does the Jay Shetty Certification School ring a bell? Trust that you’ll be in the right hands, all you have to do is book your FREE discovery call:?