Are you providing a perfect pathway for prospective parents?

Private Christian School Marketing:  Are you providing a pathway for prospective parents?

Your prospective parent is looking for evidence of your school’s greatness.  Are you creating a pathway for them to discover your unique offerings?

You cannot assume every potential family is ready to enroll.  Some are only becoming aware of your existence, while some are somewhere in between. Are you providing each family profile the right kind of steps to move them to the next level?

Read this guest article that Randy wrote Providing Stepping Stones Not Stumbling Blocks“.

Shareable Content is King

Shareable Content is King - Private School Marketing Ideas

While I’ve written many times that “content is king”, I think the important distinction is that “shareable content is king.”  In our cluttered world, there’s a lot of content out there in our news feed, in our news stream, on our pin boards, and in our email inboxes.  But often it is nothing by noise, spam, or just irrelevant chatter in our digital mailboxes.  The foundation of a solid social media system for your school is to connect relevant content with the right audience who will pass it on to others with a similar need.

First of all, where do you get this relevant content that is worth sharing?  Recently, I wrote “3 Places to Get Ideas for Your School’s Blog Content.”  I found another article listing “12 Characteristics of Highly Shared Content”.  The key is to listen to your audience’s needs.  Ask them for input.  Write what they are asking about, not just what you want to say.

Once you have great quality blog content, it’s time to share it for optimal exposure and maximum impact:

  • Tweet your blog article, not just once, but over a period of time (or at peak moments during your marketing season)
  • Post this article on your school’s Facebook page
  • Put a link to this article in your school’s email marketing newsletter (where you hopefully have numerous prospective families on the list)
  • As a follow-up to a family who came for a tour, you can email them links to articles that speak specifically to each family’s concerns
  • Pin your article to a parent-related board on Pinterest

Shareable content is highly-relevant information that your audience has asked you for or that you know they need to understand it.  Shareable content cuts through the clutter in our world and resonates with the needs of your immediate audience, and then they share it with others who have a similar need.

FINAL TIP:  Writing shareable content for your families may force you to think differently about your intended audience.  While current families may be the first to read your article, your final destination is really the laptop of the prospective family who currently has a friend whose kids are enrolled at your school.  Armed with the right kind of relevant content, your current families become ambassadors who can passively promote your school by passing a link to a friend via email, Twitter or Facebook.   For example, highly shareable content may be “How the class size at my son’s school increased his grades from Cs to all As!” or “How a smaller classroom environment has turned my wallflower daughter into a social butterfly.”  Current families read (and maybe write) this content and then stand positioned to post such insights all over Facebook, Twitter and on their Pinterest board about their kids’ school.

ACTION:  If you need ideas on setting up your school’s social media system, contact us for your FREE 30-minute phone consultation.  No obligation to sign up for anything – just an opportunity for us to listen to your needs, share ideas and help you lay out a plan that will work for you.

3 Places to Get Ideas for Your School’s Blog Content

3 Places to Get Ideas for Your School's Blog Content

When talking with private school clients about creating high-value blog content for their social media system, one of the most common questions I get is, “what do I write about?”  Admittedly, it’s so much easier to think of self-promotional content (i.e., your next marketing preview event, a statistic about your school’s college acceptance rate, school growth, class size, etc..)  But your social media system must include educational and informational content that will resonate with prospective families.

The 3 most common places where you can receive inspiration for your high-value blog content are:

  1. ONLINE RESOURCES – as seen in the image above, the NAIS website has a parent section (click “Parents” at the top as indicated in the photo).  You’ll find a number of articles that are talking about issues NAIS has deemed important to prospective independent school parents.  These are likely YOUR prospective parents as well.  Get clues from these articles to craft your own articles, or simply link to articles on sites like NAIS to provide high-value content to your families.  You can also get content ideas from other parent forums at Private School Review or GreatSchools (look for their “Hot Topics” forum) and even the educational areas of national news sites like CNN or FoxNews.
  2. ADMISSION Q&A – think through the 5 most common questions prospective families ask about your school during your preview events or school tours.  These are excellent starting places for blog content.  While a blog post answering questions about your school’s tuition rates may not sound very riveting, it could give you a foundation for talking about the VALUE your school offers a prospective family, a discussion of financial aid solutions, or an opportunity to highlight current families who have made the sacrifice to afford your school.  When one prospective family watches a compelling 5 min video blog from one of your current families, there is an opportunity to move past the dilemma of “how could we ever?” to a more positive “we can do this!”  attitude about enrolling in your school.
  3. CONVERSATIONS EVERYWHERE – asking questions on your school’s Facebook page can extend the opportunity for your prospective families to understanding more about the spiritual, academic or character-building advantages that your school offers.  Ask prospective families to submit questions via Facebook or Twitter and then answer them on your blog.  Every member of the marketing/communication/admission team and parent organization should start keeping a record of FAQs they get asked at church, at the little league game, or while sitting across from their friends at the coffee shop.  These questions, concerns and curiosities of prospective families are your basis for every educational blog post you write.

*UPDATE* – If it can be of some help, I’ve recently a “Parent Articles” board on Pinterest to help you have a go-to resource for relevant articles that you can tweet out or include in your email or Facebook updates.

18 ideas for your school’s social media command center

A Private School Social Media Command Center for Your Next Open House

As you ramp up your organized admission/marketing events such as an Open House or Preview Night, you need to be thinking smart about social media.  You need your very own social media command center.

As a Duct Tape Marketing consultant (learn why I believe Duct Tape Marketing is the best marketing system for any private school), we focus on strategically thinking about social media, not just treating it as an isolated island.   Enjoying an integrated marketing approach for your private school will not only help you see better results, you’ll have the confidence of a long-term, strategic social media effort as opposed to a “fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants” way of doing things.   Some of you know what I’m talking about.  Let’s do social media better!

John Jantsch, the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, recently posted 18 elements of a strong social media command center.  Have fun looking at this list and thinking about how you could implement one or more of them during your marketing season.  You will need to put your innovation hat on and think “outside the box” as you adapt the suggestions to your admission event, but I suspect you will walk away with some game changing ideas that sets you apart from competing schools.

READHow to Create a Social Media Command Center by John Jantsch

School Marketing Retention Idea: Saying Thank You!

Private School Marketing - Retention - Thank You NoteIn an upcoming episode on our private school marketing podcast, we are talking about retention and the efforts it takes to cultivate “loyal ambassadors.”

Today, I read 2 articles to encourage your school retention efforts:

  1. What can we do to encourage our families to re-enroll early? (by Rick Newberry of Enrollment Catalyst)
  2. Increasing Student Retention – The Power of “Thank You” (Hyatt Bolden of The Ratner School in Pepper Pike, OH)

The article by Bolden reinforces how simple efforts play such an important role in cultivating an environment where families return year after year (loyal) and they talk enthusiastically about your school to their friends as if they were on staff with the school’s marketing department (ambassadors)!

To learn more about retention ideas, download the free ebook, “3 Rs of School Marketing” at the bottom of our website.  It’s FREE!

-Randy