Seems like many private schools have an interest in Pinterest. Independent schools and Christian schools are asking “how can we use Pinterest in our marketing strategy?” In a two-part series, we first talk about how we use Pinterest to help your school marketing. See the shownotes below for links to various boards. And click here to go to Part 2.
Time [14:29]
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SHOWNOTES:
- Follow Your School Marketing on Pinterest
- Specifically follow our boards like Private Schools Pinning, Parent Articles, Schools & Social Media, and boards about recruitment, retention and referrals (what we call the 3 Rs of school marketing).
- Read our recent article: “Shareable Content is King”
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- See below or click here for more PODCAST episodes
- Suggest a TOPIC or GUEST for the school marketing podcast.
- If you have a question or comment about this episode or any of our school marketing podcast shows, leave us a VOICEMAIL.
- Review our podcast in iTunes – your positive feedback tells other school marketing, admission and communication professionals that this is worth their time (remember, most podcast episodes are only 14 min and 29 seconds long!)
- Click here to go to Part 2 of this Pinterest Podcast
- To subscribe to the school marketing podcast, click on the image below:
As we continue to offer marketing consulting for private Christian schools all over the U.S., I wanted to give many of our new visitors a summary of the way we deliver free marketing ideas for private schools. We love to give away free ideas and freely share resources that we find all over the web. Here are a variety of ways we share marketing ideas with private schools:
- School Marketing FREE REPORTS (see bottom of this page) – we invite you to download for free any of our free reports (we hope to add a few reports in 2013)
I also found this article that you may want to review as well. What I found interesting is, at the end of the article, the Asker of the question tells you what idea meant the most. You will want to check it out: “Marketing ideas to help increase enrollment in private school?“
Does your school have a visual content strategy? Nowadays, you are probably aware that the social world is heavily focused on the “visual” representation of the events of your school. Are you using Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Facbeook photos, or Twitter pics to showcase all the events at your school?
Besides just snapping photos, your school must have a visual content strategy in order to optimize the use of pictures. Your families (current and prospective) are very visual and the integrated world of social media is highly visual. How visual is your online content? In a recent guest article on a nationally-recognized small business forum, I was invited to share the important elements of having a visual content strategy. I think you can easily make the translation to having a visual marketing strategy for your school.
I invite you to read the full article: “2 Easy Steps to a Visual Content Strategy.”
-Randy
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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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
