How to write a great school marketing plan

Marketing your school can no doubt seem like a pretty daunting task! Most of our school clients aren’t trained marketeers, but there’s this all important task of making sure enrolment numbers are achieved and so emphasis on school marketing is becoming increasingly important. A great school website and an outstanding prospectus are but two parts of the process, how does this tie into your overall school marketing plan? We’ll show you in these 6 steps:

1. Execute a situation analysis to find out where your school is now and where you want to be. Prepare a PESTLE analysis. This framework makes you consider the external factors affecting your school including political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal and environmental. Finally include an analysis of your competition and what makes them great and not so great.
2. Set objectives for your school marketing, based on meeting your overall objectives for the school and make them SMART (strategic, measureable, achievable, realistic and timed). An example might be: “To increase enrolment by 5% for the next academic year by creating a new school prospectus” or “To improve communications with parents by creating a new parent portal on the website by the end of first term”.
3. Create some marketing strategies. If you go back to the results of your situation analysis, you’ll be able to pull out some key strategies to improve your school marketing which will help meet your objectives. So if enrolment numbers are down and communications with parents is declining, perhaps creating a new bespoke school website to meet your exact needs is a clear strategy.
4. Set the wheels in motion to implement your strategies with some tactics. If a new website is on the cards, get all the heads your need around the table to come up with a clear brief for your school marketing agency to bring your ideas to life. Engaging all stakeholders at this part of the process is essential to make sure you get what you need. Make sure all of this data filters into your school website brief.
5. A website can be a beast of a project! Make sure you create a solid timeline to put to your school marketing agency, agree on this before moving forward so everyone knows what’s required at each stage of the process and when. Working to deadline is so important to make sure you reach your end goal of your all-important go live date.
6. Measuring success! After all the hard work of planning and carrying out your tactical marketing, being able to measure success is key to knowing what worked, what didn’t and to inform next year’s plan. If a school website was in your marketing plan, then read this article about the 8 most important metrics in Google analytics to help you to measure the success of your new website!

If you’d like help creating your school marketing plan then contact one of our CIM accredited marketing team today - we’ll get you on the right track!