While many music schools strive to attract more enrollments they still use traditional marketing strategies such as billboards, direct mail, and newspapers. In today’s evolving digital world, it’s becoming increasingly important for schools to adopt robust marketing strategies to increase music school enrollment.
Why do Music Schools need a Robust Marketing Plan?
Having robust marketing strategies to increase school enrollment is the first step toward achieving success for your music school. Today, you can adopt online marketing strategies that are more sustainable and cheaper compared to traditional strategies. With the ideal marketing strategy, you can easily monitor your progress across the years. Here are some tips that music schools can use to boost enrollment.
· Dominate Your Brand
Your brand defines who your school’s history, a promise that you should strive to deliver. Outline the things that differentiate your school from others. Do you offer specialized courses? Do you have an exclusive collaboration with sponsors or partners which can be beneficial to the students?
Perhaps you’ve adopted environmentally friendly practices in your school. Define the features of your brand and incorporate them into your communication channels. This way, potential students will understand your brand and what you have to offer simply by viewing your website.
· Leverage your Offline Communication to Boost Your Online Activity
While you want to adopt advanced marketing strategies, you can leverage existing communication tools to boost your online strategies. Here is how to achieve this.
- Should you choose to advertise in mainstream media, always include your web address and all your social media platforms.
- Develop content that your customers will want to share.
- Include your online information in envelopes and all outdoor signage. All of your communication with parents should have a subscribe option where they can register to receive an e-newsletter. It’s worth noting that you’ll rely on the people who receive your marketing material to share the information on their social media platforms.
· Leverage SEO to Boost Your Organic Search
Parents today are conducting research way before they contact the institution. This explains why creating a search engine presence is critical when it comes to increasing your school enrollment. Assuming that a parent with school-going children is relocating to a new area and searching for a good school.
Many of them are likely to key in specific keywords on search engines in their quest to find the best schools for their children. Establish your school’s ranking performance on the search engines within your area. If your school doesn’t appear on the first page, you should devise robust ways to improve your performance.
Cater To Your Target Audience
As we’ve mentioned before, begin by outlining your brand. Explain the unique features, tools, resources, and experiences that students can expect. Why is your school the best choice? Here are some of the areas you need to evaluate.
· Student Objectives
What is your school doing to develop all-round students? Do you have in place programs to support students with special needs or financially unstable students? Does your school offer any extracurricular activities or afterschool programs? Have you adopted any counseling programs to take care of students with emotional problems? What is your definition of student success?
· The Job Market
Establish the jobs and professions that are popular within your area. You could hold discussions with local business people and associations. This way, you will be able to figure out trending jobs and understand what your school can do to fit in.
· Research Your Competitors
Establish your key competitors and what they have to offer. Read through their website to establish what they promise on their website. You also need to read reviews on their pages to find out what parents and students are saying about them. Figure out what’s different between you and your competitors, and use it to develop robust marketing strategies to increase school enrollment.
· Determine Ethnic, Gender, and Racial Demographics
Conducting a demographic survey within your area enables you to focus on your school’s unique challenges and needs. While at it, you want to establish the expected racial, ethnical, and socioeconomic changes within your recruitment area. You may want to develop a ten-year projection for instance.
With your statistics in place, define the preparations you are making in anticipation of the changes. When it comes to socio-economics, establish the average household income within your area. This helps you understand and develop programs that cater to the financial situation of your potential students.
Boost Your Website Experience
Ensure that your website is designed to maximize student and parent’s experience. Here is how to go about it.
- Your website should be responsive. Parents and students should be able to access your website using their mobile gadgets. Remember, many people today are accessing the internet using their smartphones. If your potential clients can’t access your site, chances are they will move onto the next responsive site.
- The site should be easy to navigate. Visitors should be able to find what they want in record time. Assuming your potential clients are looking for your contacts, they should be able to find them in less than five minutes. Make sure your visitors are able to achieve their objectives with fewer clicks and time.
- Your website should be fast. Clients hardly have time to deal with slow loading websites. Ensuring that your website is fast to load improves the reputation of your institution.
- The site should be Professional. Remember, many parents today are techno-savvy, and can easily tell a professional website from a non-professional one.
Increase Search Traffic with Google Adwords
Google Adwords help you to advertise to your visitors instantly when they research. This is a great opportunity that you may not enjoy with traditional marketing strategies. However, you need a robust understanding of how the system works to achieve success. Further, you’ll need to establish how your target audience interacts with various platforms such as; Bing, Google, or Facebook.
Identify your goals and ensure they revolve around something as easy as acquiring potential client contacts. You could ask yourself the following questions; who’s your marketing strategies to increase school enrollment targeting? Is advertising across the year necessary?
Assuming you’re targeting parents, are you targeting researchers of people in search of a quick fix? What is your target age group? These questions will help you develop your goals and approach. Here is what you should know when advertising with Google Adwords.
- Incorporate keywords in your ads. Make sure they are captivating enough to convince visitors to click on them.
- Figure out the expectations of visitors who click on your ad and strive to deliver it. Define what you want your visitors to do on the page in as simple terms as possible.
- Direct your visitors to a landing page that communicates to the target audience directly.
- Observe your advertising performance and establish the ads, ad groups, and keywords to encourage conversions. Further, you may want to figure out the return on investment for each of them. With time, you’ll recognize money-draining areas which you can either stop or improve to enhance performance and increase productivity.
Prioritize
Do one thing at a time. The process of listing down your goals can be overwhelming and time-consuming. This can be more prevalent in schools with multiple school districts and campuses and multiple level schools, which have varying goals. This is where you need to prioritize your goals and define what’s possible to achieve within a specific duration.
You will find that, while sole goals can be achieved in a year, you may have to wait longer to accomplish others. Your ability to achieve each goal will depend on the available resources and your school community.
Further, many other underlying goals will have subdivisions of goals that will facilitate the achievement of bigger goals. For instance, enrollment is a top priority but you still need to increase it every year.
Establish smaller objects that can help you achieve a bigger objective. Choose the top things that require urgent attention, or those that will help you make a huge impact within your community within a year. Whatever you do, you should be realistic with your expectations.
Remember, you will need support from different departments in the school as well as the school’s management. This will help you set both annual and long term priorities. Some schools choose to engage their stakeholders under a signed contract to ensure each adheres to the set directions and priorities.
Maintain an Active Online Presence
Social media is fast becoming a critical part of business marketing strategies. Apart from having various social media platforms for your school, ensure that your profile is active. Here is how to go about it.
Post relevant content on your website and social media platforms that your target audience is looking for. Optimize it for SEO and include effective calls to action to boost more visitor engagement and interaction.
Launch a digital marketing campaign comprising of various features such as programmatic ads, search engine optimization, Facebook advertisement, and geotargeting to reach a wider audience.
Include a submission form on your website where visitors can leave their contact information. You can use the contacts to reach them at a later date.
Finally
Adopt these marketing strategies to increase school enrollment to reach more potential customers and boost your conversions.
