In the education and child care markets, it’s commonly known that marketing your specific school or district is an important aspect of growing enrollment, creating brand awareness and differentiating yourself from competitors. However, it’s not always easy to know the right families to send marketing messages to in order to increase ROI on your efforts.
Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, you need to know where you fit into the market and who your best potential students and families are. Once you do this, you can conduct targeted marketing outreach.
Whether you operate a child care facility, a charter school, an institution of higher education, or anything in between, data can be used to improve digital and traditional marketing efforts. Read on to learn how analytics can be used to strengthen your current marketing strategy in three key areas.
Goal #1: Growing Enrollment
Reaching enrollment capacity is a goal most schools strive for, and that can happen when you have a strategic marketing plan in place. This applies to both new schools as well as schools that have been up and running for years. For new schools, marketing efforts typically begin up to a year before the school actually opens. This means you have to be proactive in not only developing strong marketing messages, but also understanding who your best potential families are.
For established schools, each school year is an opportunity to improve on your strategies from years’ past in order to keep building brand awareness in your community and retain families at your school for many years.
In both scenarios, analytics can be applied to increase enrollment numbers. With the help of targeted marketing models, your best potential families can be broken out into different profiles, each with the demographic and psychographic information that differentiates them. Using the model, you can target families that have a high likelihood of wanting your specific services and not waste your marketing dollars on families that aren’t likely to enroll students.
Goal #2: Creating Brand Awareness
If enrollment isn’t your main goal at the moment, it’s still important to develop a marketing strategy to increase brand awareness. Just as with enrollment, you can utilize analytics to stay top of mind with your best potential families. For example, you may market to families with children who are too young for enrollment now in order to build brand awareness and ensure you are at the top of their list of places to consider in the future.
Goal #3: Differentiating Yourself from Other Schools
Another way analytics can help strengthen your education marketing efforts is by differentiating your school from your competitors. When you realize where you fit into your market and trade area, you can better understand what makes you different, and better, then other schools around you. If you know the demographic and psychographic details of the kinds of families you serve, you’re able to market to other families like that in order to reach that segment of the market. This gives you an advantage by allowing you to truly know your offerings, where you succeed, and in what areas you have a competitive advantage.
The Bottom Line
If your student enrollment strategy, brand awareness and competitive differentiators aren’t achieving the results you want, consider using analytics to strengthen your strategy to reach more of the right families and make your marketing dollars go further in the process.
To learn more about how analytics can help your school, contact us.
