A solid marketing strategy might be the difference between success and failure for schools that want to increase bookings or boost their international profile. Your marketing efforts will be more effective if you take the time to identify your target demographic of prospective students, develop messages tailored to them, and then consistently execute this refined strategy.
There are certain strategies that, when incorporated into a marketing plan, consistently yield outstanding results for effective promotion and the gains that accompany it for schools. Are you wondering how to begin? In order to assist you in promoting your institute, we have provided the following guidelines.
Launch a Marketing Strategy
The course-specific personas you create will also guide the direction of your content production efforts. For instance, if your school is hosting a summer camp, the parents of your prospective students will likely be your primary audience. These parents will want to know not only about the academic rigour of your program but also about the extracurricular activities and security measures you have in place.
Establish the Students Persona
You should have a distinct idea of the people you want to enroll in your school as a driving concept for your marketing efforts. You can utilize the information in this “persona” to guide the development of your marketing campaign’s messages since it describes the key traits of your ideal customer.
Some key characteristics to keep in mind while developing your character are as follows:
- An overview of the prospect’s reasons for wanting to learn a new language
- Issues that the prospect may have or obstacles they may encounter
- What kind of investigation into language schools your ideal prospect is likely to engage in
- Demographic data including age, location, education, income, etc.
- Potentially influential third parties (family, agents, guidance counsellors, etc.)
These characteristics should be considered, since they may be indicators of specific attitudes and behaviours to which you may wish to appeal in your advertising. If you create a student persona of a high school kid who wants to learn a language so they may study abroad in college, your messaging should portray your courses as an effective means to that end.
Apply Promotional Strategies for Schools
Multiple aspects contribute to a website’s search engine rankings, including its content’s quality and relevancy, its accessibility to crawlers, the prominence of visual features, and its mobile-friendliness. However, developing an effective SEO strategy for schools has even more challenges, as they may need to appeal to prospective students in a variety of languages and places.
Get Your SEO Game On!
While Google is the most popular search engine in the world and the one that the vast majority of educational institutions around the globe will prioritize when optimizing, there are other regional search providers that may be of interest to you if your institution is aiming to attract students from a specific region. Several of the most important regional actors are listed here.
Baidu is the most used search engine in China; it gives preference to URLs written entirely in Chinese characters, prioritizes speed, and uses very little JavaScript and Flash.
One of the most popular search engines in Russia is Yandex, which also has a sizable user base in several other countries in Eastern Europe.
A lot of people in South Korea use Naver as their primary search engine. Included are facets of social networking as well.
It’s crucial to take into account the specifics of each search engine, although they all generally function on the same principles of favouring high-quality, relevant material. Spend some time learning about foreign SEO methods, or hire a company whose employees have such knowledge.
It may also be worthwhile to put effort into creating information in multiple languages for your website if you anticipate a sizable chunk of your student body to speak a certain language. Be careful to get any existing information professionally translated to ensure effective communication and the maintenance of clarity and value. Misunderstanding or a negative impression of your organization among native speakers of the language you’re translating into is a real risk if your translation isn’t up to par.
Be Consistent with the Keywords of your institution’s Curriculum
Search terms where you currently appear in search results, albeit not in a very prominent position.
Using these keywords effectively in your writing is equal parts art and science. You might think of keywords as markers of what language-learning institutions are in demand of from their students. Not only should your material include these keywords, but it should also be structured around them to generate a message that specifically addresses the concerns of the individual who typed them into a search engine.
If a school wants to get more exposure online, one technique is to focus on geo-localized keywords. These are phrases that specifically mention a location, such as “Colleges in Canada.” If someone is set on learning a language and has an idea of where they’d like to do so, but is still unsure about which school to enroll in, this may help you attract them.
Content Marketing for Schools: Drive Readers to Your Website
Making use of targeted keywords and phrases in web pages and blog post content is one of the best techniques to boost organic search rankings. In the long run, this can increase traffic to specific pages and boost their search engine results.
First things first: Devote some time to research to identify the keywords for which your website content should be optimized. In order to conduct in-depth research and identify the keywords that would work best for your website, you can use popular choices like Google Keyword Planner, RankIQ, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMRush.
Conclusion
Along with these tips, It is crucial to track data in each of these areas of your digital marketing plan in order to fine-tune your school’s efforts and boost performance.
After all, digital marketing is mostly a data-driven discipline, and there are many metrics by which to gauge success. You may set your CRM and marketing automation reports to give you insight into the efficiency of your student recruiting procedures, and powerful platforms like Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads, and Facebook Audience Insights will offer you a plethora of data.
We have compiled the top tips to promote your school business. We hope you liked them!