Marketing for a private school can be tricky. You want your school to convey the right message, and you want to attract the right students and parents. Therefore, it’s best to decide on the online image of your school first. How do you want to be marketed to the world (literally, since boarding schools, for example, have many international students)? Some schools like to market according toward their academia, sports programs, or even extracurricular options, such as study abroad programs for upper classmen. You have to ask yourself: What separates my private school from our competitors, and what will attract students and parents to apply to our school?
Once you have that question figured out, you can start by looking into hiring a consultant. Educational marketing consultants can help you create a strategic marketing plan. It could save you months to years of hassle, especially if time is an issue. Think of it this way: it’s much more expensive to hire a full-time staff member with benefits. Instead, you can enlist a consultant who signs a months-long contract and is paid out monthly. This way the pressure is off of you. However, you must research or ask around via word of mouth for who is the best consultant in your area.
If you think hiring a consultant is just too much money, another recommendation is to read anything you can about educational marketing online. Nowadays, there are blogs, online articles, and books dedicated to this very subject. Become an avid reader and research how you can market your private school online. Also, case studies are helpful; they can be of other schools who have successfully marketed themselves online. Study the best private schools in the world and see how they market themselves online as well, and then try to duplicate what they do if it applies to your school.
Your school should have a website, and if it does, it must include Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO allows a student and his family to find the perfect private school match for them. Back in the old days, it was all about having a “name.” Today, it’s about making a name and ensuring that this name is seen on the Internet. With the right SEO keywording and content strategy, it can bring a school from obscurity to front and center. So, you may be asking, how does SEO work? SEO uses a system of strategically researched keywords that are embedded into useful, informative content. For example, a blog post or an article can have SEO. Therefore, a school website can provide a strong framework in which to incorporate SEO principles and move up in the search engine rankings. We all want to be #1 in a Google search, right? SEO makes that happen.
At QThinker, we are happy to discuss how to incorporate the best SEO practices into your private school website, and the best part is, we will do it for you. We’ve had years of expertise in search engine optimization (SEO), social media, content creation, and management of websites, especially in regard to top search results in Google. If you’d like to make your website mobile friendly, please contact us at 617- 816-2969 or use our contact form.
This blog was inspired by an article from Private School Review.