You’ve probably seen loads of articles that start with phrases like, “In today’s digital age…”. While it might sound clichéd, the world indeed entered the digital age just a few decades ago, and since then, the marketing strategies of many companies and organisations have completely changed. Schools are no exception.
The traditional PR and marketing strategies many schools used in the past, like placing newspaper ads or holding open days and fairs, are no longer effective. Schools need to adopt new communication channels to reach their prospective audiences—potential job applicants or students. Online marketing for schools differentiates you from competitors and attracts you to both categories of target users.
In this article, we will list the benefits your school will achieve by building a consistent online presence and offer six effective digital marketing strategies to try right now.
Building an online reputation for schools is a long-term endeavour. You will need to continuously invest in your digital presence on school websites and social media. It pays off every new school year for teaching new talent who joined your staff and more student enrolments.
Here are some of its benefits if you need additional arguments for allocating time and resources to digital marketing.
Increase marketing ROI
Establishing a digital presence is an effective marketing strategy, which will allow your school to attract teachers and prospective students faster, cheaper, and more efficiently compared to traditional marketing means. Since you will be able to track the source of every application after your advertising campaigns, you will know for sure how much marketing return on investment (ROI) you get.
Promote your school's brand
School websites and social media profiles are great places to showcase your school's distinctive atmosphere and culture. It is worth describing online the school's mission, values, and key branding elements. A strong brand will help your audience distinguish your school from competitors and relate to it. Increased brand awareness among your target audience ultimately brings you more "leads," such as new teaching talent and/or students.
Hunt for teaching talent
Hiring new teaching talent is not easy, as the country faces a “dangerous” teacher shortage, and the recruitment crisis in the educational sector deepens. However, with a consistent presence in the online space, your school will meet prospective new talent where they are and remain on their radar if and when they consider changing job. Through online marketing campaigns, you will build an inexhaustible pipeline of prospective candidates for education recruitment.
Boost school enrolment
Similar to reviewing potential job applicants, a consistent online presence will win you prospective student and parent engagement through digital marketing. When choosing a school to enrol in, your target audience usually does thorough research online. If your school can easily be found online, they can make a data-driven decision based on the descriptions of your offerings, curriculum, and testimonials.
If you are considering creating an online brand for your school, these steps will help you integrate digital marketing into your overall strategy. Do not miss the first and most important stage of any digital marketing campaign: understanding your business goals and target audience. Always keep these goals and the audience’s needs in mind when executing your marketing efforts.
1. Design an attractive school website
Building an online reputation for schools is impossible without a website. Yours should be attractive with its content and design as well as load speed and responsiveness. Work with a professional copywriter to publish a compelling description of your school’s advantages, day-to-day activities, and vacancy requirements for potential job applicants. Invite a UI/UX designer to create easy navigation and a good-looking graphical design for the website.
Load time of your website is critical, as even a two-second delay can result in abandonment rates of up to 87%, recent research shows. Load speed is also important for mobile users: 53% of visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load. Use online speed test tools to check how fast your website loads and fix the elements that slow it down.
2. Improve Search Engine visibility
What’s the point of having a strong online presence if your school’s website isn’t showing up in search results? To ensure potential applicants can easily find your website with a simple Google search, it’s important to follow best practices for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Start by submitting your website’s sitemap to Google via the Google Search Console to improve your search engine ranking.
There are two vital components of SEO: on-page and technical optimisation.
- On-page optimisation encompasses the content of the website and the proper use of relevant keywords that the audience uses when searching for the schools in the area.
- Technical optimisation includes an SEO-friendly website structure, mobile-friendliness, responsive design, website load speed, etc.
The mobile traffic market share in the United Kingdom was the largest in July 2023, with 65.08% of all mobile traffic in the country. That is why responsive design is critical for your website—it should automatically adapt to any device and screen size. Once you have your website optimised, your chances of getting traffic from a potential student campaign or recruitment campaign increase exponentially.
3. Build consistent Social Media presence
Social media, just like your school website, is an important building block of your educational institution’s digital advertising. Through social media, you can broadcast your school's daily living and speak to the potential audience more informally and engagingly. There are many different social media platforms out there, yet LinkedIn and Facebook prove to be most effective for recruitment purposes.
Successful social media marketing is all about getting potential candidates to interact with your content. If you’re looking to connect with experienced teachers, make sure you’re consistently posting relevant content, including branded messages, user-generated posts, and testimonials. This helps you stand out to teachers looking for new jobs while also keeping you in the minds of those who aren’t currently searching but still appreciate content that resonates with their interests.
4. Track analytics for your website and Social Media profiles
No matter how much you put into online marketing for your school, you won’t know if it’s effective without analytics. Most importantly, with the right analytics tool, you can refine your strategies by identifying what didn’t work and improving conversions by correcting those issues.
There is a great variety of out-of-the-box analytics tools available to track user metrics on your school websites and social media profiles. Some of the most popular ones include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Brandwatch, HubSpot, BuzzSumo, Sprout, etc. They differ in user experience, depth of offered insights, and price. The most important thing about any analytics tool is understanding which metrics matter most and consistently tracking how these metrics differ as a result of your marketing efforts.
5. Build a community in Social Media
LinkedIn and Facebook are great platforms to create online communities of like-minded professionals. A teacher’s community in social media can become another effective means to promote your brand awareness and be a source of teachers for your recruitment campaigns. By welcoming specialists from your area to participate in the community, you will foster collaboration across schools and share opportunities for professional learning.
Invite practising teachers and teachers-to-be to join your school's community by sharing relevant and engaging content with them. It could be research with statistical data, tips and tricks for better student engagement, user-generated content, recent recommendations by the Department for Education, etc.
6. Run targeted Social Media ads campaigns
If your school has established a presence online, you will most likely get a decent portion of the so-called organic traffic for your website and social media accounts. However, if you want to get better exposure in front of potential applicants, try launching an advertising campaign.
If your goal is to attract new talent for an open position at your school, an effective ad campaign strategy might look like this:
If you’re still unsure whether social media advertising for recruitment is worth trying, consider these compelling statistics. On average, it takes just 23 days to fill an open position through a social media ad campaign—nearly twice as fast as traditional recruiting methods. Plus, using a professional social media advertising platform and consultancy, like soccialy (now branded as Gaia), can save you over 30% of your recruitment budget.
Soccialy (now branded as Gaia) has helped thousands of educational institutions with digital advertising, successfully promoting nearly 7,000 job openings over the past few years. Let us make recruitment easier for your school. Turn to us to have education recruitment for your school done smartly. Book a free discovery call today and see how we can help you recruit smarter.
To place your school on par with education institutions globally, consider building an online visibility for it. Digital marketing techniques will help you increase brand awareness and drive more attention from potential job applicants and prospective families in a cost-effective way. Before you start online marketing for your school, make sure your website is user-friendly and SEO-optimised and your social media accounts are consistently updated. You will have higher chances to catch the attention of potential students and teaching candidates with carefully planned digital campaigns.
Why is building an online reputation for schools good?
Having a solid online presence and a good reputation brings plenty of benefits to an educational institution. These include better brand awareness, more student enrollment, improved communication with your target audience, easier recruitment of teaching and non-teaching staff, and stronger parent engagement through digital marketing, among others.
How do you start online marketing for schools?
Online marketing should be a key component of your school’s overall promotional strategy. To succeed in digital advertising, your website needs to be both attractive and easy to navigate. Keep your school’s social media accounts updated regularly. To boost website traffic, consider running ad campaigns on search engines or social media.
How do you interact with the audience after a social media ad campaign?
Your social media ads should align with your school’s overall marketing strategy to attract the right candidates. If some applicants didn’t reach out after seeing your social media campaign, don’t let them slip away. Use retargeting and remarketing to re-engage with them and keep the conversation going even after the campaign ends.