Highly Effective Marketing Ideas for School Admission, School Consultant’s Advice

India has the largest network of schools for K-12 education in the world.

Education in India is about innovation, invention and upscaling your existing processes to meet the goals of raising a technically advanced generation. As new education entrepreneurs in 2020, you require to think and act eccentrically for catering to the problems of the 21st century. As school consultants, our marketing ideas for school admission begins with thorough market research. So, here what you need to know…

As per the statistics released by FICCI, India is home to 1.4 million schools administering the K-12 education system to 253 million students. As a new school entrepreneur, you need to spread your horizon and reach out to the audience innovatively. Otherwise, you’re fated to become another drop of water into the ocean. The good news is that education demands are only growing in neo-modern India. While, India has 25% of private schools but these are availed by almost 100 million students. With such a staggering response from parents looking for private schools, it’s still a challenge for some greatly built schools to bring students to their premise.

We conclude that most of the schools, struggling to make the first-mark, are suffering from the upheavals of the market. Some challenges which can drag you behind in the race:

• Insufficient marketing budget
• Relying on out-dated marketing strategies
• No attention to details when it comes to inception of school (the story)
• Lack of 360 degree marketing and great content development
• No lead nurturing process in place

To demolish the gap between parents’ expectations, industrial needs and school’s facilities, we walk with the schools to help them become the problem solvers. When you hire experts, they trace the right path which defines inception, institution’s infrastructure, facilities, recruitment of the best faculty and staff, marketing, admission process and upgrades continuously.Click here for our DPR Services

So, let’s discuss our devised admission marketing plan for new schools in India.

When you’re setting up a new school, you’ve to consider several factors. One of the most important factors being “Target Audience”. Here’s where the difference speaks- while the consumers are young kids but the target audience is parents of these young kids.

As a school entrepreneur, understand the audience profiling which includes parents’ profession, location, economical section, demanded board affiliation and more. School consultants can help you to draw details of your target audience.

We will map the budget and allocate it to reach out to the target audience. This allows us a clear insight into how the brand will be established and our next challenge will be to upscale it to a prominent position in the market.

The very step is to plan a 1-Year and a 5-Year marketing plan for a school. Brands of other industries relish a direct audience definition while in the education industry, you need to be highly specific with an approach. While you have to speak to parents, the urgent needs to be created among the young kids. Hence, your tonality is defined by what kids will understand.

This is where our expertise as school advisors come handy as we’ve spearheaded our clients to great success because of our strategic plan and budgeting throughout the marketing phase. We understand what works, hence, we know where to invest your money.

We are often consulted for budgeting the marketing strategies to increase school enrollment. Our initial approach includes:

• Audience Profiling
• Defining Idealistic Marketing Goals
• Research Previously Executed Marketing Schemes and Results
• Selection of the Platform
• Coining of Strategies based on Platform
• Redefining Realistic Goals Post Research Phase
• Allocating Tentative Budget
• Running Test Campaigns (If Required)
• Revamping & Fixing Loopholes
• Execution and Monitoring the Response

This 10-step guide may seem simple but it is filled with strenuous market study, creative-thinking, marketing skills, response statistics and financial breakdowns. Putting all together with complete integrity needs a professional’s hand. That’s where we come as trusted partners of our clients to promote a new school in India.

To plan is step uno but to implement, you need a sharp-sighted team of experts who have dedicated their time and efforts into building an education brand. Our marketing tools and techniques are finely tuned to today’s world. The only way to create strategies for increasing student enrollment is to maximize the use of cross-platform marketing.

When we talk of marketing funnels, entice the audience for longer periods with different campaigns and lead them through the bottom of a marketing bucket.

How do we, as school consultants for marketing schools, suggest to do?

Let’s not get tunnel-eyed when it comes to Digital Campaign. Here are some ground-breaking strategizes you can’t do without:

• Responsive Website and Application

You are interacting with millennials. These parents are highly inclined towards technology. Having a simple website is not going to leave a great mark. Go fancy, go big. You need your school’s mobile and desktop application that has its CRM software to improve communication.

Also, investing in a highly responsive website enables your reachability and empowers your digital footprint on search engines too.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We all have heard of SEO from our digitally intelligent sources. How does it help for a new school?

When an SEO expert works on your school’s rank on search engines like Google and Bing, the search visibility is improved. For commonly searched keywords, like ‘best CBSE schools in Delhi NCR’ and ‘affordable ICSE school in Bangalore’,  you will see your school’s name on top that increases the chances of clicks on your website by the targeted audience.

Also, our Online Reputation experts will help spread the word about your school being the best in town. So that, whenever your target audience reads about your school, they only see great reviews and a strong portfolio that helps to make up their mind.

• Media Buying and Planning

Google Adwords and Social Media Paid Marketing are the avenues to capture the high-intended audience.

When there is an admission session of the year, there are chances of more schools focussing on marketing themselves. To convince parents, it’s important for them to see you. By spending over paid marketing, you are ascertaining great response from parents looking for admission in a short span of time.

We break down the budget based on your goals:

• High web traffic
• Increased sales
• Improved search engine visibility
• Be on top of local search
• Brand Awareness
• Lead generation
• Conversion

• Social Media Groups and Communities

We suggest our clients stay active and execute campaigns that specifically target audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora and YouTube. You can have direct communication with parents, advertise your school and its facilities, showcase the achievements and inform them about the new upgrades through these mediums in a very interactive tone.

Also, social media is not limited to these channels. There are other processes like viral marketing, influencer marketing, meme marketing and other neomodern methods that can be used to stir dialogue about the school keeping dignity and integrity in place.

As you can’t directly reach out to the students, social media marketing is a great dose of engaging your consumers who have higher chances of advocating to join your school.

• Content Marketing

Schools need a backbone of content marketing. From writing crisp social media captions, case studies, video scripts, emailers to blogging, PR articles, ebooks, landing pages and more. We suggest collaterals from content marketing to each client who enquires about ‘how to improve school strength’. Storytelling is the powerful tool which builds a school brand and establishes sentiments. That’s how you pull the interests of parents and students towards your school.

Sharing relatable stories and enticing content, you can sway the notion of your audience easily. It is one skill and service that allows you to set your foot strong in the market and become a thought leader for the education industry in no time.

Outdoor advertisement in 2020 would have been a far-fetched idea but with our creative campaigns, there are ways to make it efficient and effective. Here’s where parents’ can find a prospective school for their kids:

• Print and Video ads on Residency Lifts
• Banner Ads on highways
• Standees in education exhibitions
• Unipole Ads
• Newspaper advertisements
• School and Education Magazines
• Paid partnership with education societies and more

This is one of the best ways of how to increase admission in school in India. Print media will never cease to surprise people. It is the freedom of expression which will always slide into the consciousness of readers or viewers. Some of the common yet effective mediums:

• Ads on notebooks & stationery (Merch Marketing)
• Brochures
• Pamphlets
• Event magazines
• Brand stories
• Customer magazines
• Member magazines

We always divide our services into Pre-Launch, Launch and Post-Launch when it comes to school. It’s an education brand which is why our idea of thought is to put philanthropic causes in front. Following are a few ways in which we help our clients to carry out promotional activities:

• Online Live Events for Kids
• English, Hindi and Regional Storytelling on Facebook Live
• Zoom Webinars on STEM education
• Various Inter-School Competitions
• Partners in Organizing Global and National Olympiads and Events
• Exhibitions Stalls in Annual Fests and Shows
• Hosting Launch Parties for Delegates and Parents
• Celebrity Brand Ambassador

Capturing leads from various sources is still an easy task when we talk about the lead cycle. The most difficult challenge arrives at the sales team.

We train our sales reps for problems like, “How to convince parents for school admission?” What you need to understand as new school owners is that parents need to build trust through word-of-mouth and reputation of the school. You need to have advocates of your brand to gain that credibility.

This is why Step 1 to Step 3 are crucial. But the next game plan is to showcase your strengths.

To do so, you need executives and administration personnel who can talk to the parents and walk them through the process until the completion.

We suggest the following ways to do:

• Lead Capture: Have an automated lead capturing sheet aligned with your online campaigns. Whenever an interesting parent fills the form on the landing page, your team will be intimidated through emails or Excel-Sheet.
• Calling Process: Once you have the details of a high-quality lead, ensure your business executive contacts them within 24 hours. That’s the best time frame for a lead to mature.
• Non-Calling Process: Emailers, SMS Marketing and Remarketing are some of the ways you need to check to remind your audience to take action. Take a creative approach as you can.
• On-Premise Admission Team: Parents and students prefer running through the building blocks and inspect if it suits their expectation. We train our client’s team to nurture people who are visiting the school premise. These are the people who need no other push but great communication skills to persuade them to take the admission.

It has become difficult for management to understand how to attract students for admission in school when they can’t experience one right now. However, situations are set to stabilize and schools and colleges will start to open.

This is when schools will require a good boost of marketing tactics. If your school opts out of it, you’re losing in the race of hundreds of schools in your location.

Our suggestive schemes would be:

• Promote online training administered during 2020 for parents to showcase how their children are aligned to the new world education.
• Provide free webinars on technology for students to create a reputation of being the 21st century school.
• Introduce school’s mobile and desktop application for conducting classes, CRM, parents’ monitoring system, and other administration and school processes.
• Make innovative infrastructure upgrades to win the trust of parents and provide them peace of mind.
• Attach a social agenda to your school’s story which connects with a larger crowd like campaign which thanks to the parents for being an extension of their teachers who have selflessly become a part of their team.
• Offer free training to parents and teachers regularly to train them to handle inquisitive minds.

Putting in efforts to carefully plan the lifetime of a new school in India is exciting, overwhelming and stressing. As entrepreneurs, you might get lost in the multilevel processes. Marketing is such a task that you should leave it on the experts. Instead of hiring just any agency, you should only go by experience and case studies.

At Erocon, we have built a reputation among the best schools in India. As their working partners, our satisfaction is in catering the specialized solutions to schools based on their requirements.

If you think, this article helped you to take away some major information, then, this is the right time to drop us a message or a call for holding an astounding conversation about how you can upscale your admission process and ensure a higher number of admissions in the coming session.

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