When your school reaches full enrolment – perhaps even with a substantial waitlist – it might seem like the perfect time to scale back on marketing efforts. However, it can be a critical misstep. Here’s why.
The enrolment success you enjoy today is a direct result of your past marketing and brand building efforts. School marketing is different to consumer marketing in many ways. One of those is the length of the purchase decision cycle. Research by Independent Schools Queensland show that 66 percent of parents start their school selection process at least two years before the child starts school[1]. Much of your current marketing effort will only pay dividend in the coming years.
It’s important to be clear about what school marketing is and isn’t. Marketing your school is the strategic process of identifying, attracting and engaging prospective families through the creation, communication and delivery of value, aimed at driving enrolment and retention. It is much broader than your enrolment advertising. How your reception answers the phone, how your website leads a visitor through their journey and how your students look and behave on the way to and from school are all marketing.
Your marketing, and how it is executed, is essential for sustaining long-term success and staying ahead of the competition. Continuous marketing is not just a good practice but a necessity, even when every seat is full.
Why maintain your marketing efforts?
Enhancing application quality: Growing your application pool is not just about numbers. It’s about enhancing the quality and diversity of your candidates. By attracting more applicants, your enrolments team can choose students and families who best align with your school’s values, goals and community spirit. This ensures that each new cohort strengthens the school’s culture and academic excellence
Building brand advocacy: When current families see youactively marketing for enrolments it reinforces their decision – perhaps one made over a decade ago – to choose your school. This provides them with ongoing reassurance that they made the right choice. In turn, this continuous engagement builds your school’s brand and activates parents and students as advocates who will speak positively about your school within their community.
Sustaining brand visibility: In a competitive market, maintaining a strong presence is crucial. Consistent marketing communication keeps your school brand top-of-mind in the wider community, ensuring that your school remains on the consideration list of prospective families. This visibility helps control the narrative about your school, protecting and enhancing its reputation.
Outpacing competitors: When you pull back on marketing, you leave space for competitors to capture attention and share their messages. Continuous marketing efforts help maintain your school’s share of voice, keeping competitors at bay and ensuring prospective families are more aware of your school’s strengths and offerings.
Advancing new initiatives: During periods of full enrolment, you have the stability (and luxury) to focus on strategic marketing projects that can elevate your school’s brand. Whether it’s enhancing your website, developing new messaging or investing in a flagship video production, this type of initiatives is often sidelined when you are struggling to fill seats. Now you have the time to give these initiatives your attention and resources. They often also have a nice side benefit of showing current parents how you are continuously improving and innovating.
Strategic marketing investments you can make when every seat is full
1. Invest in your secondary audiences
Identify and engage with new potential families beyond your primary audience. Broadening your reach helps build a more diverse and dynamic school community, ensuring long-term sustainability.
- More diverse families: Expanding your demographic reach can enrich the school environment.
- Families in new areas: Targeting families in different suburbs or regions can open new streams of enrolment applications.
- Newly admitted families: Build and maintain engagement with families in the ‘grey zone’ between enrolment and attending to secure their commitment and involvement.
- Current families: Strengthening relationships with current families builds loyalty and encourages positive word-of-mouth.
- Families with specific interests: Tailor your marketing to families interested in specific programs that align with your school’s strengths such as arts, sports or STEM.
- Future prospects: Engage families with younger children to keep your school top-of-mind as they plan for their future education.
2. Invest in Testing and Optimisation
Now is the time to experiment with your marketing strategies to find what works best.
- A/B testing: Testing is one of the highest pay-off investments you have available. Test different versions of lead generating advertisements with alternative placements, headlines and graphics. You can also test email variants to current parents and website landing pages for enrolment lead generation. Even if your test does not outperform your current control version, you’ve learned something valuable.
- Refining campaigns: Analyse past advertising creative and placement to understand what resonated with your audience and how you can improve them.
- Feedback loops: Create and implement systems to gather and analyse feedback from your audience to continuously refine your strategies.
3. Invest in ‘wish list’ projects
Every school has a list of things they would love to do if only time permitted. Now is the time!
- Update your visual assets: Refresh your photo and video library to better represent your school’s current environment and offerings.
- Redesigning templates: Improve the design and functionality of your email and communication templates. Every time a template is used it saves time and enhances your brand consistency.
- Integrating new technologies: Investigate and learn how to apply new tools like AI before adding them to your marketing technology stack.
4. Invest in long-term initiatives
Take advantage of this period to plan and execute long-term projects.
- Reimagining enrolment events: Have you been using the same ‘formula’ for your enrolment events (i.e., Open Days and school tours) for years without reviewing their effectiveness? When was the last time you tried something new? These in-person touchpoints are often where you win or lose the enrolment, so they are worth the investment.
- Developing marketing strategies: Your marketing strategy is your principle reference point that guides your whole team — not only your marketing team — about how you will achieve your marketing objectives.
- Build workflows: Build comprehensive email marketing and lead tracking automation workflows to streamline communication. This work is fiddly and requires concentrated effort, but the impacts can be enormous.
- Create fundraising campaigns: Fundraising is an add-on for most school marketing teams. If you have got an exciting development on the horizon, use the time to build the communications now. If it has been a few years since you last looked at your annual Giving Day, perhaps it is time for a refresh, or even a redesign, based on current research and trends.
5. Align marketing with strategic goals
Ensure your marketing efforts support the broader objectives of your whole-of-school strategic plan.
- Enrolment planning: Align marketing with long-term enrolment and facility planning to manage growth effectively.
- Community building: Use marketing to foster a sense of community among faculty, families and alumni.
6. Plan for future marketing needs
Lay the groundwork for future success.
- Foundational work: Start developing the next major marketing theme, updating your brand guide and conducting market research.
- Engagement studies: Use surveys, workshop groups and other research methods to understand your audience better and tailor future marketing.
7. Explore new marketing channels
Experiment with innovative platforms and content.
- Social media: Get familiar with new platforms that might help you target younger demographics.
- Virtual events: Develop virtual open house videos and interactive content to engage prospective families online.
- Lead magnets: Create valuable content, such as e-books or webinars, to attract and capture enrolment leads.
Don’t stop now
Full enrolment is not a signal to slow down your marketing efforts; rather, it is a prime opportunity to strengthen your school’s brand, engage with your community and lay the foundation for future success. By strategically investing time and resources into marketing, even when every seat is full, you ensure that your school remains a top choice for the best-fit families and continues to thrive in a competitive market.
insight applied
- When enrolments are strong is not the time to pull back on marketing, but it may mean you can do it differently.
- Full enrolment periods are an ideal time to advance strategic marketing initiatives.
- Marketing when enrolment is strong enables you to focus on quality, retention and share of voice
[1] What Parents Want: 2021 Survey Report (2022) p24. Brisbane: Independent Schools Queensland.
