Optimize Your School’s Marketing Efforts
Hello private school marketers, enrollment professionals, Heads of School, board members,
It’s time to own it and earn it.
Marketing gets a bad rap. I get it. School is about to start and faculty and staff on campuses all over are focusing on the student experience, as you should be. Optimizing your school’s marketing efforts sits low on the list, for now. Additionally, “we” marketers have been, if anything, consistent at creating the mistiness around what is marketing. Helping brands clearly articulate what they do doesn’t mean “we” are good at doing that for ourselves. As they say (and I know to be true), “A carpenter’s house is never done.”
Let’s see if we can explain how we do marketing, simply.
StoryScape exists to help independent schools clearly articulate what you do well in a way that resonates with people you want to speak with most.
We are above all strategists – here to help you focus on your brand, communications, messaging, positioning, marketing (insert more marketing lingo here).
EFFECTIVE MARKETING IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE:
- OWNED efforts: All that belongs to you that is under your control and how you choose to represent that – your promise, your messaging, your positioning, your view book, your logo, your brand strategy and assets. Invest in this and it will generate stories that resonate. Owned efforts answer the question, why you, instead of all the other choices of schools out there?
- EARNED efforts: What people say about you determines if you will engage the people who matter most. The message they take away, strategic communications, are also under your control and carry the most power to pique interest in your school. Sharing the lived experience, your proof points, of what matters most is really where schools shine. Is your community empowered to consistently illustrate your school’s unique proof points from question #1?
- PAID efforts: All the ways you can spend your budget to be seen by all the people, for example, your annual digital marketing spend. Are you getting all you can out of your resources by leveraging your owned efforts (strategy) from question #1 and your earned efforts (proof points) from question #2? Esther Han illustrates this well in digital marketing in her post on Harvard Business School Online.
Please allow me to offer one piece of unsolicited advice to make your life easier and your marketing better. Don’t waste your valuable resources, or your audience’s attention, with messaging that doesn’t resonate. If you focus on owned and earned channels, you will effectively market your school.
Focusing on #1 and #2 is worth the investment. Own who you are by clearly articulating what you do (owned) in a way that resonates with the people you want to speak with most (earned). Owned and earned channels feed your paid efforts. Get your owned and earned house in order first to optimize your paid marketing efforts.
Articulating what you do well in a way that resonates most will clarify your market perception and therefore will generate positive word of mouth buzz, engagement, enrollment, and retention.
StoryScape clearly articulates what schools do well in a way that resonates most by optimizing your owned and earned efforts. These foundational marketing efforts empower schools to make the rest of your marketing and communications plan work well.
Own it. Earn it. Articulate and Resonate.
Looking forward to the possibilities,
Barbara