As HubSpot CRM continues to grow in popularity across the independent schools market, our CEO and Founder explores why school groups should be harnessing the power of HubSpot to transform their customer journeys.
Independent school marketing and admissions teams are frustrated that education-specific tools are limited and disconnected, as schools compete for the best students the customer journey of prospective families remains top priority and schools want to harness data and automation to streamline and report effectively.
Small, busy teams are working across siloed systems (website, web forms, emails, live chat, digital ads, social media, MIS/pupil management systems, Google Analytics... the list goes on). having the customer journey across multiple systems fails to put the prospect at the heart of the journey and makes it hard to report on success of marketing efforts.
HubSpot offers an all-in-one solution with world-class marketing features, admissions pipeline management and highly sophisticated tools for reporting, communication, automation and AI. HubSpot is able to bring all of your efforts into one place, and for aspects of the journey that may sit separately (website or MIS for example) these can be connected via API integrations seamlessly. There are currently 1500 off-the-shelf (plug in and play) integrations available and this list grows by the day.
Schools with multiple siloed systems means that groups of schools can have dozens (even hundreds) of different systems across the group, making reporting and forecasting a difficult task for management.
School groups need to be able to ensure effective customer experiences with engagements across all schools in their remit, as well as allocate resources where needed and this relies on accurate data and the ability to forecast conversions.
The risks of siloed data across multiple systems go further than this, with considerations such as GDPR compliance, as well as challenges when staff members join or leave the group.
By bringing all schools into one platform, you can see everything in one place - from engagement with ads to campaign comparisons across the group, admissions conversion rate comparisons between schools to group-wide website analytics. You can have fully custom dashboards that show you everything you need at a glance - you can even automate an email to go out to management or to the board that summarises all key metrics from across the group at regular intervals. No more chasing schools for data and then having to create reports from scratch.
By introducing HubSpot across all of your schools, you can ensure consistency and quality of data across the group. HubSpot provides a whole host of automated, semi-automated, and AI-driven tools to help with data hygiene and managing duplication. By reducing manual data entry throughout all touch-points of a customer journey, from website form submissions populating your CRM to keeping Marketing and Admissions all in one place, you also reduce the risk of human error.
Hiring is expensive and paying salaries to admissions teams for them to spend time on manual data tasks is not an effective way to scale. Teams using HubSpot can expect to automate lots of their laborious daily tasks and use their time more effectively, give your schools the tools to automate mundane admin tasks, and let them focus on building meaningful relationships with prospects.
With HubSpot's wide range of communication tools, the schools within your group will be able to engage with prospects and customers more effectively. No more prospects slipping through the net, leads going cold or reliance on spreadsheets for any aspects of your student recruitment. School marketers love the flexibility that dynamic (smart) email content gives them, enjoy knowing where to focus their efforts with lead scoring and predictive lead scoring (AI-powered). Attract, engage and delight your prospects at scale, and report on conversions from every campaign and marketing asset.
School management systems are crucial in the day-to-day running of a school for timetabline, behaviour management, class lists and everything in between. But a good MIS platform for running your school is not necessarily the best tool for marketing and admissions or communications. HubSpot has easily accessible API endpoints and can be integrated with your other systems (subject to the availability of endpoints in your MIS software). We know that custom development can be a little daunting which is why we are proud to have launched the world's first integration between HubSpot and iSAMS.
iSAMS is by far the most widely implemented MIS system we come across with our customers, so by offering this integration that would be implemented by our developers and HubSpot for school specialist consultants, we can make seamless data transfer from HubSpot into iSAMS a reality.
HubSpot offers so much potential for school groups who are looking for smarter, more aligned ways to work. If you would like to find out more, we would recommend registering for one of our HubSpot for education demos.
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