Content tips for successful inbound education marketing

Setting your school apart from the rest nowadays is tough.

In a market that is seemingly saturated with choice and competition, finding new and unique ways to post about your school, when you all ultimately offer the same thing, can be challenging.

If you're feeling a little flat and out of ideas, here's where an inbound marketing approach comes in, focusing on growth and building meaningful, lasting relationships with your current and prospective families by adding value

So here's a few new tips to help you get you your mojo back!

Identify your USPs

Look at your school from an outside perspective. It is all too easy to overlook your best selling points simply because you're there, every day. Think back as to what your first impression was of the school before you started your role. Have a think about some of the unusual things your school offers, or even ways your school offers an overall educational service, in a way others don't. Competitor research is key here as well as speaking with current families via simple surveys sent out via HubSpot.

An example of this could be exclusive links with a local business or university that you know your target audience or surrounding area think highly of, an individual or innovative support system for students or unique co-curricular offer.

This kind of content is a great and engaging conversation starter and helps in generating genuine and strong leads. Parents already know most schools offer a lot of similar things, but the main assets that set them apart are grades, customer support and service and unique offers, such as the examples above. The thing that ultimately sets you apart is showing you are taking your audience's interests into consideration by offering them a solution and clearly showcasing your USPs across your social media, without them having to spend the time to search for them.

Use Your Buyer Personas

You most likely already have your buyer personas in place and will probably already have a pretty good idea of what kind of content your audience wants to see.

Starting with this in mind is great way to think outside of the box and produce fresh content to connect with your current and new families. It shows you are providing them with the valuable content they want to see, as oppose to simply posting the content you want them to see.

HubSpot's analytics feature, offers a great insight into how your previous content has been received and which buyer personas have engaged best with the different types of content you have posted. This is also great for really segregating your audience and targeting specific groups based on their personas. Your buyer personas can be set up with as much or as little detail as you like (the more the better!), and can be incorporated into campaigns, and analytics reports.

If you're looking to recruit Nursery aged pupils and you know, based on your current personas, that mothers tend to primarily be the decision makers at this stage, take a deeper look into their demographics and psychographics and research real people to get an idea for the kinds of content they are engaging with. This opens the doors for all sorts of useful insight (which we have added to our further points below)! Then simply adapt this style to your message.

You can get all sorts of useful SEO key words and blog ideas from this research too, where you ensure you're answering the questions your target audience want to know in fun, engaging and creative ways.

Adapt to the platform

With social media scheduling, it can be easy to forget the true value of understanding your audiences' needs on each social media platform. But once you establish this, you can really begin to start to build content with an inbound approach.

Considering your buyer persona research, you may notice able that your senior school parents may have more of a presence on Facebook and Pinterest. They may prefer to interact with informative, video based posts via Facebook and use this platform as their news update source. Or younger nursery parents may prefer Instagram as a source of social media updates from the school.

An alumni story profile would be great for LinkedIn and Facebook, but maybe not so much for Pinterest. Or a gallery of photos from a student art show event may be best on Facebook or Instagram as oppose to Twitter.

Not all pieces of content work on all platforms, so if you wanted to adjust the wording, or graphics of a post, this can be done via HubSpot social media scheduling.

Or simply ask your parents in their buyer persona groups via an email form/poll which medium they prefer the best!

Schedule posts for evenings & weekends

An easy mistake to make is to only be active on social media during the 9-5 when you're in the office. But what we tend to forget is that, so are our audience!

Posting at prime scrolling times will definitely help your content perform better and be seen by a larger audience.. First thing in the morning during the commute or over a morning coffee, lunch breaks and evenings are all effective times – based on which specific content you're posting. This is something to also consider for when your audience is most likely to be engaging with your content, responding in good time will show that you are listening to their responses and make your audience feel valued and heard.

When scheduling with HubSpot, suggested times are often displayed, showing the best times based on user activity on particular platforms, to post for a higher engagement rate.

Stories

This is one of the best ways to portray your brand and tone and is the perfect way to really portray the daily environment in the school to create original and engaging content. We would recommend using the poll features to gain audience insights on fun topics, story takeovers and highlights to really get across the personality of your school.

The polls feature on Instagram is a great tool to gain an extra insight into your audience and encourage engagement. For example, you could use polls for audience lead content ideas such as asking them if they would rather have a blog on tips for learning at home or a video!

Timely Content

Use trigger events to align with the audience's immediate needs. If for example, it has been announced that week in the local news that Nursery places are becoming very limited due to a large intake that year, perhaps addressing the availability for your nursery and hosting an open event or virtual service will help put parent's minds at ease who may have found this news stressful.

You could post about any National Days or link some of the work your pupils are currently doing linked to this theme, across your social media platforms. This keeps your content relevant and linked to trending topics.

You didn’t think we would leave you empty handed after this post did you?

To finish here are 9 ideas to get you moving: