It may come as no surprise that after a year of home schooling and limited social interaction, our audience's behaviours have changed.
With the start of a highly anticipated, gradual lockdown lift this week, normality is finally just in sight (whatever that looks like!) However, we have quickly come to realise there's a new normal on the horizon in the way our customers want to be engaged with during the search for a school. A personalised approach to your school marketing is now more crucial than ever.
This is the perfect time to look at your student recruitment strategy for September 2021 from a whole new perspective, and begin to understand your customers and their new needs.
Here's a few inbound marketing areas for you to review:
The buyer personas in your inbound marketing strategy may have been effective pre-lockdown, but your audiences' psychographic data may have shifted. You need to know their new opinions, challenges, thoughts and aspirations in order to market your school effectively to both current and prospective parents and pupils.
A few ideas to do this could be to speak to current parents and ask them how their needs from a school have changed since the pandemic. This could be achieved via one to one conversations with parents, creating a landing page on the website with an online feedback form, specifically for current parents only, or sending out a survey to your current parent database.
Consider including current parent and pupil testimonials across your social media and school website to evidence to prospective families how your school thrived during the innovative home learning period last year.
Updating your online application processes and registrations for upcoming open events, including more specific questions in line with your audience's new challenges, such as health and safety concerns, may also be worth reviewing. All of the above methods can be put together via a strong CRM (customer relationship management) system, which is able to automatically track and log data as it comes in, such as HubSpot.
Think about how the keywords parents will be typing into search engines when they begin the search for schools may now differ from previous years. Your school SEO strategy is definitely worth refreshing in order to optimise initial engagement in the awareness stage of the customer journey, and is a quick yet effective way to drive traffic to your school's website. Produce written and video blog content speaking about your school's adaptation methods in the pandemic and the new measures you are now putting into place to avoid any future potential unexpected disruptions. By showing how you are adjusting to the current circumstances, you will be conveying a sense of reliability to parents and pupils who may be anxious or wary of the possibility their education may be affected again during the new academic year.
Families will also predominately, now more than ever, spend the first half of their potential school research journey online and your website will be the first point of call, so ensure the navigation of your site is as clear and concise as it can be. This may mean shifting some of the main recruitment information to a more central, easy to find location with clear call to action's to register for meetings, events and application information, as we close in on the recruitment period.
With all of this in mind, simple yet effective SEO keywords this year may now consist of phrases such as:
Video blogs: current pupils speaking about their home learning experience last year and how the school supported them
Written blogs with a focus on key words such as: School Home Learning Provision/What we have learnt in the academic year 2020/21
Resource pillar pages for 2021/22 prospective families, linking to any new measures in place since the return to school, health and safety policies and positive news, such as strong GCSE grades.
Personalisation via inbound marketing is an incredibly effective way to connect with your ever-changing audience and now is the perfect time to really perfect a fresh, new approach.
For more information on building an inbound marketing strategy, download our Inbound Marketing Checklist here, or, if you would like to arrange a chat with a member of our team, register for a free consultation below!
Happy marketing!