You have meticulously planned every little detail. You've done the hard work and finally opened the doors to your school. You're doing well, but there is certainly room for improvement, and you might find yourself wondering how you can make your school grow. While running a school can be profitable when done right, many schools struggle with a low number of admissions.
It may feel like you’ve got everything in place, but some crucial aspects of how to make a school grow are often neglected. Now is the perfect time to consider: What is my school missing out on?
In this article, we outline:
➡️ Advice on how to increase school enrollment.
➡️ Practical tips that you can implement within your own school.
➡️ How technology can be leveraged to attract prospective students and parents.
Let's dive straight into it.
Before growing your school and expanding your audience, you need to know exactly who your current target market is.
Take a minute to analyze what you know about the current student population you serve.
You can get started by asking yourself the following questions:
Without the answers to these questions, you won’t be able to grow your audience or find ways to make your school stand out from the rest.
The next step is to figure out exactly what target audience you are aiming to reach. Who are the students you want to teach? How do you deliver your message to their parents?
From there, you can start to define the audiences you could work with to grow the number of students enrolled at your school.
For example, if you currently offer services to a handful of students in the same age bracket, you can consider broadening your reach to be more inclusive of all ages.
Here are three ways you can broaden your reach:
To analyze your audience so that you can make more informed decisions about reaching new students, you need to be able to collect and use data to your advantage.
Using smart school management software like Gosfem gives you access to powerful reports on your current students.
These reports can help you focus on audiences other than those you currently cater to with the questions we outlined earlier.
With our robust reporting features, you can track enrollments and easily spot trends that could give you further insight.
You can design new programs that cater to different age groups than your current students.
For example, if your existing student body comprises mainly young children, you could consider designing after-hours learning programs for adults.
Designing new curriculums will attract new students, which will ultimately help your school to grow.
Age groups aren’t the only thing you can diversify when it comes to growing your school’s reach.
Consider trying to attract students from different cultural backgrounds. An example of this could be offering language learning services to foreign students in your area.
You can reach prospective families by designing learning experiences geared towards their specific needs to increase student enrollment.
The retail and food sectors aren’t the only places where good customer service is valued.
When it comes to running a private school—and especially when you’re working towards growing one—maintaining world-class customer service is crucial.
Ensuring that you create an outstanding experience—for current or prospective students and their parents—will help improve your school’s reputation and referrals.
It’s critical that you have a reliable customer service system and plan in place to better serve students and parents.
Your plan should also include your turnaround time for responding to queries—which should always be as soon as possible.
Having a plan in place is the first step. The second is to nurture your existing relationships with students and parents and foster new relationships with potential families.
Ensure that you invest in your customer service, and you will soon see these relationships improve.
You should also try to avoid cutting corners with your customer service budget.
Ultimately, good customer service is what establishes your school as a trusted platform that cares about its students’ needs.
According to recent research, up to 92% of mothers in the U.S. use social media. The same study found that 80% of mothers use social media for finding recommendations.
If your school—which is essentially your brand—isn’t present on social media, you’re missing out on a powerful way to market your business.
Social media can be a far more impactful marketing activity than handing out a few fliers or hosting school tours.
When leveraged correctly, social media can play a pivotal role in increasing private school enrollment.
Social media boosts your school’s brand awareness, it gets your name out there and encourages potential customers to start considering your school as their best option.
Since both students and parents are active on social media, this gives you a portal to market to both groups in a way that no other channel can.
Let’s dig a little deeper into how you can make your social media marketing efforts work.
Social media without a strategy can be summed up in one word: directionless.
Your strategy should be informed by solid research into where your ideal audience is online. For example, you’ll find most 18 to 24-year-olds on Facebook.
When you know where to reach your target audience, you can position your marketing efforts accordingly.
Your social media strategy should include:
Who you want to reach.
What and how regularly you want to post.
How you will handle queries, concerns, and complaints.
How you will provide value to your followers.
You can run Facebook and Instagram ads during critical times throughout the year.
For example, when your admissions team is ready to accept new students, you can run ads that target the audience you’ve outlined in your social media strategy.
This allows you to increase interest in your school at set times during the year when you need to boost new enrollments and generate leads.
Ensure that you publish consistent, high-quality content on social media.
If you have existing content like case studies or reports that are relevant to the education world, optimize it for social media.
These case studies and reports can be cut down into bite-sized chunks for social media. This can improve your engagement on this platform by providing valuable content to your audience.
Did you know that 72% of people say that positive testimonials and reviews increase their trust in a business?
Testimonials are a relatively quick and effective way to convince prospective parents and students that your school programs are what they’re looking for.
Prospective families will want evidence that your teaching business is better than other schools.
By collecting testimonials from current students and families and publishing them on your school site and social channels, you’re giving your prospective audience insight into how:
You treat students and parents.
Welcoming and diverse your school is.
Highly-trained your staff are.
Well-run your school is.
For these reasons, it’s vital that you publish parent, student, and alumni testimonials that will reach your target audience online.
When it comes to growing your school and reaching your full potential, automating your processes can make the world of difference.
Using a reliable school management system, you can automate aspects like pricing and fees, invoicing, online payments, and communications.
We created Gosfem to help teachers and administrators completely automate their school operations.
Automating your processes eliminates the possibility of human error, leads to more seamless school operations, and reduces the time it takes to conduct everyday tasks.
Gosfem has been designed with powerful automation functionalities to help you improve your business. This includes:
Save time, improve learning experiences, and find new students by automating your processes with school management software like ours.
If parents have several schools to choose from, how do you ensure they choose yours?
Your marketing efforts need to communicate why your school is better than the rest and what makes your school the right choice.
To achieve this, you need to develop a unique value proposition.
A unique value proposition outlines what it is about your business that makes you different—or unique—from the rest.
With regards to your school, some features that could make you stand out include:
Competitive fees.
Smart classrooms.
Private tutoring.
Smaller groups within classes to allow for more one-to-one attention.
World-class facilities.
Spend some time thinking about what makes your school unique from others in your area or schools with similar offerings to you.
A great way to start developing your value proposition is to speak to the parents and students who you currently cater for. Find out from them what made them choose your school and what stood out to them the most about your teaching business. You can turn this feedback into case studies and testimonials to use on your school’s website and social media, as discussed above.
As you know, the foundation of any good professional relationship is open and effective communication.
As you know, the foundation of any good professional relationship is open and effective communication.
Maintaining good communication with your school’s existing parents is essential to upholding a good reputation for your teaching business.
If parents feel like you’re going the extra mile and adding a personal touch, it’s likely they will become your biggest and best brand ambassadors.
There’s no more powerful form of marketing than word of mouth. Parents are more likely to recommend your school to friends and family when they feel valued.
Investing in technology that allows you to communicate important information to parents is worthwhile for good customer service and building relationships within your school community.
Maintaining good communication with your school’s existing parents is essential to upholding a good reputation for your teaching business.
If parents feel like you’re going the extra mile and adding a personal touch, it’s likely they will become your biggest and best brand ambassadors.
With built-in capabilities that allow you to communicate with parents quickly and effectively, Gosfem is the smartest solution.
Instead of printing out letters for students to take home or giving each parent a call, you can use Gosfem to send SMS messages or emails to all parents at the touch of a button.
Once you have identified new audiences to target through your marketing strategy and your unique value proposition, prospective families need to keep your school top of mind.
You can do this through lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is essentially reaching out to prospective parents and students at the right time, with the right message, on the right platform.
The platforms you use—like SMS, for example—are called touchpoints.
Prospective parents need to be reached by your school through different touchpoints regularly if you’re hoping they’ll choose your school.
With a school management system like Gosfem, lead nurturing is done through automated communication.
In other words, you can schedule personalized follow-up messaging to reach prospective families when the time is right.
A well-nurtured lead can quickly turn into increasing enrollment.
Email marketing is possibly one of the most effective tools in your marketing toolkit.
In fact, email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent—which is far higher than most other marketing activities.
While email can be effective when communicating with current students and parents, it’s also a powerful way to target new audiences and nurture existing leads.
Email marketing lets you share your unique value proposition, testimonials, and any other high-quality content you may already have.
Most email marketing tools have a free plan that you can use. However, considering this channel's substantial ROI, it’s worth investing in premium versions of email marketing tools.
Some tips for effective email marketing for schools include:
Ensuring your subject line sparks interest and grabs the reader’s attention quickly.
Always using the preview text feature to give recipients more reasons to open your email.
Using your school’s branding (font, colors, and logo) to personalize your email.
Include strong CTAs that tell the recipient exactly what action you want them to take once they’ve read your email.
Investing in a well-designed and visually appealing website for your school is key to effective marketing.
When people search the internet for potential schools, you'll want your name to appear quickly.
Appearing early on in search results means optimizing your website through something called search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO helps users discover your website on the internet and gives you a competitive edge.
Our advice is to have a professional website development company create your school website and optimize it to achieve more website visitors.
However, if you are attempting to optimize your school website yourself, here are some points to keep in mind:
Include plenty of calls to action (CTA) buttons that direct prospective students and parents to where you want them to land.
Make your unique value proposition clear at the very beginning of your website.
Include the testimonials we mentioned earlier.
Ensure that your website is easy to navigate and that it loads quickly.
Make your contact details visible from the moment users land on your website.
You can also use a website builder like WordPress or Wix to create your site. These platforms have easy-to-use and customizable templates to help you get started.
Make sure that your website aligns with your school's culture. Since this is often the first time people interact with your business, you’ll want to leave a good, lasting impression.
Over time, it’s also a good idea to make sure that you optimize your website for search engines and mobile devices.
Whether your school is performing well or could improve its student enrollment, we hope that these practical steps will help guide you towards growing your school effectively.
Growing your school and increasing student enrollment has never been easier than with Gosfem.
Our robust student information system has been designed to be utilized by schools of all sizes and offerings, including:
Language schools.
Colleges.
Tutoring businesses.
Adult education centers.
Music schools.
Computer skills schools.
Faith schools.
Our school management system puts you in control with powerful features, including automation, reporting, communication, and lead nurturing.
With Gosfem, you can look forward to:
Create a free account today and enjoy a completely free school solution. No credit card required.
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