Inbound Marketing for Schools: How and Where to Start

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Due to the emergence of the internet, there has been a basic shift in marketing strategies. Today, schools are realizing that outbound marketing tactics alone are no longer enough to attract parents searching for schools. The way students and parents are choosing their schools have changed. Everyone today is talking about inbound marketing for schools.

So What is Inbound Marketing?

In Contrast to outbound marketing where schools attempted to find prospects using the old costly methods of buying ads, billboards, and email lists, Inbound Marketing if used efficiently is cheaper and will attract prospects to your school so you don’t have to chase them down.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality intelligent and compelling content that is aligned with the prospects’ interests. It is also an interactive experience that can be used to enrich, nurture, and increase engagement with your prospects. Which will over time lead to an increase in response and conversion rates at much less cost than outbound marketing. Now that we know what is inbound marketing, or at least have an idea, so where and how to start?

Step 1: Set Achievable Marketing Goals

As a first step, you need to set smart marketing goals to accomplish. Inbound Marketing is a means to an end. That is why it is really important that you know where you are heading? And what is it that you hope to accomplish? You might want to increase the number of applications and visits to your School. In the end, it is important that you don’t lose sight of your goals as you get on your inbound marketing journey.

Step 2: Create a Marketing Strategy

In Inbound marketing and social media, there is no magic stick that you take and wave to get the desired results. These are strategies that take persistent efforts over a long period of time.  So who is going to execute this long-term work that requires high commitment and dedication? Soundly, it is highly recommended that you find staffs to help you manage these channels. Delegating the tasks to other staff will save you time, make you more effective and make the job much easier to accomplish. For example, for blogging, you might get volunteers from the faculty, parents, and students to write posts for your blog.

Step 3: Optimize Your Website With Compelling Content

In today’s competitive marketplace, with so many different messages coming in. People are looking for better and more reliable sources of information to solve their problems. Let us say you are a parent, and you have a child that you want to enroll in school. Of Course, you want the best education there is for your child.

Traditionally like many of other’s parents, you might first refer to your contacts and relationships to ask about the best school in your community. But all this has changed lately, presently 89% of parents are searching the Internet for information and opinions about schools in their area. The first thing they will check is the school website. For that reason, the school’s website needs to be effective, professionally designed, cross-browser tested, easy to navigate, optimized for quality SEO and mobile responsive. Parents need to find valuable information on your website. Information that they find useful. Information that reflects a trustworthy image of your school.

Step 4: Build an Active Presence on Social Media

Your school need to be present on social media.  Social Media constitute a big part of the inbound marketing initiative. You need to make sure that you are using the social media channels the best way you can. You need to launch a Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and google+pages. You need to post contents on an ongoing and consistent basis to these channels. Furthermore, you need to be well-organized, disciplined, and attentive with how to use social media. Moreover, you need to make sure that you allocate time to review your analytics and make changes and variations accordingly.

CONCLUSION:

In short, to accomplish your inbound marketing goals, you have to find the right combination of quality content, website optimization, and social media marketing. The combination that works best for your school. Last, I hope you have found this article valuable and that it answers some of your questions about inbound marketing.

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