Social Media Marketing for schools

Digital marketing for a school or college is a must to ensure that you are visible where your target audience lives ie “online”.

Marketing of the education sector has grown substantially in the past 10 years through the newspaper, local radio or TV but the most significant area of growth has been seen in the digital space.

Digital marketing helps you stand out from your competitors through strong brand communication while using your budget wisely.

To do this, it is important to understand how India’s consumer media in 2021 and how much the market has changed.

Social media marketing for schools or colleges is all about local area marketing, standing out through the media in the local area so that you are on the top of the mind from a brand recall perspective.

People are no longer spending time reading newspapers or magazines as they used to do in the past. People are on the move and multi-tasking more than ever. We cannot deny that outdoor, radio, TV, hoarding boards on the roadside can still play a valuable part in your marketing mix but the dominant channel for marketing these days is – digital.

To be successful in your marketing, your presence needs to be where your target audience is, and you need to stand out from the crowd. People continue to make their own choice as to what they want to watch, listen and read – you need to be more targetted than ever to catch them.

• There are now more than 50 free TV channels in India, with 64% of people watching free to air TV, with 87% of people multi-tasking whilst they are watching TV.
• 43% of Indians have a paid streaming service
• Three of the top 10 most popular app in the world are music apps.
• Up to 85% of Millennials to mature-aged are on social media.
• Magazines are closing and, online subscriptions continue to grow for news and magazines video.

Your target audience’s daily media consumption

As a digital marketer, it is critical for you to think about your target audience’s typical brand persona and what are their daily media consumption looks like:

1. Checking their phone a lot of the day
2. On social media – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn
3. On email – work/personal
4. On certain websites – banking, news, shopping
5. Streaming TV – at home and mobile
6. Listening to Hungama, Spotify – at home, in the car, at work

People go online for news, information, social interaction, entertainment and much more. So this is where all people are, it is by far the most dominant media channel, and therefore needs to be a key part of your media plan. And it is also more cost-effective and measurable.

What is a Digital Strategy?

A digital strategy is a unique plan for engaging your target audience, driving them to the website and enhancing the reputation through paid or organic content. It involves:

1. Investing in digital media and hosting own digital assets.
2. Ensuring the content aligns with the marketing goals and brand strategy to promote the key message and capture attention through social media channels.

Digital Strategy can be divided into four components-

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the website, to improve search ranking in the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), to capture the attention of the target audience via Google Adwords, Remarketing, Geotargeting etc.
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) to provide visual engagement opportunities via Facebook, Instagram etc.
4. Streaming – to provide reinforcement of your message, podcast, clubhouse. Content strategy – web copy, blogs, social media posts etc.

In search of a preferred school of choice, your target audience (parents) are online:

1. Using search engines to search for schools by location, keywords and more
2. Looking at your websites to research, download prospectus and watch videos of the school activities.
3. Ask friends on the chat and discuss recommendations and referrals with friends, family or peers.

Where are the opportunities for school in Digital Marketing?

1. Be an early adopter of digital media in your local area so that you can stake your claim to search engines’ ranking and particularly maximise your new website content.
2. Evolve your marketing to match your target audience’s digital footprint, so you can be extremely targeted and effective in your investment.
3. Create digital content that is truly original and enables engagement, ultimately driving traffic to a call to action that you can measure.

Call or message us today to help you with:

1. Your marketing strategy to address your unique challenges in your school
2. Open day marketing campaigns
3. Website design and development
4. Prospectus design and distribution to targeted audiences
5. Digital Marketing – Google Adwords, Remarketing, Social Media advertising
6. School photography
7. School videos
8. Branding and communications
9. Public relations- strategies and advice