Online marketing is important for any business or organization, but it may be especially crucial for schools. We live in the age of the internet, and online searches are the pathways that will guide most of your future students—or their parents—to your school. That means that there is never a bad time to take a fresh look at your website, your social media accounts, your email marketing, and every other method you use to reach an online readership. With the back-to-school season just around the corner, it’s worth taking the time to review your online presence to try to decide whether or not your marketing strategy is as effective as it could be.
What Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs to Include
Developing a workable marketing strategy for your school is the surest way to keep your online visibility high. There are so many possible approaches to online marketing, however, that it can be difficult to know where to begin. The best way to start is to identify some key areas to focus on. These are some of the things you should emphasize in your school’s marketing strategy:
- Diversity. Your promotional efforts shouldn’t be confined to a single area—you need to come at your target audience from more than one direction. There are numerous methods of promoting your school available to you, and you should take advantage of as many of them as possible. Permanent website content, blogs, email marketing, social media—all of these mediums are crucial for reaching a wider audience.
- Relevance. If all of your content comes across as completely promotional, it’s not going to help you build a regular audience. The key to attracting and retaining new readers is providing them with original content that is relevant to their needs and interests. Look at what your target audience’s priorities are, and craft your content to reflect it.
- Optimization. Including well-chosen keywords and key phrases in your online content will help to keep it prominent on search engine results, thus making your website more likely to attract new visitors. These keywords, however, need to be relevant to your content, and they need to be incorporated naturally into it.
- Engagement. If you want to connect with an audience, you need to be prepared to interact with your readers on an ongoing basis. Always respond to any questions asked via email, your website, or social media right away. The more approachable you are, the more your audience will trust you—and the more successful your online promotional efforts are likely to be.
- Calls to action. When a reader finishes a piece of content—whether it’s a landing page on your site, a post on your blog, or an update on your Facebook page—they’ll want to know what they should do next. Don’t leave them hanging—give them something to do. End each piece of content you produce with an invitation to click on a link, send an email, download a special feature, or visit another page on your site. Calls to action are essential for getting the most out of all of your online content.
Tips to Keep in Mind for Your School’s Online Content
- Decide on a central message. Ask yourself what you want your content to tell readers about your school. What makes your school different? What makes it stand out from other schools that your potential students may be looking at? Once you’ve determined which qualities you want to emphasize in your content, it will be much easier to produce content that reflects your values and your vision.
- Set goals for your content. Setting specific and measurable goals for your content will help you identify where your marketing strategy is working and where it needs improvement. There are a number of excellent analytical tools for tracking the success rate of your online content—which pages get the most traffic, which blog posts are most popular, what keywords bring the most visitors—and you should take advantage of them.
- Develop editorial calendars for your content. If you are publishing regular updates on your school website’s blog, having an editorial calendar can be extremely beneficial. Planning out all of your content well in advance will help to ensure that it remains relevant and that you are posting about a balanced assortment of different topics.
- Look to outside providers for your content. The greatest challenge of producing quality content is finding the time and resources to do it. Reaching out to a full-time professional content creator will allow you to maintain an active presence on social media, keep a regularly updated blog, and continue to have a strong and balanced online presence.
Are you looking to improve the quality of your online content? Pennington Creative can provide you with exceptional content for your website, your blog, your social media platforms, and much more. We’ll customize our content packages to your specific needs, ensuring that your school will get the smart, relevant, and engaging content it needs to stay current and impress potential pupils. If you’d like to find out more about our content creation services, feel free to contact us today!
