Private, boarding, and religious schools rely on increased enrollment and student retention not only to continue operation but to thrive. Competition with public schools and other private schools requires a fresh approach to marketing, updated constantly. Unfortunately, many schools do not have the resources to market themselves in-house, especially at the caliber required to stay ahead.
Instead, private schools should choose to outsource marketing, freeing up their time and efforts towards running the school while experts can handle marketing strategy.
Further, private school administrations should vet marketing agencies according to their understanding of challenges and opportunities in the private school space. Consequently, schools should consider hiring professionals who know how marketing strategies should improve student retention and enrollment.
If you’re looking to understand how to outsourcing marketing activities to improve your school, below are several compelling reasons.
Benefit from an Outside Perspective
Of course, school administration knows its school and students best. Administrators’ careers depend on their understanding of the school’s inner workings and the local area. On the other hand, it’s easy to be too involved in school to the point that you cannot remove your subjective feelings from your objective understandings.
In the case that your school has implemented marketing strategies without success, it’s important to gain an outsider’s perspective. Often, unsatisfactory results from marketing campaigns are due to a misunderstanding of the target audience. Potentially, school marketers desire to share the school experience with anyone and everyone, but marketing to everyone is not at all effective.
Marketing agencies are experienced in how to narrow down the groups of people most likely to be interested in your school’s programs. For instance, they’ll recommend tactics for targeting only local families while highlighting aspects of your school that would excite specific demographics.
Moreover, they’ll know exactly how to craft a marketing funnel that directly speaks to that narrowed audience. As a result, you’ll see improved results and focus on the families who are most likely to enroll.
Overall, hiring a third party to get involved in your marketing activities will put an extra set of eyes on your efforts. They could potentially find flaws or gaps in your strategy and help you rectify those issues.
Find a Sense of Direction
Maintaining marketing activities in-house can be overwhelming, and it’s often difficult to find a sense of direction. A school might buy marketing software and hire in-house employees to manage marketing activities, but how will these efforts congeal into one guiding force towards the school’s goals?
Realistically, marketing requires more than knowledge and skills such as how to use software or incorporate SEO best practices. Marketing is full of activities done within the larger umbrella of effective branding and achieving income-earning goals.
The process of hiring a marketing agency to outsource your marketing activities lends itself to an improved, fuller vision of your goals and brand. From the first discovery call, the agency will ask you to evaluate what success looks like for your school, nail down your target audience, and assess your current strategies. This third-party perspective combined with professional guidance on building a marketing strategy for your school will help point you in the right direction going forward.
Gain a Wealth of Resources Without the High Price Point
Outsourcing to a marketing agency means you gain an entire team of professionals who have the knowledge, experience, and resources to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Instead of attempting to keep up with marketing trends, new software, and the latest industry news, you can rely on the agency to do all the tedious and time-consuming work.
Often, schools will consider hiring an in-house marketing employee, whether full-time or part-time. Upon consideration, however, it’s clear that hiring an in-house employee for marketing is an expensive endeavor.
Full-time marketing employees require substantial salaries, benefits, vacation time, office space, and more. At the very least, even part-time employees will need space to work and access to the resources that marketing tasks require.
In summation, the cost of overhead when adding in-house marketing employees is astronomical. Conversely, outsourcing marketing activities will allow schools to only pay for what they need as a service.
Enjoy Instant Results
Saving money by hiring experts to take over your online marketing activities is already a great reason to outsource. Further, marketing professionals are experts in their field, so hiring them will provide near-immediate improved results. As opposed to spending time hiring, onboarding, and training an in-house employee, a school can receive instant marketing assistance through outsourcing to trained and ready professionals.
Not only will outsourcing save schools from enduring the tedious and time-consuming hiring process, but it will ensure satisfactory results.
Understanding analytics, for example, is an integral part of running successful marketing campaigns. Analytics, however, are tricky to digest and learn from without proper experience and training. Depending on a team of marketing experts at an agency is more reliable than hiring a single in-house employee to handle Instagram and Facebook campaigns while also maintaining the responsibility to learn about emerging tools such as TikTok and Snapchat in education.
Social media marketing is also a complicated and demanding field. Often, running an entire social media campaign is enough to become a full-time job. Outsourcing to a team of experts who understand the best practices for social media and can handle the tasks together will save you time, money, and frustration.
In addition, there’s no need to buy your own equipment and software – the agency will provide everything. For video marketing production, there’s no need to rent equipment and run the production in-house. For social media marketing, buying subscriptions to content scheduling and analytics tracking software is unnecessary.
Capacity to Handle One-Time Projects
Even if you choose to handle the majority of your daily marketing activities in-house, what will you do for massive one-time projects? For example, what is the course of action if you need to build the best school website to replace your outdated site? Moreover, will the full-time staff’s daily marketing activities be interrupted to produce video marketing assets for the school?
Consider whether your in-house team can add such an extensive project to their already loaded daily tasks calendar. Will other marketing activities suffer neglect so that the school can focus on tackling the larger project? Even an audit of your school website SEO will command hours of your staff’s time.
Outsourcing marketing activities can mean you hand over all your marketing or only pay for one-time projects. Either way, outsourcing can save money and ensure smooth marketing operations.
Scaling Flexibility
Private school budgets often depend on the success the school had in the previous year to increase enrollment and retain students. Not every year, however, is quite as successful as the last. Making the decision to outsourcing marketing activities will offer the flexibility a school needs to scale its efforts up or down according to need.
Instead of hiring and firing employees every year to accommodate the changing budget and margins, schools can easily alter the packages for which they pay marketing agencies. As a result, schools won’t need to constantly reassess their internal structures and operations.
Scaling flexibility is also extremely important for marketing activities such as producing school website content.
Content marketing strategy, for example, demands a consistent approach to updating sites with fresh content. Updated content includes blogging, refreshing web copy, and adding pages to address new programs or offerings. As the school grows, the school website should be altered to reflect that.
While consistency is key, the ability to alter frequency according to need is important as well. In the case of school websites blogs, the school might not always have the budget or capacity to increase the number of blogs per month produced in-house. Outsourcing blogging to a marketing agency will allow for this flexibility.
Successful PPC Advertising
Of all the marketing activities often done poorly, PPC ads are one of the most commonly ineffectual. PPC advertising requires extensive knowledge and understanding of search engine algorithms, keywords, and effective audience targeting. The accessibility and ease of paying for a PPC ad often lead many less-experienced schools astray.
For instance, many PPC ads are vulnerable to false clicks and do not target the correct viewers. This reality is unfortunate since schools are paying for each of these false or unhelpful clicks.
Finding and hiring an employee who has this experience and knowledge is often expensive and difficult. Outsourcing PPC advertising to your marketing firm will ensure that advertisements are set up correctly and pull in satisfactory results.
Outsource Marketing for Schools
School administration and faculty are busy enough dealing with the daily operations. Hiring full-time or part-time marketing professionals will add extensive costs to an already tight budget. Outsource marketing activities to an experienced marketing agency that is well-versed in the needs of private schools to improve retention and growth.
VujaDay has been assisting private schools in their marketing efforts with great success. When you’re ready to take your marketing strategy to the next level for your school, contact us to begin the process.
