What's your education marketing plan?
Do you have a complex long-term strategy that involves things like ‘content calendars’ and ‘brand awareness building exercises’?
Or is it more of a ‘send a quick email when we can’ kind of plan?
Don’t worry if it’s the second one… you’re not alone!
So many marketers understand the benefits of building a relationship with teachers and decision makers in UK schools. But believe they don’t have the time, or inhouse resources to achieve it.
The truth is, with the right people on your side, it’s not as difficult as you might think to develop and maintain an effective education marketing plan.
Still not sure? Let’s break it down…
Why do I need an ‘education marketing plan?’
The first priority of a good marketing campaign should be to develop a relationship with your customers.
When it comes to email marketing for education, the trust you build from that relationship is what will ultimately give you those big returns.
Building a relationship takes time, and requires you to be consistent. That’s where a good strategy can help.
Building your education marketing plan
There are a few important questions to ask yourself at this stage:
1. What do I want to achieve through my marketing to schools?
Having clearly defined goals from the outset will help to shape the campaign at every stage.
2. What does ‘success’ look like?
Ultimately, it’s all about the return on investment, but in the short term a better measure of success is achieving a high level of engagement with your audience. Gain their trust and build a relationship, and the sales will follow.
3. How will I track these statistics?
Using analytics and tracking codes will allow you to see the traffic generated directly from your email, but did you know that an email campaign will also generate an upturn in your search engine traffic in the weeks after it lands? Make sure you track these figures before and after each email send.
4. How frequently do I want to contact my audience?
Are you sending weekly, monthly, or less frequently? There are no hard and fast rules on this; as long as you always have something relevant to say, you can email as often as you want. But don’t wait too long between messages – you don’t want your audience to forget about you!
5. What type of content do I want to send?
Are you sending out a newsletter, a special offer, or something else? Try to give your readers something of value in each communication. The ideal balance is 30% commercial to 70% non-commercial content. And don’t get too repetitive.
If you need a hand with creating your content, we can help!
6. How will I follow up each email send?
The people who clicked links in your email are interested in what you have to say! Follow up with them soon after the first message to boost your conversions.
And don’t write off the people who didn’t open the message the first time; they may just need to be approached differently. Try resending the email using a different subject line, or sending at a different time of day.
What else do I need to know?
✔ A great strategy will involve lots of testing, failing, learning and flexibility.
✔ The best way to build a relationship is regular, relevant and interesting content.
✔ We’re here to help!
If you're not sure where to start, or your current strategy isn't meeting your expectations, check out our range of marketing to education services to find out how we can help:
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Or talk to us today to start
building an education marketing plan that works for you!
