Over the last 20 years, private schools have told their faculty that everyone is a marketer. It is the same misdirected approach that we used when we started introducing our schools to marketing. We give amateurs the responsibility for which you need a professional. Remember when a head of school took a teacher and said, I want you to run the marketing, communications or admission offices. They really believe that good people can do any of those jobs. This thinking is changing mostly because schools aren’t achieving their revenues goals with this strategy. The thinking that all teachers are marketers need to change too, because teachers are not marketers.
We understand why we want to say that everyone affiliated with their school is a marketer or everyone is in marketing. This thought process may have helped some schools short term with their overall objective of doing better marketing, but I believe it also hampered the importance of strategic marketing in the admission profession. How could it not? School start to believe that marketing isn’t a professional skill that takes training. If we believe marketing is a professional skill, we must realize that everyone doesn’t have the skill to be a marketer. At times, admission professionals don’t have the right skills to be considered marketing, communication or recruiting professionals. This problem has made it difficult for many schools to achieve their revenue and compositional goals, because they are hiring the wrong people.
What role do faculty members have in the marketing process? What faculty should be doing is to support the process of matriculation. It is the job of the marketer to skillfully determine the marketing strategies and tactics, and use their resources in the best way possible, to produce the desired result.
Faculty as teachers can support the matriculation of full-pay families by the follow:
- Faculty need to be on the same page with what makes the school unique. They need to buy into the concepts and ensure that they are represented in what they do as teachers, not as marketers. For example, if collaboration is a key component centering on the school’s uniqueness, then it must be demonstrated in the way faculty teach.
- Faculty need to utilize the tools that are provided by the marketers. When communicating with the consumer, the faculty should take advantage of the packaging of the school’s excellence that has been developed by the marketing and communication people. For example, if a well-positioned marketing approach is developed to articulate excellence in community service, the faculty should use this tool during appropriate events and conversations with prospects and stakeholders.
- Faculty need to support the demonstration that what the school offers is excellent. Like it or not, the consumer wants to test drive. In order to test drive they want to engage with the environment, the program and the people connected to the school. Would you buy a house by only looking at the picture online? You want to step inside it and touch it. Parents and/or students want to know the faculty and get a sense of how they teach. They want to gain a sense of the resources and get a feel for the peer group. They want to understand the type of education that is used. Why wouldn’t they want this?
- Faculty need to serve as disciples. If the faculty don’t believe in the school, then why would the consumer believe in it. Faculty need to show a clear commitment to the pedagogy and programming of the school.
During The Five Pillars workshop, we will talk about developing that uniqueness and formulating the ideas for what you want your individual schools’ faculty and staff to promulgate to your prospects. Many are willing and happy to express the right messages about their school for all who will listen, but often they don’t have the language or skills to do so. The marketer’s job will be to give them the necessary tools – set it up for them, not just tell them about it. Let them be the teacher and the marketer can serve as the expert in marketing.