How Do You Determine the Resources to Be Spent on Marketing?

How does one determine the amount of money needed for marketing their private school? A benchmark can be a good place to start, but you will need more than that. Benchmarks don’t take into account the importance of brand. Schools with strong brands can afford to spend less on their marketing initiatives while still enjoying first choice among the applicant pool. In New York City for example there could be more than 2000 kindergarten age children applying to private schools. But with hundreds of schools contending for these students, unless your brand places you in the upper third of this market, you will have to work harder and spend more resources to attract these families. More marketing, communication, and sales directed touchpoints and programming will be needed, costing more resources. Private schools with bigger brands can more readily limit the amount they choose to spend on advertising, travel, events and staff because they are still attracting the students/families they want. So how do you determine what amount of money is needed? You allocate enough funds to bring in the desired revenue with a supporting action plan.

Often a school’s head isn’t convinced that additional marketing resources will yield a gain. He/she may not be fully confident that the director of admission or communications has the skill to use these resources in the best way possible even though they were hired to do just that. “We can’t afford it” is another response often used to justify not increasing the marketing budget. But if the spaces are not being filled, can a school afford not to spend additional funds?  “We can’t afford it” will not solve the problem at hand.

To understand your school’s unique situation, consider the following questions:

1. How difficult is it for your school to generate revenue? When does your school reach its target goal – beginning of summer, start of the school year, or start of second semester?
2. Is there a high level of insecurity about reaching the goal?
3. Do you have unfilled desks or beds that would bring in useful revenue?
4. Are you spending too many financial aid dollars to fill spaces making it difficult to maintain a viable business model?
5. Could you use more full-pay families to generate more income per seat?
6. Is your senior team reviewing the trends in marketing, communications, and sales? Do they understand the challenges that you face to produce more revenue and see the value in increasing your marketing resources to handle the situation?
7. What type of data is available to help you understand current market conditions for generating the necessary income? How many full-pay families do you have per opening? What is the trend in this market area? What is the satisfaction level of your current families?
8. Ask your director of admission or marketing to present a case for piloting new initiatives – give it the right consideration.
9. Based on your discovery, provide the funding to launch an effective solution. The biggest challenge most schools face is learning to anticipate a major challenge.  Ask the questions above and build your security.

If the school isn’t generating income the way it should, and the leadership decides not to allocate more funds towards this goal, how will the school solve its problem of lack of revenue? In my chats with several heads who found themselves short in their enrollment, they admitted that the problem did not happen overnight. It came about because no one was taking the time to talk about enrollment conditions. Sometimes this happens with a school’s capital expenditure decisions; these decisions get delayed simply because the discussions surrounding them don’t take place.

Take a look at the four private schools below each located in a densely populated area of our country within 10 miles of one another. They are all tapping into most of the same geographic market area.

Even without knowing the whole story about their data, I believe school A needs additional marketing resources and a new plan. Based on school C’s strong position with the shrinking demographics in that area, I think that Schools B and D would benefit from additional marketing resources to better position themselves in that market.  If I knew how many full-pay applications these schools received per opening, I could say much more.

I find that most private schools are under-resourced given our current market condition – serious conversations need to take place at independent schools. Some schools will choose to wait until their situation reaches a crisis; but whatever money they may save now by not proactively addressing their condition will be lost plus more in the future.

So how much money is needed – enough to pay for the right leadership and a high quality marketing initiative that will support generating the right amount of revenue for your school.

If you are looking to strengthen your plan, join the Five Pillars program to learn a customizable strategy for marketing to full-pay families.  You will discover that this is the best training available for today’s complex market place.