Private Schools tend to shy away from strengthening their school marketing plan by using corporate marketing strategies. Many admission professionals feel it is heresy to use the corporate ideas. To them, the purity of school marketing should not be tainted by corporate thinking. If you’re a school that needs to have more full-pay families and aren’t stuck in this mindset from the previous sentence, you may be interested in the seven reasons listed below.
1. The corporate world uses highly paid experts to get people to buy; how much do private schools invest in marketing research compared to Ferrari or IBM?
2. Expert authors in marketing strategies, such as Al Ries, Patrick Hanlon, Jack Trout and Renee Mauborgne, do research and marketing for you and are willing to share their research and insights for the cost of a book or a workshop. Invest in yourself!
3. As you gain more knowledge, you can see or, in some cases, experience as a consumer, the excellent strategies of corporate businesses. This allows you to study first hand why they are successful. Take, for example, your engagement with Apple, Starbucks, Southwest, Disney, Toyota or Google. Think about why you are a loyal consumer for their products or another company with whom you are loyal.
4. Many companies target your finicky full-pay customer, so their client base is essentially similar. Does your customer buy a Rolex, Mercedes or own a vacation home on the beach in France? They bought those luxury items over something else that they could have purchased. Why?
5. Corporate strategies can be readily adapted to fit the education business. Keeping an open-mind, you will be able to adapt these strategies to meet the needs of your private school marketing initiatives.
6. Technology has allowed us to utilize aspects of the profit world’s 21st century tactics at an affordable price – websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, marketing automation, Mosaic consumer data, Google adwords, and customer relationship marketing systems. Even printing customized materials are much less expensive now. In this day and age, there are so many other fantastic options available at your means.
7. Are you unsatisfied by hearing the same not-so-effective, independent schools’ traditional strategies at conferences? You know, the conferences that you leave saying, “That’s old hat” or “I’ve tried that and it only works if they are coming to your school anyway.” The corporate world has the successful tools that we need.
The key to a successful school marketing strategy will require using the rich solutions used by the corporate world. I will continue to share them with you and try to adapt them to be best used by private schools. If you have questions, please note them in the comment section of one of my blogs or email me.