David Carne explains how using social media adverts led to record numbers attending his school’s open evening!
Read the full article below or read on page 32 in our October magazine
The autumn term is, traditionally, the season where school leaders will probably be reflecting on the best approach to communicating their marketing messages and securing pupil numbers for another year.
Around 18 months ago my own school began asking whether there was a better way to attract parents and students. At around the same time I was completing the first year of an international MBA and happened to be studying marketing strategy and tactics. Our traditional method of marketing had been newspaper advertising and yet, intuitively and based on knowledge of studying how commercial organisations market, we started to explore social media marketing. We already had fairly active social media channels, and were posting our open evenings there, but we decided to explore paid advertising.
With little more than the conviction and belief that paid social media marketing would be much more effective, I set about trying to convince the headteacher and governing body to let me ditch the newspaper adverts and move our campaign entirely online. Fortunately, the statistics were on my side. In the UK around 85% of the population are active social media users, of which at least 75% of adults aged between 25 and 44 access Facebook at least once a day, on average spending 2.36 hours a day checking all the 4.8 social media platforms they are members of. Figures which dwarf newspaper readers.
Having done a little research we decided to focus our marketing on Facebook and Instagram, as these were two of the most popular platforms with our target demographic. Over a four-week period we spent the princely sum of £250 on paid social media advertising, resulting in a 50% increase on our best year’s open evening attendance figures! We had so many people arriving that, at one point, we had queues out of our driveway down the main road! Not only had we saved several thousand pounds; we had experienced significant growth. The risk had paid off.
All this is a great story, and it would be easy to stop here with some kind of call to action encouraging readers to embrace social media but in using social media we actually transformed the way we market, and I would like to highlight why I believe our campaign had so much success.
Targeting
Firstly, we got the targeting right. We chose to advertise only to people aged 28 to 55, who had children between nine and 12 years old, living within a 10-mile radius of the college and – this may be controversial – but we targeted only women. This was a calculated risk on the assumption that, in general, women play a greater role in influencing decisions on which secondary school their children attend. None of this targeting would have been possible using traditional advertising methods.
Engaging
We also ran a campaign which deliberately encouraged prospective parents to engage and ask questions. In my school we have a member of staff, Karen, who checks the social media posts, responds to messages and reacts to what users are posting. Getting engagement right was crucial in beginning a relationship with those prospective parents. In my view, every school needs a Karen!
Creating
Our campaign was also extremely visual in nature. We also designed our content mindful that almost 99% of users access content on their mobile ‘phones, not a computer. We used pictures and videos formatted to be readable in a portrait format and took advantage of the great templates available on Canva (other platforms are available) to give a professional feel to our content. Where possible, good quality video will attract by far the greatest number of views.
Tailoring
During our social media campaign it became apparent that a number of parents were concerned about transport in a particular local town, and competitor school appeared to be telling parents that our school had lesser sporting facilities. We provide our own transportation and have extensive sporting facilities – including a FA certified astroturf pitch – so we ran two extremely targeted mini-campaigns to get messages out on these issues. Minibuses and sports pitches provide excellent visuals, so this worked well in a social media message.
Going ‘organic’
The aim of any effective social media campaign is to move beyond the paid views and start generating ‘organic’ traffic via people liking, sharing and commenting on your posts. The key here is to create posts which engage, rather than inform, and also to encourage your existing parents and feeder schools to share the posts as well. This is essentially free advertising!
Reviewing
One of the huge benefits of social media advertising is the rich data it provides. Statistically, on average, someone will have to see your brand around seven times before taking action, so we knew we had to been seen multiple times by every prospective parent to get them to respond and click through to register to attend the open evening. Our adverts were seen by over 34,000 people, 3,327 people liked or commented on our posts and 86% of the registrations for our open evening came directly from clicks on our paid adverts.
We don’t claim to be the best at social media advertising – in many ways we have been quite late to the party – but to anyone who is hesitating, I would encourage you give it try. It really has changed our marketing for the better.
David is a serving school business professional and executive coach.
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