Choosing where to send their child for the next stage in their education is no easy decision for parents and carers. While the deadline for secondary school applications is fast approaching on 31st October, utilising marketing, PR and stakeholder engagement tactics year-round can help any school highlight what they have to offer to help drive admissions.
With demographics shifting and a falling birth rate, there is still a wide range of approaches schools can take to reach new audiences and demonstrate their unique offer within their local community. This includes utilising local PR, digital marketing, and developing new opportunities for stakeholder engagement.
Below we have detailed a number of ways to raise the profile of your school and ensure you’re the number one choice ahead of the application deadline.
Stakeholder engagement
With parents in charge of the decision making, they will be your key target audience and it’s important you take the time to create lots of opportunities for them to engage with your school. This could include arranging open days, sharing targeted leaflets and messaging about your school, or keeping them up to date with the latest through a termly newsletter.
However, it is also important to consider how you can leverage and build relationships with wider stakeholders, who often play a key role in the community. For example, engagement with local MPs, councillors, and Department for Education stakeholders. Wider stakeholders help to build your base of advocates, creating trusted third-party endorsement and helping to spread positive word-of-mouth about being a part of your school.
Another route to consider is building out your partnerships with local feeder primary schools, who will be important in helping you to bridge the gap between the next stage in a child’s education journey. There are a number of ways for secondary schools to think outside of the box and collaborate with local primary schools, to ensure parents know your school, and feel confident in the excellent learning opportunities you provide.
Positive PR
Creating a consistent stream of positive PR and news stories about your school is an excellent way to engage with your audience in an interesting and memorable way, reaching new families in the local area, and encouraging parents nearby to see your school as a strong choice for their child.
While media engagement can be a daunting task, schools will need to start to go above and beyond to reach audiences if they are to continue to recruit students.
Through promoting exciting news, you can emphasise what makes your school unique, appealing to parents who will be interested in the curriculum, sporting, personal development, or social action opportunities on offer for their child.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is also an incredibly effective way to share your school’s USPs and messaging with a wide audience, helping to reach even more parents and carers in your local area as part of a wider communications campaign. With targeted digital adverts, you can quickly and efficiently reach a large number of users online are specific to your catchment area, helping to raise your visibility at key moments throughout the year.
In particular, this can be incredibly beneficial in driving people to your website from outside of your existing spheres of influence and helping you to reach a greater cohort of parents and carers in your catchment area. Setting up a digital marketing content plan, which highlights exciting updates, considers key calendar points, or promotes upcoming open days, can be a great way of maximising opportunities to reach new audiences.
Knowing how to best engage with prospective parents and carers ahead of the application deadline and throughout the school year can be difficult, but these tried and tested methods from PLMR will help you highlight what makes your school the best for their child. Get in touch to find out more.