Content is king, no doubt about it. But how do you turn content into leads? Let us talk about content marketing for schools.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable and relevant content to attract, inform, and engage your target audience, while also promoting your school. In other words, content marketing is the art of selling your school.
Content marketing generates three times more leads than paid search advertising. In addition, 70% of consumers feel closer to a brand as a result of content marketing.
Organise your existing content
Content marketing can be overwhelming, especially for small schools that have a small marketing department. However, if you have written news stories, have student testimonials and photos, produced videos, you already have content you can use.
Use content mapping
Content mapping means taking an inventory of your school’s current content and matching it to the personas (scholar, parent, athlete, etc.) and stage in the journey (prospect, current student, alumni, etc.) where it best fits.
Content mapping will help you determine:
- Who each piece of content appeals to by using personas
- Where in the journey the content is relevant
- Which channels to use to best distribute this content
- How you may be lacking in content, and where you can improve
Create engaging content
Engaging content is content that triggers a measurable response in people. This means that your content needs to be impactful in some meaningful way to be considered truly engaging.
Blog
Blogs are a great resource for content marketing, proven to generate new leads and website traffic for schools. They are meant to be more informal than traditional news stories and offer you a platform to share authentic stories from different voices.
Using statistics in blog posts improves consumer trust.
News stories
News stories and blog posts are not the same. Schools write news stories to promote particular individuals or events. However, that does not mean they should be boring. Do not be too formal with your news stories and always include a CTA (call to action).
Downloadable content
When a prospective or current student visits your website, what kind of information do you offer that is not necessarily direct marketing about your school? Today’s consumer looks to brands to provide insider knowledge.
When a visitor comes to your website, consider which kind of content you can provide right away that would be helpful. And then decide if you have content that supplements an action on your website. Whether they request more information, schedule a tour, or even apply, have follow-up communication ready with content that proves their engagement was a good investment of their time.
Videos
Having a video on your website can boost your conversion rate by up to 80%.
Having videos a part of your content marketing is proven to increase email click-through rates, website traffic and conversions, and brand awareness. Videos are effective because they are fun to watch and easy to digest.
Distribute content strategically
Create targeted campaigns
Write every email you send as if you were writing to someone whom you personally know. Each email, whether it is to one person or 1,000, should be crafted in a way that feels like it is a personal, one-to-one communication, in efforts to make the recipient feel special.
Segment your email lists by audience and include personalisation tokens (like their first name) to make them feel as though the content you’ve shared is just for them.
Do not post the same content with the same strategy on every platform
Syndication is not a content strategy. And while getting your content out there is better than having no content at all, having a strategy behind where you post content and when you post it is key to successful content marketing.
For example, you have a great 2-minute admissions video that you had professionally produced. It can be used in more ways than one to drive traffic back to your website.
With this piece of content you can:
- Email the video to all prospects who filled out an inquiry form
- Shorten the video to 15-30 seconds to share on social media
- Pull content from the video, such as student testimonials, to create more concise and specific videos for your blog posts
Always link back to your website
Content marketing is an essential way to grow your school’s brand and reach. However, it is important to ensure you are always directing your audience back to your website so they can further engage with your school.
Thank you for taking the time to read or blog post. At faethe.marketing we have been helping schools to increase student enrollments since 2010. If you are looking to recruit the best matching students for your programmes with minimal cost and effort, feel free to reach out to us.