Five Steps To Boost Enrollment

1. Own Your Brand

Your brand is the essence of who you are. It is your school’s story. It is your promise and
the delivery of that promise to your stakeholders is essential.

What makes your school unique?

Do you offer STEM or other specialized courses? Is your school environmentally

friendly? Do you have unique partnerships or sponsors that benefit your students? Are
your GPAs, standardized test scores, and other metrics higher than the national average?

Your brand is unique to you. Your attributes and offerings need to be expressed, but first,
they need to be defined.

Once you’ve defined them, make them a prominent part of all your communication.

2. Catering To The Market

Start by defining who you are. What unique experiences, resources, and tools do you
offer? Why is your school the optimal choice?

Critical areas to analyze:

Student goals – What are you doing to develop the whole child? What programs are in
place to support struggling learners? How do you support students with special needs?
What counseling programs are available for students with emotional issues? What
afterschool programs and extracurricular activities do you offer? How do you define
student success?

Competitors – Determine which schools are your primary competitors and what they are
offering. What does their website promise? What do parents say about them? How are
you different?

Job Market – Determine which professions and jobs are most prevalent in your area. Talk
to local associations, local business people. What jobs are becoming a growing trend?
How does your school speak to them?

Racial/Ethnic/gender demographics – Determining and understanding the racial, ethnic

and gender composition of your area is critical. It enhances your ability to address your
school’s unique needs and challenges.
Projected changes in population – how is your recruitment area changing ethnically,
racially and socioeconomically? What will it look like in ten years? What steps are you
taking to prepare for the changes? What are you doing to ensure that you are nimble
enough to flow with the projected changes?

Socio-economics – determining the median household income for your area is essential to
understanding and designing programs that are appropriate and sensitive to the financial
circumstances of potential enrollees.

3. Online Marketing Rules

Digital marketing is vital. Billboards, TV, radio and direct mail are past their sell-by date.
Jim Smith, Chief Executive Pastor at Bloomington Christian School, saw a very limited
return on investment from radio, magazine, and print advertising and turned to online
marketing to solve his enrollment issues. The results were instant.

The digital marketing space is expanding, and it’s the future.

Here are a few things to consider:

Social media ads should be a primary component of your marketing strategy. Social
media allows you to expand and broaden your reach while engaging your existing
audience in meaningful ways.

Alice Hendrickson, Director of Enrollment at the Hargrave Military Academy, says that
they “rely very heavily on social media. They have migrated away from a lot of old-
school marketing channels but still incorporate very limited print and maintain a small
radio presence in targeted areas.”

Digital storytelling is a creative and innovative way to tell your story and familiarize
people with your brand. You can show one advertisement after the other in a specific
sequence which tells a story. This can be done across platforms and can be tailored to suit
any campaign.

Conversion Funnels are a set of steps a visitor to your website needs to take before
reaching conversion—or taking the action you want them to take. They include all the
steps required to move from browsing your website to the targeted end-state, which is on
your conversion page.

A conversion could be as simple as scheduling an appointment or filling out a pre-

enrollment form. Figure out what your goals are and what you want visitors to do on your
site, and then create a funnel for it.

The quickest way to get people through your funnel is by having a well-defined brand
and hyper-targeted marketing.
Hypertargeting is the ability to deliver a tailored message to a specific niche or select
audience. A good analysis of your catchment area in step 2 makes this a piece of cake.
Hyper-targeting is the most efficient way to stretch your advertising dollars. No dollar
goes wasted, and all your ads are seen by people who are relevant to you.

4. Keep Enrollment Consistent

Recruitment and enrollment efforts don’t end when school begins. Building and
maintaining enrollment numbers is an annual endeavor. One of the biggest mistakes any
school can make is the failure to plan for a year-round campaign.

You might think that you don’t have the budget for a year-round campaign. You actually
spend less when you have goals for each month of the year. Is June always a weak month
for student inquiries? Share those educational videos, post 2 articles on parents’ blogs to
help the undecideds come to you in August.

Do you have any issues with different class sizes between Pre-K and 12th grade? Failing
to have a strategy for maintaining class size and balancing lopsided enrollment numbers
is a recipe for disaster.

Managing your enrollment numbers proactively guarantees stability and consistency. St.
Finbar Parish School in Burbank, California is generally satisfied with their enrollment,
yet Rosselle Azar, Director of Marketing and Development, wants to iron out “some
spots in each grade that become available because of students transferring in and out.”
Rosselle plans to fill these imbalances through “targeted digital marketing.”

Parent satisfaction surveys are another excellent measurement tool that can help improve
academic rigor and morale.

You need to understand what really makes your parents happy.

Surveys help you gauge which parents will most likely re-enroll their students. You will
be able to identify those who are “on the fence,” address their concerns in advance, and
gain their support for the upcoming year.

Think of it this way: Parents are making a major decision that influences the rest of their
child’s future.

They need to be familiar and comfortable with classroom routines and school rules.

5. Measuring And Assessing

Most schools fail to track and assess the effectiveness of their marketing plan.

Keep a simple log of all aspects of the enrollment process. Record things such as website
visits, conversions, requests for information, school visits, applications submitted,
deposits and new and returning students.

This type of tracking leads to an organized, effective and successful enrollment

campaign.

If you do fall short of your goals, you have a detailed account of what you did. Adjusting
your processes is much easier than starting from scratch. It’s important to remember that
you can’t improve what you don’t measure.