Making Your Independent School Digital Marketing Ads Count
12 lessons on new and emerging techniques in independent school recruitment marketing
Use this tool to help define your school’s digital strategy, design ad campaigns, and gauge the performance of digital efforts.
As enrollment teams look to boost their digital marketing capabilities, they must make decisions about how to acquire the necessary skills and expertise. While approaches vary, any successful digital operation will possess the same key capabilities, including analytics, technical infrastructure, and familiarity with digital content networks.
The lessons in this resource offer a crash course on the applications of digital recruitment and the digital marketing landscape. This primer arms enrollment managers with the information they need to design a digital marketing strategy aligned to their enrollment goals while getting the best return on their investment.
Section 1: Four lessons on the digital marketing landscape
Defining digital strategy
Few independent schools are fully utilizing digital marketing to its fullest potential when it comes to enrollment management. Although many admissions teams are beginning to integrate digital marketing strategies into their larger recruitment efforts, most have yet to fully make the shift from traditional marketing techniques.
Assessing market impact
Demonstrating ROI is important for any marketing investments; one difference in the digital era is the substantial trail of data that Internet users leave in their wake. This data trail can allow enrollment teams to get a comprehensive picture of the recruitment marketing interactions they’ve had with prospective families to better understand which elements of recruitment outreach contribute to success.
Section 2: Eight lessons on digital ads
Networks and audiences
When deciding where to place display and social ads, you have numerous options to choose from. Two criteria can be helpful to assess your options: the network’s relevance to parents and students and the robustness of the ad offering. The first seeks to ensure that advertising reaches the right people, while the second aims to provide recruitment marketers with the necessary tools for analyzing and optimizing ad performance.
Ad and campaign design
Beginning your digital marketing efforts with display and social ads make sense as an initial approach as they present less of an execution challenge than other digital channels. However, ads can be more or less effective depending on how expertly they are executed; success depends on many steps, from initial planning to post-deployment assessment.
Gauging ad performance
Many digital channels hold significant promise for recruitment marketing. However, most also come with limitations, which are important to understand when planning ad campaigns and assessing their performance. One important consideration in this regard is audience reach.
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