Your School’s Fall Digital Marketing Checklist

Setting up your school’s digital marketing strategy for the busy admissions season ahead requires all hands on deck. Here are 10 digital marketing strategies your school should consider as you get planning underway:

1. Set goals as an institution

Is your school’s enrollment marketing goal to build top-of-the-funnel awareness and inquiries? Get a record number of students at your big open house? Attract families from a particular socio-economic background? You likely have several goals and initiatives, and your marketing campaigns should support them. But without a clear sense of your larger institutional goals, setting smaller marketing objectives is difficult. Advancement, Admissions, and Marketing and Communications should all work together to set transparent enrollment marketing goals, which you can then use to guide your digital marketing campaign goals. Check out this blog on setting smart goals for help!

2. Start with a basic UX audit for your fall events

This may seem obvious, but all too often schools miss this simple exercise of optimizing their website for improved User Experience (UX). This can be an intense project as part of a large SEO (Search Engine Optimization) effort and require dedicated experts to help. However, schools can also tackle this in-house at its basic level. Start by conducting a query of your school + your admissions event in an incognito browser. Notice if the proper pages rank for your event, and have compelling title tags and meta descriptions. Once you click on the result, does the page load quickly and have updated event information? Is there a clear call to action with an easy form completion process? (Actually try it out with your phone!). If this is not a desirable or easy process, or old events show up, then you need to improve that user experience by making the necessary website adjustments before you start investing in marketing. Here is a resource on how to conduct a proper user experience audit for your admission events.

3. Optimize your website for AI & SEO

Generative Artificial Intelligence is a new way for people to search for things they are interested in online. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Bing’s CoPilot and other AI technologies have rolled this out in recent months, impacting search results for schools. Learn more about Generative AI for schools. In a nutshell, to focus on optimizing for AI, schools need to ensure their websites have a positive user experience with content that stays as relevant, compelling, and as authentic as possible per Google’s E-E-A-T process (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Not only is this best practice for SEO, but with AI advances, your content needs to be optimized to address common questions users ask such as: ”What admissions events should I attend at this school?” or “What is the tuition, and how do I know if I qualify for financial aid?”. Like the UX exercise above, get started by conducting some queries on these various AI search tools and update the website content it pulls in accordingly.

4. Audit your local listings and search directories

Local SEO is the process of ensuring your digital footprint is up to date so that you show up favorably in places like Google Maps, Bing Place, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and more. For schools who serve a local area or offer in-person learning, this is extremely important. Furthermore, a solid Local SEO strategy now encompasses school-search directories like Niche, BoardingSchools.com, and Findingschool.net, because those properties serve as backlinks to your site, and signify important information to search and AI tools. While it's always been an SEO best practice to improve your local listing and search directories such as these, it's become more important than ever since generative AI tools are scraping enrollment data, content and reviews from these third-party platforms. Make sure you audit these channels and update their content (including getting new reviews!) as part of your digital marketing strategy this year.

5. Choose your digital advertising platforms wisely

Once your website is in tip-top shape, reflects your marketing goals in a user-friendly way and is optimized for AI and Search, you can plan your outbound marketing initiatives. Assuming you have a limited marketing budget, you can’t hit every platform effectively. Therefore, schools should maximize their dollars by focusing on the platforms that hold their core audience online. Use data points like third-party research and your own school surveys, enrollment data, and website analytics backlinking reports to understand where your audience is online.

The most common digital platforms for schools to focus paid efforts, in support of enrollment, are:

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Ads
Google Search & Display Ads
Microsoft Search Ads
LinkedIn Ads
YouTube and CTV (connected television) Video Ads
Local Digital Media & News Outlets
School Search Directories

Once you’ve established the list of platforms with the biggest opportunities for your school, it’s time to devise a strategic campaign within those platforms that work with your budget and goals.

6. Diversify beyond digital

Digital platforms are the preferred way for adults to consume news and seek information according to this Media Consumption Research from Pew. The good news for marketers is that digital marketing is an effective and measurable way to execute enrollment campaigns. However, there are benefits to having an integrated approach to marketing which includes print and broadcast material. Here are some reasons why print isn’t dead from the digital marketing perspective. Whether it’s a new viewbook, post card, or yard sign, or event a broadcast ad for television or radio, diversifying your footprint provides a multi-touch strategy which is critical for building awareness and influencing users at the right time in the enrollment funnel. These offline touchpoints all serve as ways to keep your brand top of mind, and generally increase ad recall.

7. Create a media & measurement plan

Once your goals are established and you have a decent understanding of which platforms are available to your school, it’s time to put them together to ensure your marketing goals align with the chosen platforms. A media or marketing plan is a way to organize your marketing initiatives throughout the year. It should list the goals of the marketing campaign, the platform, messaging, and calls to action. Some plans even include the targeted personas and how each piece of content supports those audiences. Listen to this podcast that dives into persona marketing for schools if it's a new concept to your school. If possible, ensure your media plan gets as detailed as the QR codes, UTM codes and analytics reporting that you've set up to measure success. This marketing media plan can be created through a project management system, Google sheet, or other shared tool like this marketing plan template from HubSpot. For fun getting started, you can even use AI to generate a marketing plan for you!

8. Get your surveys ready

Be sure to have surveys ready for folks who inquire and register for events to understand which marketing tactics are driving interest in enrollment. Don’t just ask “How did you hear about us?” as most responses will certainly be “Word of Mouth”. Instead, ask “How did you hear about the event today?” or “What led you to visit campus today?” If you have a sophisticated CRM with attribution in place, use it to analyze the sources of form inquiries in addition to the survey and form responses, allowing you to assess the impact of your emails, ads, organic presence, and direct efforts. Here are some other survey strategies schools can consider as you get deeper into the admissions cycle this year.

9. Set up your email marketing plans

Once you’ve planned your marketing efforts, ensure you have a lead nurturing strategy in place. This can be done by setting up an email marketing drip campaign to consistently engage prospective families, and provide timely information while addressing common questions as they arise. This approach helps nurture inquiries by gradually building trust and highlighting your school's strengths over time. By strategically planning these communications now, schools can effectively guide inquiries through the busy fall right through applications and the decision-making process, ultimately increasing enrollment rates. Here is a guide on how to write a drip campaign for admissions. Schools can also download this free email planning template from HubSpot to get started.

10. Track efforts with Google Analytics

Tracking marketing efforts using Google Analytics is crucial for understanding what strategies are working and where improvements are needed. You must set up tracking even before your marketing is live. For instance, when boosting an Instagram post, create a destination URL with a UTM code and also mention Instagram in your survey. If you're using yard signs for an Open House, include a call to action with a QR code that has a UTM code, so you can monitor how many people scanned it, visited your open house page, and registered. Here’s a guide to setting up key events in GA4 to help.

It's a lot of work to plan a successful digital marketing strategy each year. For help with your digital marketing for enrollment, reach out to Enroll Media Group, a data-driven digital marketing agency for schools.

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