Online Marketing Strategies for Schools to Hire Teaching Staff
You have probably read dozens of articles with openings like this: In today’s digital age …. As clichéd as it is, the world entered a digital age just a few decades ago, and the marketing strategies of so many companies and organisations have changed completely. Schools are no exception.
The traditional PR and marketing strategies many schools used in the past, like placing newspaper ads or holding open days and fairs, are no longer effective. Schools need to adopt new communication channels to reach their prospective audiences—potential job applicants or students. Online marketing for schools differentiates you from competitors and attracts you to both categories of target users.
In this article, we will list the benefits your school will achieve by building a consistent online presence and offer six effective digital marketing strategies to try right now.
Why Is Building an Online Presence Important for Schools?
Building an online reputation for schools is a long-term endeavour. You will need to continuously invest in your digital presence on school websites and social media. It pays off every new school year for teaching new talent who joined your staff and more student enrollments.
If you need additional arguments for allocating time and resources to digital marketing, here are some of its benefits.
Increase Marketing ROI
Establishing a digital presence is an effective marketing strategy, which will allow your school to attract teachers and prospective students faster, cheaper, and more efficiently compared to traditional marketing means. Since you will be able to track the source of every application after your advertising campaigns, you will know for sure how much marketing return on investment (ROI) you get.
Promote Your School’s Brand
School websites and social media profiles are great places to showcase your school’s distinctive atmosphere and culture. It is worth describing online the school’s mission, values, and key branding elements. A strong brand will help your audience distinguish your school from competitors and relate to it. Increased brand awareness among your target audience ultimately brings you more “leads,” such as new teaching talent and/or students.
Hunt for Teaching Talent
Hiring new teaching talent is not easy, as the country faces a “dangerous” teacher shortage, and the recruitment crisis in the educational sector deepens. However, with a consistent presence in the online space, your school will meet prospective new talent where they are and remain on their radar if and when they consider changing a job. Through online marketing campaigns, you will build an inexhaustible pipeline of prospective candidates for education recruitment.
Boost School Enrollment
Similar to reviewing potential job applicants, a consistent online presence will win you prospective student and parent engagement through digital marketing. When choosing a school to enrol in, your target audience usually does thorough research online. If your school can easily be found online, they can make a data-driven decision based on the descriptions of your offerings, curriculum, and testimonials.
Effective School Marketing Strategies Your School Should Apply
If you are considering creating an online brand for your school, these steps will help you integrate digital marketing into your overall strategy. Do not miss the first and most important stage of any digital marketing campaign: understanding your business goals and target audience. Always keep these goals and the audience’s needs in mind when executing your marketing efforts.
1. Design an Attractive School Website
Building an online reputation for schools is impossible without a website. Yours should be attractive with its content and design as well as load speed and responsiveness.
Work with a professional copywriter to publish a compelling description of your school’s advantages, day-to-day activities, and vacancy requirements for potential job applicants. Invite a UI/UX designer to create easy navigation and a good-looking graphical design for the website.
Load time of your website is absolutely critical, as even a two-second delay can result in abandonment rates of up to 87%, recent research shows. Load speed is also important for mobile users: 53% of visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load. Use online speed test tools to check how fast your website loads and fix the elements that slow it down.
2. Improve Search Engine Visibility
Why build a solid presence online if your school website cannot be found in search engines? To make sure potential applicants can easily land on your website after a quick Google search, consider the best practices of search engine optimisation (SEO). To get a search engine ranking, submit your website sitemap to Google through the Google Search Console.
There are two vital components of SEO: on-page and technical optimisation. On-page optimisation encompasses the content of the website and the proper use of relevant keywords that the audience uses when searching for the schools in the area. Technical optimisation includes an SEO-friendly website structure, mobile-friendliness, responsive design, website load speed, etc.
The mobile traffic market share in the United Kingdom was the largest in July 2023, with 65.08% of all mobile traffic in the country. That is why responsive design is absolutely critical for your website—it should automatically adapt to any device and screen size. Once you have your website optimised, your chances of getting traffic from a potential student campaign or recruitment campaign increase exponentially.
3. Build Consistent Social Media Presence
Social media, just like your school website, is an important building block of your educational institution’s digital advertising. Through social media, you can broadcast your school’s daily living and speak to the potential audience in a more informal and engaging manner. There are many cool social media platforms out there, yet LinkedIn and Facebook prove to be most effective for recruitment purposes.
The key to marketing in social media is you can encourage interaction with your potential candidates. If your goal is to engage experienced teaching staff, you should ensure consistent posting of relevant content mixed with branded messages, user-generated content, and testimonials. This way, teachers looking for a new job will recognise you among the rest of the employers. Simultaneously, teachers who are not seeking work now will appreciate relevant posts that resonate with their professional interests.
4. Track Analytics for Your Website and Social Media Profiles
Whatever efforts you put into marketing your school online, you cannot understand whether you are successful or not without analytics. Most importantly, with an analytics tool in place, you can alter the approaches that did not work well and increase conversions once you discover your mistakes.
There is a great variety of out-of-the-box analytics tools available to track user metrics on your school websites and social media profiles. Some of the most popular ones include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Brandwatch, HubSpot, BuzzSumo, Sprout, etc. They differ in user experience, depth of offered insights, and price. The most important thing about any analytics tool is understanding which metrics matter most and consistently tracking how these metrics differ as a result of your marketing efforts.
5. Build a Community in Social Media
LinkedIn and Facebook are great platforms to create online communities of like-minded professionals. A teacher’s community in social media can become another effective means to promote your brand awareness and be a source of teachers for your recruitment campaigns. By welcoming specialists from your area to participate in the community, you will foster collaboration across schools and share opportunities for professional learning.
Invite practising teachers and teachers-to-be to join your school’s community by sharing relevant and interesting content with them. This could be actual research with statistical data, tips and tricks for better student engagement, user-generated content, recent recommendations by the Department for Education, etc.
6. Run Targeted Social Media Ads Campaigns
If your school has established a presence online, you will most likely get a decent portion of the so-called organic traffic for your website and social media accounts. However, if you want to get better exposure in front of potential applicants, try launching an advertising campaign.
For instance, if your goal is to attract new talent for an open vacancy in your school, then an exemplary ad campaign mechanics can look like this:
- Choose the media where you will promote the vacancy
- Create the content assets for the campaign: the full-fledged job requirements description and shorter, laconic content for Google Ads, and visuals
- Define posting frequency
- Set up proper targeting so that the ad is shown to the relevant users only, e.g. people with a teaching background and at least three years of relevant job experience
- Post the ads and track the results
- Adjust the content and/or targeting if needed.
If you are still not sure whether social media advertisement for recruitment is worth trying, here are a few convincing figures in favour of this marketing approach. The average time to close an open vacancy via a social media ad campaign is 23 days, which is almost 2x faster compared to traditional recruiting methods. Over 30% of recruitment budgets can be saved by using a professional social media advertising platform and consultancy, like Soccialy.
soccialy helped thousands of educational institutions with digital advertising and advertised almost 7,000 jobs over the past few years. Turn to us to have education recruitment for your school done smartly. Book a free discovery call today!
Bottomline
To place your school on par with education institutions globally, consider building an online visibility for it. Digital marketing techniques will help you increase brand awareness and drive more attention from potential job applicants and prospective families in a cost-effective way. Before you start online marketing for your school, make sure your website is user-friendly and SEO-optimised, and your social media accounts are consistently updated. You will have higher chances to catch the attention of potential students and teaching candidates with carefully planned digital campaigns.
FAQs
Why is building an online reputation for schools good?
An online presence and good reputation bring about many benefits for an educational institution, including better brand awareness, increased student enrollment, better communication with the target audiences, opportunities for recruiting teaching and non-teaching staff, and parent engagement through digital marketing, among others.
How do you start online marketing for schools?
Online marketing should form a part of the school’s comprehensive promo strategy. For the purpose of educational institution digital advertising, the website should be attractive and easy to navigate. School social media accounts should be kept up-to-date. To drive more traffic to the website, your school should try advertisement campaigns in search engines or in social media.
How do you interact with the audience after a social media ad campaign?
Your social media advertisement should be tied with the overall school marketing strategies so that relevant candidates are found and attracted to what you do. If there are applicants who did not contact you as a result of your social media ad campaign, do not let them get away. Retargeting and remarketing are powerful techniques to interact with your audience once the campaign is over.
Start with creating user personas of the candidates you’d like to target. Proceed with a content calendar and different categories for your profile posts, then set up analytics for your social media profile and track it regularly and use the available tools, like soccialy to manage the hiring process efficiently. Make an enquiry by contacting [email protected]
