Nowadays, advertising proposals have to be pieces of creativity in action. Therefore, the efforts of the marketing or attraction team have to be increasingly innovative and focused on the target audience; in order to attract more and better customers. There are several effective methods, but everything depends on the product or service to promote and the practices that the industry is putting into action. And the same happens in the specific case of advertising for private schools.
The first step before any proposal is: promote the best attributes of your school.
Since the essence of the brand, is the central core that combines the functional and psychological aspects and gives a unique identity. This is how the leaders of the education sector know perfectly:
- What is your value proposition?
- What benefits do you get from your service?
- What problems or needs do they solve?
- And what monetary and non-monetary aspects it solves?
Once you have this in mind, the best advertising proposals from private schools in 2016 have certain key aspects in common, which we show you below:
They adapt their design without losing identity
Adapting the advertising message is vital when promoting any institution. It must be completely addressed to potential students, so it should capture their attention, should make them feel identified and want to know more about it. Visually it should be something that can be captured and retained in seconds without the need to review it several times and with simple language.
And simultaneously it must preserve the identity of the institution. The goal is to create a balance between the new advertising trends and the essence or prestige of the school so far. At first it may seem a little complicated and more if the institution has already been on the market for years; but with a good adaptation strategy, of course it can work.
Say hello to the digital era
It is sad but the flyers and the ads in the newspaper are strategies that were completely in the past, and more if you are trying to attract a young market with new expectations and interests. They can even represent sunk costs for the school.
Currently there are hundreds of portals and social networks that young people visit daily, and if as a school you are not present at least in the main ones. It is as if you did not exist to their eyes. The biggest advantage of digital media is that they achieve a huge reach of prospects at a very low cost. As they are also fully measurable, which facilitates future optimizations, in order to obtain better results.
They updated their marketing mix
A few years ago, having a spectacular on a main avenue and several radio spots was enough to keep registrations high in any school. On the other hand, currently the advertising proposals must be more complete and executed in a more strategic way, with the intention of capturing more market and creating a notable differentiator in comparison with the competition.
By this we mean to better combine advertising channels. Once the mentioned digital media have been adapted; An excellent option is to create complementary BTL (Below the line) campaigns. For this type of marketing has the purpose of using forms of communication not massive directed to a specific segment, using as main weapons the creativity, the surprise or the sense of opportunity, originating novel channels to communicate the desired message. With little scope but very high effectiveness.
Offer a PLUS
Most likely a sticky message will not be enough to convince the most stubborn students, so offering something extra is always good. The most common are usually guided visits to school or interviews with students already enrolled, but in reality to be so used they become unattractive options.
As an agency, we recommend you to create specialized content, since if the educational leaders work, most likely to you too. And with this we refer to: once you have already promoted on the internet, why don’t you invite the users to download a guide to understand your scholarship process or success stories of alumni, etc. In this way, the interest of your audience can grow and the probability of enrolling in your school will increase.
Finally remember that it does not matter what your competition does, as long as you get to know your ideal student perfectly. Because it is well known that it is better to attract 20 qualified people and stay with you 18; They attract 100 people at random and they finally enroll only 10. It all depends on the quality of your school’s advertising.