Content marketing for schools entails creating, distributing, and promoting informative and compelling content. Content showcasing your school’s values, mission, programs, and uniqueness can help capture, attract, and convert parents, potential students, and other visitors in your favor.
Content marketing is an integral part of the modern world, where consumers demand more information to empower their decision-making over sales advertisements. The good news is that, unlike traditional ads, content marketing has a long-lasting impact.
When done right, content marketing for schools is a cost-effective marketing strategy. It can drive more organic traffic to universities’ websites, establish your organization as an authoritative thought leader, and drive more prospective students to the school.
The tricky part is doing it right. The main part is the content, but you must keep an eye on the dos and don’ts of content marketing to ensure you invest in a solid strategy. Herein, we’ll dive into the main steps to help you develop practical content marketing strategies for your school.
Layout the Basics
Content marketing entails more than developing a website and uploading materials. You need a well-laid content strategy to help guide and keep your efforts on track to actualize your goals. The main aspects to consider at this point are:
Who’s Your Target Audience?
Knowing your target audience is the most important part of creating a content marketing plan. Who are they? What are their personas? What do they like, and what are their expectations from a school?
The research lets you uncover the target audience’s pain points and interests. It also informs you about where they will likely find and engage with your content, such as from search engine results pages or social media channels.
What Content Best Matches Their Needs?
How do you make educational content? You can answer this by considering the content potential students or prospective parents could be looking for. Don’t forget the current students and alums, too, since they could be looking for content to help them engage with your school more. Audience targeting is a critical part of effective content marketing strategy for education institutions, which significantly hinges on the content type used.
You need relevant content to engage the audience and foster healthier relationships. Understanding your audience’s interest ensures you provide such content, positioning your school at an advantage.
What Content Form Should You Use?
Now that you know what and where to post, you’ll easily pick the content form that best matches your audience. This could include:
- Blog articles
- Video and other visual content
- Infographics
- E-books
- Academic articles, and
- Social media posts
Now, you have a solid foundation for your school content marketing since you’ve narrowed down the target audience, what content to upload, where, and how.
Content Development
Content is king; this phrase, coined by Bill Gates in 1996, holds and won’t change in the foreseeable future. Content is the heart of all marketing campaigns, and it also happens to be the most challenging bit.
Producing diverse types like evergreen content for blog posts and program descriptions, time-sensitive news articles, white papers, how-to guides, video tours, and e-books can take a toll on your progress.
You need high-quality content that tells your brand story. The content highlights your unique points and takes the audience on a journey to understand the school better. While you know much about the independent school, producing quality content may take more work than anticipated.
Much goes into content creation, including leveraging some of the top content marketing tools for optimal performance. You must brainstorm ideas for content marketing for schools, pick relevant topics, do thorough keyword research, and draft, write, optimize, and edit content. Given the volume, this can prove to be time and resource-intensive.
Low-quality content can do more harm than good. Educational institutions can rank poorly on search engines and potentially taint their reputation if they use low-quality content.
You can avoid such concerns by outsourcing content writing to professionals. Services like ContentGo have the tools and technologies needed to deliver high-quality content matching your target audience and marketing objectives.
Outsourcing content writing saves you more time and resources while ensuring you consistently employ high-quality search-engine-optimized content. Search engines love such content, meaning your school will rank higher. The content also exudes E.E.A.T. (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which helps win more users’ trust.
Better search engine ranking improves visibility, and with helpful content fulfilling user intent, you’ll:
- Gain more traffic
- Generate more qualified leads and
- Enjoy better conversion rates.
Publishing the Content
The school’s website is the obvious channel, but given your target audience and diverse forms of content, you’ll have to do more. This is more so in today’s world, where social media is increasingly becoming a major gateway to virtually every online activity.
Publishing content is not simply about uploading the content. Before you hit that publish button, you have to consider aspects like:
- The timing: Strategic content publishing is critical. Ideally, you want to publish the content, especially time-sensitive pieces, when the target audience is likely online.
- The schedule: Besides proper timing, you have to consider frequency. Consistency is crucial for successful content marketing for schools. It helps develop a huge pool of engaged audiences since they have enough to browse throughout. This means you must develop a content calendar indicating when and where to upload content.
- The channels: The school website and social media are the primary home, but where else can users find your content? For example, turning to the top content syndication platforms is a great way to extend your reach. The publishing phase should include such considerations to ensure you reach an extensive user pool.
The good news is that you can leverage various tech tools to streamline the process. For example, you can schedule and automate content publication, which saves you more time while helping maintain consistency.
Promote
Your content is online, but your work isn’t yet done. You don’t want just to capture the usual eyeballs. You must promote the content, or simply put, you should invest in content amplification to reach a wider audience for better content marketing results. So, how do I market my content?
You can employ diverse means to enrich your content distribution, ensuring you reach a wide range of users. Email marketing campaigns can help capture more attention. You could also cross-promote your content across various social media platforms like X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, to name a few.
Influencers are a great addition to your digital marketing strategies as you strive to extend your reach. This entails working with influencers to expose your brand to an extensive user base. You can turn to social media users with massive followers, including current students or successful alumni.
Choose influencers for school content marketing carefully. A large following doesn’t always mean success. Ensure the influencer has a good reputation to build a strong brand image.
Also, ensure the influencer’s content resonates with your target audience. This means the influencer can easily associate with and exude your school’s values, which helps drive more qualified leads to your website.
An influencer with a few thousand followers who’d be more interested in your school’s program could deliver better results. This is unlike an influencer with millions of followers who would hardly be interested in your school and its offerings even beyond academics.
Promoting your content is all about gaining more exposure. The more traffic you drive to the site, the better for your school. While not all may convert, more visitors to your site helps improve search engine ranking. This is especially so with quality content, which means the bounce rate is low.
The more traffic and time spent on your website signals the search engine that your website is authoritative. This means your school will rank better, which helps keep more traffic coming your way, generating more leads in the long run.
Continuous Improvements
School content marketing is never done. You still have room for improvement, especially in today’s fast-paced world. Don’t relax because your strategy is streaming leads in every direction, and conversion rates are through the roof.
The edge giving you such a success rate can be gone as fast as you gained it, emphasizing the need to stay on your toes. For instance, you may have mastered the content part, but how about technical search engine optimization?
Is your website in top shape and updated to match the evolving user preferences? Technical SEO counts as much as the content. This is considering its impact on user experience and how it affects search engine crawlers.
Keeping an eye on your website to ensure it is in great shape is a must, which applies to other channels, including social media platforms. The good news is that you’ve enough tools to help you analyze your sites, such as Google Analytics.
Among the metrics to keep an eye on that can help you spot potential issues include:
- S.E.R.P.s (search engine results pages) rank, which tells you how SEO efforts are paying off
- Site traffic – Helps establish if your audience targeting is working
- Page views – Uncover the most and least visited pages
- Time spent – see which content interacted with the most and pages with the highest bounce rate
- Leads generated – Learn what is working per the source of the leads
- Actions taken like sign-ups and subscriptions, informing you of the impact of the content, and call to action’s clarity
- Social engagement – Know if your social media activities are engaging
Considering such analytics helps you to be proactive. You’ll make relevant changes to adapt. This includes cutting off or refining what seems not to be working and focusing more on strategies that deliver.
While optimizing your content marketing for schools, consider privacy and compliance with relevant rules and regulations.
Transform Your Content Marketing Efforts
Content marketing for schools doesn’t deviate much from other industries. It is all about providing the target audience with high-quality content. The content answers their questions and keeps them glued to your private school’s website. This eventually converts them into active clients.
High-quality content creation gives your school credibility. Prospective students and parents will trust your school more, easing your efforts to tip them in your favor. Creating such content is the main challenge, but you won’t have to stress over it once you turn to professional services.
ContentGo is powered by cutting-edge technology and an extensive team of professional content creators. We guarantee fast and reliable content creation services for diverse uses.
You can count on ContentGo to turn your marketing for schools around with top-class content. Register today and let ContentGo take your content marketing to the next level.
