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Mastering Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing for schools is an increasingly important activity due to many factors including building a community, focussing on a defined target and modern sharing technologies that double as word of mouth  promotion.

If you’re a school or in the education business, maximising your impact on social media is essential. It’s the most dominant media channel and in many cases the most cost-effective in terms of reaching your target audience – prospective parents and families. It can also be a powerful way of creating awareness, engagement and word of mouth.

At the same time, it’s constantly evolving and becoming more complex, which adds to its challenges. Managing your content on your social media and managing your marketing on social media, however, are two very different things. As a school marketer do you have the time and the skills to manage your social media marketing effectively?

Social Media News stated in 2019 that there are now over 15 Million Australians on Facebook (that’s approximately 60% of our population). There are also 15 million active users every month on YouTube, over 9 million on Instagram and 4.2 million on LinkedIn. It’s a marketing platform you can’t afford not to be using. The question is how, when and why do you use it? And how do you ensure it delivers a return on investment?

Our Social Media marketing Services

After working with clients for a number of years on social media marketing for schools, we have evolved our Social Media Services to offer everything a school needs to do well on social media.

Our services include:

Firstly, we work with schools to get the foundations right through school marketing research, branding, websites and digital marketing – so we have a well-rounded understanding of your goals, target audiences and challenges. We then help you get your brand positioning right , apply this to your website and ensure you site operates optimally, so you can maximise investments in this digital asset. Your website is a key assets that you own and ultimately want all social media to drive to, as this will enable you to grow your database and leads.

This is about establishing purpose to what you do and your chosen platforms, establishing appropriate goals, setting up the framework, the roles and responsibilities of your social media team, posting schedules, and ongoing management including proactive and reactive elements, as well as group management for the likes of Facebook. Importantly, strategy also encompasses your brand positioning and key messages.

Look Education is available to create highly engaging content as part of your planned social media program. This can involve photo shoots for brand images and developing videos for digital platforms including social media execution. We can ensure your school brand as portrayed in social media reflects your brand promise and unique positioning in a professional and engaging way.

Through a campaign that showcases the key messages of your school you can build brand understanding incrementally and also enable word of mouth, not just on the content but also the entire campaign. Over time these mini-brand stories will enable full appreciation of who you are and what you offer. This will enhance trust and engagement.

There are situations where you need a more immediate call to action to create brand awareness (or shift brand perceptions), engage prospective families to attend Open Days and school tours, and drive enrolments for specific year levels and entry years. You only have a short opportunity on social media to grab attention. We have the knowledge to ensure you create highly effective social media campaigns that target the right people in your catchment.

Part of any paid campaign is ensuring it is well set-up and tracked and uses the most current and effective ways to convert prospects. For example, did you know that using video is more powerful than an image alone? And that your video should be shot in a certain format and tailored to the social media channel?

Did you also know it is critical to have the right landing page (copy and form) on your website when you create a social media marketing campaign to track results? There are many hidden tricks and things that need to be done in order to build a successful social media campaign that delivers the best ROI. Our digital marketing team work in this area day in and day out and are constantly keeping up to date with innovations and developments on these platforms. This is something that inhouse school marketing teams don’t have the time nor technical skills to do amongst the broad remit of their marketing brief.

Many people when they start out with social media, for example, Facebook, decide they want to promote an offer and pay to boost a post. With the advent of Business Manager, Facebook has created a system that gives you far greater control over targeting and campaign spend across Facebook and Instagram. How do you set up Business Manager? When do you pay to boost a post and when do you run a sponsored post? Do you pay for impressions or click throughs? How much should your campaign budget be? At Look Education we can manage all this for you, taking away the guess work and trial and error that comes from inexperience.

For each client we provide a tailored digital dashboard that is easy to view and understand. It can track your results across social media, your website (Google Analytics), and mail program, like MailChimp. It can also track your SEO (if you have invested in an SEO keyword campaign). This enables you to track the success of your campaigns on a daily basis, to analyse and tweak as campaigns progress and to stop spending money if your campaign delivers before the money is spent (e.g. Open Day bookings). You also have the flexibility to view results by set date ranges to track short and long term results.

As we work with a number of schools and other organisations, we are across the budgets that organisations are spending and the results they are seeing. We can provide advice on annual social media budgets for ongoing and campaign specific periods. We also understand most schools don’t have the budget to be advertising online every week so we can work with schools to tailor campaigns to build awareness and drive results for key specified times.

Social Media Marketing for Schools — getting it right.

To do social media right requires the right foundations, strategy, resources, budget, expertise, creative content and tracking tools. It is often a job that is too much for a single person at a school to manage by themselves – nor do they have the necessary systems in place. Yet, it is increasingly a role and task that comes with high expectations.

Much of paid digital marketing work needs planning and analytics to project your school brand in front of the right target audience and lead them down a funnel (call to action) to enable them to start the enrolment enquiry process. On Facebook, for example, we use a variety of processes such as optimising and monitoring your school Facebook advertising campaigns through to ensuring your brand is featured on the right newsfeeds on Instagram. It’s critical to use the right image and have the right copy to get click through to your website/registration/form.

We are here to help with your school’s social media marketing. Talk to us today to explore how our school marketing team can elevate your school brand above your competitors.

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“Look Education helped us navigate a strategy to reposition our Middle School. This involved market research, marketing planning and a new brand positioning implemented via website, Prospectus and advertising. This has resulted in us receiving increased interest in our Middle School enrolments.”

Gaylene Bell – Business Manager, Brisbane Montessori School