by Joe Faulkner, mtm schools marketing consultant
Consider this: 1/3 of schools in mtmconsulting’s School Marketing Survey 2009 now report that at least 50% of their enquiries for places come via their school’s website. Google’s market share is estimated to be around 90% – nine out of every ten internet searches globally are carried out through the eponymous search engine.
What does this mean for your school’s marketing?
Well, the main thing to point out is that acheiving a good placement on Google’s search results is likely to be an extremely good-value means of marketing your school. If your school’s website design is sound, and you can use a built-in analytics package to monitor responses, then you should see hundreds of new visitors each month visiting your school’s website and learning about the wonderful education you offer.
What if you’re based in a competitive marketplace? If your school marketing team’s aim is to be the number one ranking under a search for “independent schools London” for example, the road ahead will be long and, in all likelihood somewhat potholed: requiring outstanding design, regular (several times a day, perhaps) updating of news and highly targeted content, customised coding and a dedicated back-linking campaign.
Feasible, yes, and something mtmconsulting’s school website design team can help with.
But there may be an easier way. Undertaking a sponsored advert campaign via Google or any other search engines will help improve your school website’s visibility, by showing a brief advert down the side of the Google results page when relevant searches are carried out.
Google adwords allows users to monitor the impact of school advertising
A pay-per-click campaign is just that, you write your advert and choose relevant search terms, and then assign a maximum bid for each search. Your school only pays when people click on your advert to visit your school’s website, and the cost of this may vary from 5p to a few pounds, depending on how highly-competed over the search terms you have selected are. You can set a maximum daily budget, designate the duration of the campaign and monitor success rates for your school’s advertisements.
One of the most frequently encountered pitfalls of conventional school and college advertisement placements in magazines and newspapers is that they are both expensive and hard to monitor the response rates. Effective use of online opportunities may help to mitigate these issues.
To discuss incorporating a pay-per-click campaign into your school strategy, or to explore how neccessary such advertising may be, please contact mtmconsulting.
