Marketing and Technology

In the first article in this series, Marketing the Small Private School: The First Steps, we looked at the resources available for marketing the small private school. The assumption which we made in that article was that your school probably couldn't afford a full-time marketing professional. Instead, you would assign an existing member of your staff the additional responsibility of handling your marketing. That assumption still stands for purposes of this article. Now we will look at how to use the various resources and tools at our disposal.

The best strategy for successful marketing is to control your message. That means that you have to know who you are speaking to and through what means you can best communicate with them. Let's use the proven journalist's approach to understanding our communications strategy.

Key Questions to Consider

• Who are we trying to reach?
• Why are we trying to reach them?
• What are we trying to communicate?
• How can we reach them most effectively?
• When should we communicate our message?

This structured approach ensures that your message will be unified and on message as it progresses from your keyboard to the recipients. Let's look at examples of how we can reach each segment of our school community. My suggestions are merely suggestions designed to get you thinking in a structured manner. Adapt my suggestions to suit your particular requirements.

Communicating with Your Community

Let's start at the top.

• Who are we trying to reach? Everybody in our community as well as everybody outside

I suspect that most small private schools do not have much money in their sorely stretched budgets for marketing. I further guess that it is also true that most small schools do not have room in their budgets for a full-time marketing person. With those assumptions, let's look at inexpensive ways in which we can market your school effectively.

In most small schools, marketing tasks, such as they are, tend to be rolled into somebody else's portfolio. This article is aimed at those incredibly multifaceted professionals who have to juggle dozens of daily deadlines and still do an excellent job of getting the word out about their school.

Available Resources

What kinds of resources are available to help you market your school effectively? Probably more than you realize. Besides the old standbys such as consultants, books, blogs, and affinity groups, popular social media has become a very influential part of any size school's marketing strategy. We shall look at each resource and see how it fits into your school's budget and schedule.

Consultants

Having an expert review your marketing strategy is like going to the doctor. It will cost you some money, perhaps even a lot of money. You will benefit from years of professional experience and expertise when the consultant makes her recommendations. As a rule, hiring a consultant will not be as expensive as hiring an additional staff member. You will incur a one-time expense. If you plan to retain her services,

I can remember when many school administrators raised their collective eyebrows at social media a few years ago. You could almost hear them saying under their breath, "Over my dead body!" That was probably because few people back then understood social media. The marketing people were suspicious of social media because it was not as familiar as the analog marketing methods to which they were accustomed.

The way we used to market schools

Decades ago, your beautiful school brochures and catalogs were how you got the word out about your school and its mission. Those printed materials were expensive and time-consuming to produce. But that's all we had. Then along came the Internet. Schools built websites—pretty basic ones at first. But as the technology advanced and professional graphic designers got their hands on those school websites, the result was a product just as elegant and compelling as any of those brochures and catalogs we used to have lithographed. While most schools still produce brochures and catalogs, most of these are done in-house.

It seemed that you had barely got your website tweaked to dazzling perfection, replete with online applications, inquiries, video tours, and all the bells and whistles 21st-century web designers could cram into them when along came Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest. Social media was suddenly socially acceptable. Not only was it good, but it was essential to include it in your marketing strategy.

Let's look at social media and see how best to use

A decade ago, you spent a fortune on a gorgeous catalog and a couple of recruiting trips. Then you waited. You would be in good shape if you had gotten your catalogs into the right hands and had a good turnout for your recruiting trips. The applications came in hopefully in a three-to-one ratio. All was well.

That approach doesn't work very well today. Your demographics have changed. More and more of your target parents are Millennial and Generation Z parents. They get their information from social media and digital channels.

The diversity goals your school has require different approaches too. You need to extend the reach of your advertising campaigns by using social media, which is easily shared. Your market has become more segmented and much more competitive. As the economic outlook makes the future look more and more uncertain, parents are examining the educational foundations that their children will need to be successful in their adult lives.

Economic uncertainty, inflation concerns, and changing enrollment patterns continue to create financial concerns for both schools and families.

That's where social media comes in. Done well, social media will improve your admissions yield. Done consistently, social media can cement value in place in the minds of your target audience.

In 2026, successful school marketing strategies increasingly combine social media engagement with authentic storytelling, parent testimonials, student-generated content, and data-driven digital advertising campaigns.

But remember: Social media is still marketing. It requires planning and execution of that marketing plan to

The way we use social media in the private K-12 school setting is a bit different from the way social media is used by businesses. Businesses are looking to develop a client list from their social media efforts. They need clients in order to sell them their products and services. Private schools, on the other hand, seek to promote their community to attract new families and students. Let's look at some more differences and also some strategies and techniques that will help make your school's social media program successful.

Dedicate resources to social media.

My first bit of advice is simple but really quite necessary: devote some resources to your social media program. Your school's website used to be the only front door your school had. It was the first thing people saw. Now it is the first thing parents or anybody over the age of 40 will see. Facebook and YouTube are your new front doors for folks under the age of 30.

This video gives you a comprehensive overview of social media and what it can do for your school.

You have never been casual about creating your catalog, have you? Remember catalogs? Your catalog and other printed materials you give prospective families are always professionally produced, aren't they? They also cost a fortune, don't they? Your social media deserves the same professional approach. Therefore, allocate staff time and money in your operating budget