Digital Marketing for Private Schools: How To Boost Your Enrollment Online

Digital marketing allows parents to find your private school online and learn about your institution. With the right strategy, you can build your reputation online while educating prospects about your offerings and encouraging enrollment.

On this page, we’ll review the basics of digital marketing for private schools, so you can start implementing effective strategies.

And, if you want to begin your digital marketing strategy, contact us online today to speak with a strategist!

Why do private schools need digital marketing?

Every parent wants what’s best for their children, especially when it comes to education. It’s no secret that parents do their research when it comes to schooling, and these days they do it online.

Trying different digital marketing strategies can help you accomplish the following:

• Grow your school’s reputation: Digital marketing for private schools helps you promote your credentials to parents. You can share your institution’s awards, promote your academic stars, and highlight your school’s outstanding qualities.
• Build lasting relationships with pupils and alumni: With digital marketing, you can connect with future students and build a relationship with existing pupils. You can make sure your website is updated with the latest information, share news through email, and make everyone’s experience with your school better overall.
• Find and attract new students: The primary benefit of digital marketing is helping you find and enroll new students. If you want parents and students to find your school online, you need to make sure you’re ranking in search results and meeting them where they are.

Having a website for your institution isn’t enough. For parents to find your school online, you need digital marketing strategies for private schools that help your website show up where your target audience is searching.

4 digital marketing strategies for private schools

Digital marketing strategies are not an all-encompassing solution. Private schools must use the channels that help them reach parents who want a better, quality education for their children. Your marketing solution should target them directly via tested methods.

Below are the top digital marketing strategies for private schools that help you boost enrollment and promote a strong community within your student body.

1. SEO: Optimize your private school website for local search engine rankings

SEO is the process of improving your website so Google can read, rank, and recommend it to searchers. The main goal of SEO is to rank your private school high in search results pages. Specifically, you want to rank for terms surrounding schools in your location, or local SEO.

Local SEO is a crucial part of any school serving a specific area. For instance, 50% of private school parents are most likely to list a safe environment as their top priority when choosing a school. That’s more than even the 47% who chose academic quality.

With those figures in mind, it’s clear that promoting your school to your local parents and building your reputation are key. Some different aspects of SEO that can help you with those goals include:

• Creating content surrounding industry topics: SEO content, when paired with keyword research and optimization, provides website visitors with beneficial information when they’re looking to enroll their child at your school. If you create content that does that job, you’ll rank higher in search engine results pages than your competitors, which makes it easy for parents to find your institute online.
• Building a secure, efficient website: Once parents get to your site, whether from a search engine or other source, you want to keep them there. Your website should be easy to use and attractive to encourage more clicks and browsing. That will signal to Google that you have an effective, helpful website for parents.
• Earning qualified links from other industry sources: Your content should encourage other educational authorities to link to it as a reference. When your content earns backlinks from other educational sources, Google ranks you higher in search results, because they view links as votes of confidence.

Google’s priority is to serve users the most helpful information possible. So, as users search for private schools in their area, they pull the most relevant results that users find helpful. High rankings drive qualified traffic to your website, where you can inform new visitors and encourage them to enroll themselves or their children in your institution.

2. PPC: Run targeted campaigns to attract private school families

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an online advertising format where you pay to promote an ad and earn new visitors to your site via a search engine or social network.

You can see these ads in search engines designated by a “Sponsored” tag:

PPC works on an auction system where you bid for keywords or audience demographics related to your target reader. For example, you could target the keyword “private elementary school in Scranton.” Then, you’d bid 50 cents for every click that you receive.

Your PPC provider would then look at your bid for that keyword and compare it to your competitors. Finally, the provider lists you and your competitors in their advertising space in order of who bid the most to who bid the least.

Best of all, you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on it, making it a more cost-effective strategy. PPC also has a highly measurable return on investment (ROI), since you can see exactly how much you spend on each click for every campaign.

With that in mind, PPC is one of the best digital marketing strategies to use on a strict budget. No matter what platform you choose for your PPC ads, they all send potential clients to a page on your website that you specify. You can target your reach to parents and guardians without wasting resources on those not in your ideal demographic.

3. Email marketing: Engage families of current and prospective students

Email marketing allows you to communicate effectively with those who have signed up for your email list.

For current students, you can gather parents’ email addresses at the time of enrollment. If you want to create a newsletter for public communications, you can create a form on your site to collect email addresses from prospective parents or members of the community.

Once you have your contact list, you’re ready to create the content for your emails.

Here are some ideas for emails you could send, based on the people subscribed to your email:

• Current students and parents: Lunch schedules, upcoming events, testing information and locations
• Interested students and parents: FAQ information, enrollment deadlines, payment and tuition information.
• Community members: Updates on recent events, public fundraisers, sporting event information, and school newsletters (that protect student privacy)

In general, your information should make parents more comfortable with your organization and keep those interested informed of what’s going on in your school.

4. Social media: Build community within your institution

Social media marketing is the process of getting followers on major social networks, engaging them with new posts, and encouraging them to enroll in your private school.

Most current Gen Alpha students — those in K-12 school currently — belong to Millennial parents. Consider the fact that Millennials spend 253 minutes accessing apps or the Internet via a smartphone per day. With those kinds of numbers, it’s clear that if you’re not on social media, you’re missing out on potential parents and students.

You should be on Meta platforms specifically — 70% of Millennials are likely to connect with businesses on Facebook, and 64% will connect with businesses on Instagram.

Both apps let you share content about your private school and post everything from your new gym facility to the weekly lunch schedule. Parents and students also comment on your posts, which makes social media a great way to keep in touch in an open forum.

Regardless of what you choose, social media lets you keep in touch with anyone interested in your school, so you can promote it at a moment’s notice. Additionally, understanding your social media marketing pricing options can help you allocate your budget effectively to maximize your outreach and engagement.

Start your digital marketing campaign for your private school

WebFX is a full-service digital marketing agency that has helped educational institutions earn more students every year — including private schools!

Our team includes dozens of experts in specific digital marketing fields who know how to take your private school’s online presence to the next level.

Contact us today to get a free, no obligation quote for your private school’s digital marketing strategy!

We Drive Results for Private Schools

• 188+ education industry experts
• Renowned for our communication and transparency

Get a Proposal