Business these days is not only restricted to print and electronic media. Digital marketing is the current trending pattern of expanding business and penetrating into new market segments. An effective digital marketing strategy can break a powerful monopoly business while, if not utilized carefully, it can shatter the entire business. If you are running a school then there are some common digital marketing mistakes your school must avoid.
To run a school successfully, you must have a degree in management and leadership program and a diploma in education administration can help you to gain awesome management skills. The marketing budget has to be planned properly before you start planning for your SEO strategies and the administrative wings of the educational system should take care of it.
DIGITAL MARKETING MISTAKES TO AVOID:
Target audience: Imagine you're investing lump sum in something that is quite an influential subject but you're not aware of who to influence. For example, you'll definitely not promote an educational material of 10th std who is already pursuing his/her graduation course and if you invest in doing so, you cannot even picture what mammoth loss you're going to incur.
So inevitably, if you're not aware of the market which will give the most benefits to it, your invention or investment will be absolutely in vain. When it comes to digital marketing, leadership skills matter to a great extent, and being an educational leader you must be aware of your ad set or target audience. Let's say your school is the heart of a metropolitan city then you're supposed to target the people from that city and not any rural customer, calling spade a spade.
Website design: In an apparel retail shop you are expected to find infinite brands but not vegetables because if apparel retail is the ultimate layout, vegetables cannot be a legit part of that layout. Similarly, when it comes to website designing, your market will visit your website only to find out or research more about what they require.
If you're having a business in cosmetics, your website is supposed to be vibrant and without any kind of noise items like images of books or computers because that is not your selling item. Thus, designing a website is of sheer importance as a single distortion or misplacement of icons can repel the attraction of the viewers. Automatically, your website will start ranking low in the search engine.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is one of the prime things that the website developer must keep in mind while designing the website. Maybe your target market is visiting your page quite often but due to poor website design, it might not be alluring to your audience. Hence, people will tend to come out of your website and if SEO once started noticing that the traffic rate of your page is lower than the bounce rate, the doomsday is closer!
Social media and mobile-friendly: Social media marketing is the new money-making platform and Instagram is the new business hub irrespective of the size of your business. You can earn in lacs by doing affiliate marketing or can start earning money with your small business idea. Social media is the key because it connects people across the globe.
Educational managers who are transforming their traditional marketing strategy to entirely a digital marketing concept must be fluent in social media marketing. If you're looking for organic traffic, Instagram or Facebook reels are the ideal places. You must have quality content and the content marketing strategy should be relevant to your product and target audience. Using hashtags based on the location on Instagram can fetch you thousands of viewers and trust me; I'm not even fooling around!
Another thing that you must take into consideration is that your website or app should be mobile-friendly. Since we're talking about educational marketing strategy, it is extremely important to have a mobile-friendly website. Parents these days are mostly working and they scroll about multiple schools on social media or SERP on their mobile phones. You can go for paid advertisement if your pocket permits but why invest when there is a robust alternative!
Remarketing: This strategy, also known as retargeting, will end up having successful competition. Managers and leaders of schools can always go for alumni referral using this approach. Remarketing is nothing but in layman's word it is to make people remember that your business exists and you're always up for providing better service to them.
Good managers always tend to retain their loyal customers and over remarketing hits sixer in every ball! Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of promoting a business. Besides, various digital marketing tools can keep a track of your customers. Let's say Mr. X has admitted his daughter to your school and he is having his information in your database. Ahrefz is one such digital marketing tool that will keep an eye on Mr. X regarding any other educational product or service he is looking for on SERP.
If you do not connect the remarketing thing to your social media you are liable to lose a good amount of information. If Mr. X is looking for any other school on SERP your remarketing strategy will remind him about your business on Facebook or Instagram. Many schools believe that remarketing will not help them in their business but it is truly helpful to retain old customers and fetch new ones as well.
Blogs: Your website must have blogs related to the subject matter of your business. Well, now it is important to understand one thing not all readers are fond of blogs and everyone is not a fan of big content. Therefore, you have to be extremely picky while choosing topics for blogs. Your content must be high-performing enough to bring traffic otherwise random content having so resemblance to your product or service is futile.
Various ways can make your blogs attractive and hence your content strategy like using specific keywords, images, stats, etc., will impose a huge effect on your blogs.
THINGS YOU MUST BE MORE CAREFUL ABOUT:
- Your social media or website content must be free of spelling and grammatical mistakes.
- It is important to mention every detail about the identity of the school and highlight those features that make it different from other schools.
- You must treat all your audience the same on social media. If your customers are asking in the comment section about the service you provide, either you reply every one over there or direct them to the inbox by designing the campaign in such a manner.
- You should never try to do much with your posts and uploading too much content in one day is over-the-top.
- Remarketing often leads to spamming customers or followers and hence, you must know where to draw the line.
So the bottom line is that digital media can make you king and can drag you down to the dark pothole. A diploma in educational administration will guide you properly about all these aspects if you're planning to run a school or take over the school's advertisement and promotional segment.
