4 effective marketing strategies to get more school admissions

Your school is the best around. You know it, and now it’s time to let everyone else know it! But with over 30,000 private schools in the U.S. all looking to boost their numbers, there’s some stiff competition if you want to stand out. Here are four marketing ideas to boost school admissions for the upcoming semester.

Create eye-catching posters

Modern marketing runs on graphics. Everything these days has to be visual to attract attention, whether online or in-person. But your graphics are a representation of your school. Sub-par graphics make your school seem sub-par — and who would want to apply to a sub-par school!?

Of course, you’re busy running a school and likely don’t have time to design professional marketing collateral from scratch. That’s where templates come in.

There are thousands of school poster templates available from websites like PosterMyWall. Simply find the template that best fits your school’s brand and customize the information using the easy drag-and-drop editor. You can then upload your designs to your school website and social media channels. You could also print them out to hang around town for some old-school advertising (no pun intended).

Templates are the best way to maintain professional quality without needing professional design skills.

Optimize your website

Your website is your school’s home base on the internet. Whenever someone might have questions about how to apply to your school, they’re likely going to go to your website. And just like your graphics, your website is also a representation of your school. If it’s poorly designed and difficult to navigate, parents and students will likely look elsewhere for their educational needs.

First, you want to optimize your website for the user. Think about the information that would be most important to parents and potential students. Then, make it easy to navigate your site to find that information. The faster and easier someone can find what they’re looking for, the more highly they’re going to think of your website.

Second, optimize your website for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a list of design principles that make it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate your website. And just like human users, search engines like to find high-quality information quickly and easily. If they can quickly find quality information, they’ll put your website higher on the search engine results page (SERP) where more people will see it.

If someone is looking for a school to apply to for next semester, they’ll go online, type in “best school near me,” and your website will pop up front and center. Having a website that’s optimized for both the user and search engines is crucial to any online marketing effort.

Host an open house

You can only learn so much online, and many students and their parents want to see the campus before applying to a school to make sure it’s a good fit. Show potential students how great your school is in-person with an open house.

At your open house, start by giving potential students and their parents a quick presentation about the course offerings at your school. It also doesn’t hurt to hear from some of the teachers that students will have in the upcoming semester.

Following the presentation, give a tour of the campus. Show the classrooms, dining hall, gymnasium, outdoor spaces, and anything else that students would likely use during their time at your school.

Finish up your open house with a social hour over light refreshments. Let potential students and their parents talk to staff members and each other to learn more about your school in a more informal setting. Not only will they get valuable information about your school, but it’ll also help potential students to build early relationships with staff members, encouraging them to apply for the next semester.

Run paid ads on social media

The goal of any marketing campaign is to get your message in front of as many people as possible. In 2024, the best place to achieve that goal is on social media. With over 5 billion active users worldwide, social media is the perfect place to promote your school to a large group of people.

It takes time to grow your social media following organically, which is something you just don’t have with the semester inching ever closer. To maximize your visibility, take out a few social media ads.

With social media ads, you pay the platform a small fee, and it’ll promote your post to an audience demographic of your choice. You can choose to target school-age users who might be looking for new educational opportunities, as well as their parents. You can even target your audience based on location to make your marketing even more effective.

The best part of social media ads is that you can choose what you want to pay, so you don’t have to worry about going over budget. You can easily get thousands of views for just a few dollars per day!

Get more admissions with effective marketing strategies

Don’t let your classrooms sit empty this semester. Start promoting your school to boost admissions by designing professional promotional graphics, optimizing your website, hosting an open house, and running a few social media ads. When all your marketing efforts work together, there won’t be an empty seat on campus for the upcoming semester!