Roberts Digital Educational Marketing

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A case for Google Search Ads in your Marketing Mix

A case for Google Search Ads in your Marketing Mix

Nov 2, 2021 | Blog Posts, Google Ads

Article by Joeline Dabrowski

With billions of searches per day on Google, Search Ads can ensure that you get your brand in front of the right audience at the right time. If you want to start capitalizing on this number of daily searches and earn the attention you need to grow your enrolments, then search ads are a great way to complement your other marketing efforts!

 

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google. The platform allows you to create online ads to reach audiences that are interested in the products and services you offer. Google Ads platform runs on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which means that you pay every time a visitor clicks on your ad.

If you are wondering what some of the benefits of advertising on this platform are, then this article is just for you!

Here are some of the reasons why you should be considering Google Ads.

 

SEVEN Benefits of Google Ads

1. Google has a massive reach

When looking for a solution, Google is generally the place people go to find an answer to their question. With an estimated 63,000 search queries every second, this translates into 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year.
This means that search advertising is the perfect way to ensure you get your message in front of the right audience to help them find the answers to their questions.

2. Google Ads complements your other marketing efforts

Google Ads isn’t your only option when it comes to paid advertising online, but it can compliment all your other marketing efforts. If we consider Facebook and Social Media as an example, both these channels can work together with Google Search and feed off each other if used effectively.
Google Ads is a great place to be to generate leads as campaigns can be set up to target specific audiences. For example, when targeting customers using Google Ads, your typical visitor will have some degree of transactional intent and a successful campaign will leverage this.

3. Harness intent

The biggest difference between the people you’re reaching with Google Ads and the people you’re reaching with other forms of advertising is their intent.
On the search network, though, you’re advertising to people who are looking for something specific, like the “best schools in Melbourne” or “private school options”. When your ad appears, this helps people find a solution and prospects come to you for you to help them find the answers they need.

4. A range of targeting and flexibility

Google Ads provides endless options to customize your campaigns and ads to your particular needs, as well as targeting the audiences you most want to reach.
With Google, there’s something for every school and every prospect at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Google Ads allows us to bid on broad keyword search terms as well as very specific phrase keywords to target people along each stage of their product research phase. This also allows your ads to be fully optimised by knowing if one ad for a keyword is working, but another one isn’t, it can be changed. The beauty being that we can boost your performance for optimal results!

5. Google Ads is Measurable

With almost instant feedback and results, Google Ads allow us to use real time metrics to improve campaigns and make the necessary adjustments.
Google makes everything straightforward and easy to understand. We can measure results and information like clicks, impressions, keywords and budget. We can see what search terms people are looking for and adjust ad copy to ensure your ads are gaining the best results possible.

6. Get quicker results than with SEO

SEO can deliver exceptional long-term value but if you are looking for results straight away, Google Ads is the way to go.
Search ads increase your chances of people seeing you first thing once they type their search query into Google. Ads have evolved and are more engaging especially if you have taken the time to create the write message for your audience. Ads can also be set up to display information about your business so your advert can include things like your phone number, site links, testimonials, information about your location, your opening hours, and so much more!

7. Google Ads results may convert better than organic results

Search Ads are very targeted to peoples search terms. When you look at the results after typing in a search query, you generally will find an Ad to be the first result seen on the page as below. If everything in your ad is working as it should to ensure that your keywords are tied to relevant ad copy and a good landing page experience when someone clicks on your ad, this ensures that your prospect is getting all of the information that they are after making a conversion more likely to happen if someone has taken the step of clicking on your ad.

Why use Google Ads?

 The simple answer here is “Why not?”

 With search ads, there is something on offer for schools of all sizes with different budgets and different advertising goals. Search ads set up with the clear objectives are bound to yield positive ongoing results that can set you apart and ensure you are consistently targeting your audience with the message you want to have heard.

Joeline is our google Ads Specialist. She enjoys looking at the numbers and ways to improve results for clients. Outside of work, she is keeping up with her kids’ social activities and spending quality time with her family.

If you have any questions regarding Google Ads, please email Joeline@robertsdigital.com.au

 

How to create a successful school prospectus design

How to create a successful school prospectus design

Jul 8, 2021 | Blog Posts, Graphic Design

Is your school prospectus design effectively attracting families to enrol at your school, or is it merely a brochure packed with details of your college’s programs?

We may be tempted to play it safe and stick with the familiar, but to transform your prospectus into a powerful marketing tool, you need to engage in innovative thinking and creatively address the major questions prospective families have. 

Our graphic design  team created this all-in-one school prospectus design guide to assist you. We cover everything you need to know to assemble an exceptional school prospectus, from content and creative concepts to distribution strategies.

But before diving in, let’s examine the primary goals of an outstanding prospectus. What exactly are we aiming to achieve?

Planning your school prospectus design

A great school prospectus is a statement piece that pulls together what families have heard on school tours or read about on your website into concise stand out statements that really draw out why a family should choose your school. 

Prospectus’ lift the perception people have about your college. It answers the big practical questions families ask before they can take the next step in the enrolment process. It inspire families to take action. Whether its to book a school tour or submit their application. 

Roberts Digital School Prospectus Design

What your school prospectus design should include

Now that we’ve acknowledged the need for concise content, what specific information should we prioritise? Let’s steer clear of detailing every program your school offers and concentrate on highlighting what makes you different. 

Key content to include in your school prospectus:

  • Contact information.
  • A message from the Principal or Educational leadership that clearly defines the heart of who you are as a school.
  • Parent and student testimonials.
  • FAQs you receive from parents on school tours. 
  • Details on distinguishing programs available to students in entry year levels such as Kindy, Prep and Year 7. 

You also need to provide practical information for families, such as: 

  • College fees and any concessions that are available.
  • Location and bus service information – Add a map or visual that quickly lets families know where you are and where your bus services run.
  • Enrolment procedures and how to enrol in your college.

Roberts Digital Tip: Keeping a prospectus up-to-date can be challenging due to changing variables like school fees and bus routes. So, create a core prospectus containing mostly static information. Then, include regularly changing details as a separate insert that can be easily printed when needed.

Roberts Digital School Prospectus Design

How should you structure your prospectus

After refining your content, the next step is to focus on the structure of your prospectus.

While each school’s marketing prospectus will vary, here’s a sample structure you might consider:

Page 1: Contents

Page 2: Message from the Principal or Educational leader. 

Page 3: Your school’s values and mission.

Page 4: Testimonials from students and parents. 

Page 5: Teaching methods.

Page 6: Reasons to choose the school.

Page 7: Information about the curriculum.

Page 8: Admissions policy.
Page 9: A map of the school, other useful information or statistics.

Roberts Digital Tip: Remember, most school prospectus design will have multiple pages. Use high-quality school photography to breakup the content and reach your page count.

Creating a clear layout

While we may love to think that our prospectus is read from cover to cover by every family that receives it, the unfortunate truth is that most people will only spend 2-3 minutes skimming its contents.

Because of this, we need to learn to use more than just words to communicate our message. Your design should have succinct copy, standout phrases and an eye-catching design that visually communicates our message.

Branding, colours and fonts 

Work with a professional graphic designer to make sure that your branding is consistently represented and that the font, spacing, images and colours are all professionally maximised. 

Using the right images

When it comes to picking which photographs you will use, choose photos of students doing real activities. Your graphic designer will help you to achieve a balance between a professional finish and authenticity caught in real unstaged moments. 

Go digital

Design your prospectus so that it can be used for both online and offline distribution. Incorporate interactive elements such as a QR code for the print version and clickable links to tour bookings and application pages on your website for the online version.

Strategic locations for your school prospectus distribution

A print version of the prospectus should be ready for:

  • Use at open events
  • Handing out at school tours
  • Use at exhibition stalls and promotional stands

An online version can be used to build your email database and made available as a downloadable resource in exchange for parents email and phone number. 

Ensuring all these elements work together for your school prospectus will help you to have a standout design that can be used across all your marketing activities. 

Want an outstanding school prospectus design?

Creating and printing your school prospectus can sometimes feel overwhelming. But at Roberts Digital, we streamline the process for you. We guide you through every step of designing your school prospectus and taking photos. This allows you to concentrate on your primary school duties while we handle the design details.

Reach out to us via email at hello@robertsdigital.com.au or give us a call at 07 3185 5025 to learn more.

 

 

Automated Marketing Reports

Automated Marketing Reports

Mar 18, 2021 | Blog Posts, Marketing Dashboards and Reporting

The beautiful thing about education marketing is that we get to learn from our efforts as we repeat our marketing cycle each year. Our annual marketing calendars allow us to continuously improve based on data from the previous year. The key to our success is looking at the RIGHT data so that we can accurately assess our efforts and adjust for the following campaign or year.

Having a marketing reporting dashboard that can pull data from various sources to give you a single view of how your marketing and enrolments activities are working across the board, is an essential tool for your success. While a reporting dashboard is an amazing tool, the data can get overwhelming. This article attempts to break down how often you should be looking at your data and what data you should be focusing on.

 

Reporting timelines

When setting up our dashboards, the first thing we will need to get our heads around is the timeline of our reporting. Some reports will be reviewed by leadership on an annual basis, while other reports will help us make quick adjustments as we go on a weekly basis.

The key to getting our timelines correct is that we always want to tie in our reporting cycle with our working cycle. Meaning that your reporting directly influences what you are working on. If you have a monthly team meeting, make sure your team has the numbers in front of them to make decisions at that meeting. Also, we never want to run a marketing campaign and then find out at the end of the year that it was ineffective. Rather, we want the data to enable any adjustments needed on the go. To effectively help us inform our decisions, I generally recommend the following timelines as a guide:

  • Data that helps us to inform our overall strategy and marketing spend should be looked at once a year during our planning process.
  • Data on current campaigns should be reviewed weekly so that any campaign adjustments can be made promptly.
  • Data on the enrolments process should be reviewed monthly and annually to allow for adjustments throughout the year and to give you an aggregated view of your success.
  • Website and SEO data should be looked at monthly so that your website can be improved every month.

The key to using a dashboard effectively is to tie in the data review to your working cycle and to have team members accountable for the numbers and bringing ideas to the table.  This is the best way that we can ensure that the numbers influence our work.

 

Which numbers should I look at?

Once we get our hands on the data, it can be overwhelming at first and we can get lost in the numbers. We can spend hours sifting through data and then move on with it having little impact on what we do. To help clear the haze, I have given you a few focus areas we should routinely look at.

 

Know how many people are moving through your enrolments funnel

How many people submitted an initial enquiry, booked a school tour and then applied? It is important to address any bottlenecks in this process. It is important to look at this data monthly but to realise that a monthly view of this data is incomplete, so also review this data as a running total over the year.

 

Measuring your marketing campaigns

When running promotional campaigns we must allow enough time to adjust the campaign as we gauge its success. We will often start our campaigns two weeks earlier so that we can make space for learning and adjustments.

In terms of digital pay-per-click campaigns, the key numbers that will inform your decisions are:

  • Reach – How many unique individuals are being served your ads?
  • Link click through rate – How many people are clicking on your ads through to your landing page?
  • Landing page conversion rate – The percentage of people converting to your action of choice once they have visited the landing page.
  • Frequency – The number of times your audience is seeing your ad during a specific time period. This is important to prevent ‘ad fatigue’.

Even though we cannot tweak our traditional campaigns after they are launched, it is important to measure their overall success so that we can make informed advertising decisions. I break down different ways you can measure your traditional marketing in this article.

 

Your website and SEO performance

Your website plays a central role in our school’s marketing success. We often see people underestimate the impact that a great landing page can have on a campaign. When looking at the data, we want to know that we are growing the audience that visits our website each month, and that the audience is relevant to our offering and a part of our target market. To do this we will need to look at the following numbers:

  • Monthly visitors (users) – This will give you an overall view of your website’s ability to drive traffic.
  • New users – The number of people that visited your website for the first time. This gives you a good indication of whether you are growing your brand awareness or whether your website is just being used by current families.
  • Bounce rate – The bounce rate counts the number of people that visit your website and leave before taking any other action. A high bounce rate is indicative that your website is being found for irrelevant keyword searches and that it is not reaching the right audiences. We want to aim for a bounce rate that is no higher than 40% as a start.
  • Popular pages – Learn which content is the most popular and make this content easier to access from your home page.
  • Popular landing pages – Popular landing pages are different from popular pages, in that it highlights the pages that are driving the most traffic to your site. These are the pages that people land on when they perform a specific search.
  • The keywords that are driving traffic – It is important to look at the keywords that are driving traffic to your website, as well as the potential keywords you should be targeting more effectively. This data can be obtained from Google Search Console.

 

Social Media Engagement

There is no doubt that maintaining our school’s social media content is a major part of our role. It takes hard work to consistently update our communications. We want to be able to focus our time most effectively on the types of content that work for us. These are the numbers that will inform what content you should be posting:

  • Reach – Are we expanding our reach and is our platform ‘feeding out’ our content?
  • Engagement – Is our audience connecting with our content by engaging? We can look at:
    • Likes and comments
    • Shares
    • Video views
    • Clicks
    • The most effective content types – compare the numbers above for the content type. Are videos more engaging than text posts?
  • New Followers – Is our audience growing? Remember to invite the people who engage with your content to like your page.
  • Popular posts/content – Summarise your most popular posts for the month and learn from what you did differently for them.

 

How can a marketing dashboard help?

Marketing dashboards give you a live view of what is happening, strengthens your marketing decision making and presents your data in a beautiful format this is easily shared with others. It takes an experienced professional to set up a data dashboard, but once it is, it will keep serving you through the years.

The Roberts Digital team would love to take you through our marketing dashboard examples so that you can explore your automatic reporting options for your school. Submit an enquiry below if you would like to find out more.

Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au

How to Promote Your School in the Community

How to Promote Your School in the Community

Feb 16, 2021 | Blog Posts, strategy and branding

As education marketers, we can be tempted to think that our brand presence, local advertisements, and billboards do a lot of the heavy lifting for us to get families and students over the line. And while it all plays its part, a great marketer knows that hearts are really won over through active engagement rather than passive advertising. While it’s true that a garden that has not been watered will yield less fruit, the same is true for a community that has not been invested in – it will yield less enrolments from its marketing efforts.

It is important that we take up our role as living and contributing members of our communities, rather than institutions with closed doors and a message to push. If you invest in your local community correctly, you will become:

  • A school that shapes the long-term economics of your local community by increasing local real estate demand and local business.
  • A school that is connected to the heart of our communities and able to build long-term partnerships.
  • A school that is a valuable contributor to its community, a giver rather than a taker, and one that locals will advocate for.
  • The go-to school of choice for your area.

Community engagement has long-term benefits that will secure the viability of your College and is an especially important part of your marketing strategy. Let us look at a few ways you can start to engage your local community.

 

 

Local Business

Engage local businesses by taking up sponsorship opportunities, participating in their events and negotiating signage and brand presence.

Investing directly in local business engagement opportunities can often be more cost-effective than other advertising platforms and often provides more direct engagement opportunities.

 

Community Organisations

Get involved with community organisations such as local sports clubs, churches, youth groups and holiday programs. Again, look for ways where you can participate in their programs rather than just having your logo on their wall.

Key Stakeholders

Spend some time with your team (and parents) to identify key influencers in your local community. These may include local real estate agents, political figures, community advocates and pastors. Build meaningful connections with these people and start to involve them in your community events.

 

Community Events

Events such as Fete’s and Fairs reach far beyond immediate prospective families and are a great way to connect current parents with the local community and to give back. Be strategic about getting the local community involved in your event by inviting local community members onto the planning committee, sending invitations to local sporting groups, businesses and organisations, and including them in your entertainment program for the day. While growing enrolments will be one of your strategies for the day, the feel-good message from the day will make your event a local highlight that the community looks forward to each year.

 

Facilities

So many schools have state of the art facilities that can be used strategically to engage the community. I’ve seen many schools open up their facilities to their communities through public access to after hour gyms, hosting local events such as chamber of commerce meetings, community vegetable gardens and venue and facilities hire and sports coaching.

 

Online Forums

The world of social media has opened up increased access to local community forums. Look for opportunities through local web pages and community based social media groups where you can get involved in the discussion.

Now that we are engaging our local community, it is important that we have an intentional strategy to drive enrolments This can be done through:

  • Your Outdoor Presence – Ongoing local presence is particularly important (we don’t want to hear any more of the cringe worthy comments “I didn’t even know there was a school here”). My favourite way of maintaining presence is through the use of great campus signage, outdoor signage and flagpole banners.
  • Leaflet Drops may be an oldie, but it is a goodie. They are very effective in driving local awareness, especially when following our formula for success.
  • Referral incentives are a great way to leverage members of the community for mutual benefit. Try to build referral schemes with people of influence such as local real estate agents and businesses that work with families and children.
  • Local childcare centers and mums and bubs groups present a great opportunity to hold evening events on the transition to Primary school.
  • Driving people through your Digital “Funnel” is a huge strategy that will help you to catch any community members that are looking for a school.

 

Community engagement that is done correctly will secure the long-term viability of your school. It may be daunting to start, and it takes so much more than the marketing department putting aside an hour a week (see my video on how to grow your marketing team), but your College will flourish in every direction because of it.

Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au

5 Steps to a Successful Independent School Marketing Plan

5 Steps to a Successful Independent School Marketing Plan

Feb 1, 2021 | Blog Posts

Have you ever written your independent school marketing plan only to dust it off halfway through the year and realise you are nowhere near on track? Or maybe, that your plans were a little out of touch or unrealistic? We’ve all been there. And in today’s article, I want to take you through a framework of thinking so that your Independent school marketing plan is actually applied through the year.

I’ve highlighted five key areas that your marketing plan should clarify for you before you take it to your team or leadership and start to implement. Now is the perfect time to grasp an understanding of the bigger picture before the rush into ticking tasks off the list.

1. Research

We may be getting bored of doing market research by now and feel tempted to tick the ‘been there, done that’ box, but I have found that the type of research is what really makes a difference to your independent school marketing plan.

The better we can understand our audience, the better we will be able to reach them in the right place with the right message. For schools, understanding our audience starts with understanding our current parents.

Sure, we’ve gone through the data of where parents live and how much they earn (demographic data) but we want to get down to the behavioural level to know what drives them (qualitative data) – why are they choosing a private school in the first place? What are the fears and dreams for their children that are motivating them to choose a private school?

How do we get this deeper understanding of our parents and audience?

I like to start with quantitative data and then fill in the context with deeper motivating and influencing factors only found in deeper research and questioning: 

  • What industries our parents work in?
  • Where do families live and how do their children get to school?
  • How much do families earn?
  • How big is their household and what is their family structure?
  • What are their favourite brands, local businesses, and hangout spots?

This data is easily available online with resources such as the ABS, neighbourhood profiling data and schools specific research.

I then like to fill in the ‘Why’ with context such as:

  • What major infrastructure projects are happening around your College and what opportunities and threats do they present?
  • If parents aren’t spending their income on private education, what are they spending it on?
  • What are parents perception of your competitors and why are they loyal to your school?
  • How do they spend their time?

Matching your quantitative data with qualitative context will now give you the ability not only to pick the right suburbs for your next marketing campaign.

2. Your whole school offering

I often talk to tired and frustrated school marketers who have tried everything but they don’t seem to be getting the traction that’s needed to grow their school.

When this happens, we need to take a step back to look at the bigger picture and context of what our school is offering compared to what the market needs.

We need to realise when we are trying to sell ice in Antarctica. No amount of good marketing will be successful if we don’t pick up discrepancies between what parents want and our school offering.

Good marketing leadership is about leading your team through understanding the value of your whole school. Offering and helping them to align that with the external demand of what the market wants.

This is challenging for an industry that is so used to looking inwardly and developing services based on educational research rather than what parents want.

These are the 7 P’s of services marketing:

  • Product – Our value offering to parents.
  • Price – Our fee structure, concessions and parent capacity to pay.
  • Place – Our catchment area and understanding where parents travel from, and which new areas to target.
  • People – Our customer service standards.
  • Processes – Efficiently carrying out our services and answering enrolment enquiries.
  • Physical evidence – The appearance of our facilities, staff and students.

After we are sure we have the right offering, we can move our attention on to promotions.

3. Promotions

Your promotions strategy should reach your audience in multiple ways across multiple platforms.

Diversity of placement is essential if we are going to get the cut-through we are looking for both online and offline. In my opinion, a placement strategy should include elements from all of the below:

  • Local marketing – Placements that are going to help you build your local presence and connection. Things like community events, local business connections, online community forums, sports clubs and community engagement activities.
  • Digital – successful online promotions adopt a cross-platform approach to achieve their goals across multiple online spaces. Your digital strategy should be layered and include social media promotions for both ongoing enrolments and events such as open events.
  • Traditional – When it comes to traditional school marketing, I have a preference for outdoor display, like digital billboards, rather than indoor display or magazine advertising. Each school’s area is unique and you may have some excellent options to explore for your school. But generally, try to find the right balance between reach and the correct audience for your ideal placements.
  • Re-engagement – Parents don’t enrol in schools based on a single touchpoint and that is why your promotions campaign needs to be segmented based on where people are at in their discovery journey. Use email and remarketing to it’s fullest potential to reengage audiences as they encounter your school.
  • Lead building – Although most of our marketing efforts will go towards driving actions such as tour bookings and applications. Allocate at least 10% of your money towards building leads early on in the process. That means that we are always building our email and SMS database of local families soon-to-be in the market for a school. Strategically marketing to these parents through email, remarketing and display advertising.

4. Budgets

Many school marketers may feel that their budgets are simply handed down to them and that they have to work with what they have. It is important that we are able to assess if the budget we have is able to achieve our branding and growth objectives.

A very rough guideline is that it costs around $1,000 of overall marketing spend to attract one enrolment. Schools with a $100,000 budget should be attracting 100 new enrolments each year directly as a result of their marketing efforts. That’s not including staff salaries and wages or outsourcing costs. As your marketing matures this cost will come down as the demand for your school increases.

The corporate world is used to spending 30%-40% of their revenue to driving new sales, but schools are in the fortunate position where one enrolment can equate to $15K – $40K of revenue per year (up to $500,000 lifetime value) and a much lower investment percentage is needed. Despite this benefit, I still see schools underestimating their marketing budget and their competition. For schools, at least 1% of your revenue should be spent on marketing.

When managing your marketing budget, ask yourself the following:

  • Do the amounts allocated to each medium reflect the priorities laid out in your strategy? Are we spending money on our priorities?
  • Do the items that cost the most money return the most value for the school? If not, is a change of strategy needed?
  • How much of your budget is actually working for you, or is it tied up on fixed costs such as signage and collateral printing? How can you free up more budget to work for you?

5. Measurement and reporting

School marketers should know how you are going to measure your success before you even start implementing your marketing plan. This will ensure that you have all your measurements in place to track your progress as you go.

The first step to creating a measurable independent school marketing plan is ensuring that you not only set overall goals but that each goal has measurable objectives on how you will achieve your goal.

For example, I would write your goals and objectives as follows:

Goal: increase p-12 Enrolments. Success will be achieved through:

  • A 12% increase in enrolments in 2024.
  • A 10% increase of enrolment enquiries for each year level.
  • A conversion rate from tour to application of 80%.
  • An increase of waiting list applications for future years of 10%.

This will give you very definite benchmarks to measure success. It also help you to ensure that you have multiple strategies to achieve the same goal. Knowing your numbers is key to successful strategy implementation.

Maximise insights with automated reporting dashboards

An automatically updated reporting dashboard is your best option to keep on top of the numbers and show off your success to leadership. Your reporting dashboard should provide you with key figures including:

  • Your overall website visitor numbers including total users, the number of returning visitors and your website bounce rate
  • The number of goal completions including conversions such as enquiries, tour bookings and applications.
  • The conversion rate of specific landing pages (the number of visitors received versus how many visitors opted to take an action such as submit an enquiry and book a tour)
  • Your most popular website content
  • Which content that is driving visitors (Landing page views)
  • Which keywords are driving traffic (Search terms)

The reporting possibilities are endless! Dashboards can also include data on your organic social media traffic, paid advertising and campaign tracking.

Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au

07 3185 5025