Lakes Area Montessori in Commerce Township
// May 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Private Schools
Archive for Private Schools
What makes you private school different than your competition?
// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Private Schools
Taking some time and explaining to the parents of your future students on what make you school follow a particular road is a useful way to start a conversation. May be you manage a Catholic private school with a heavy emphasis on teachings based on your faith. May be you run a Montessori adhering to a visual style of teaching. Whatever makes you special. Whatever differentiates you.
It needs to be said and explained and better showed to the parents via online video.
Not everybody in the world knows or understands the advantages of Montessori or a private religious school over public schools. Take some time and explain it to them long before they are touring your school facilities.
Private School 2.0
// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Private Schools
Every school in America has a variation of this bumper sticker: I am proud parent of ______ school student.
It is time you put online bumper stickers where the most parents are: the ones of your students and the ones that have not become your students yet.
At our firm we have a in-school marketing program called Private School 2.0 – a fun term for some serious effort on our part to enlist parents of your students to go beyond PTO meetings and volunteer duties. This is about enlisting their help to spread the good word of mouth about your school to everybody who they know. It means we establish your FaceBook, Myspace, Twitter presence with their help. It means that we work as a team with them to spread your online videos everywhere your future student’s parents are found. It means giving online badge out that the proud parents can embed in their blogs, one their Twitter pages, even on their personal websites.
It means that you have arrives at the 22nd century way ahead of your competition.
You have a powerful ally – what parents say about you
// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Private Schools
Looking back at our own experience in choosing a private school for our children and after talking to a larger number of other parents whose children go to private schools also, I have came to the conclusion that very few things hit the power of what the parents of the students going to your private school say about you.
Nothing comes close.
Look I understand the power of testimonials. Hell, we shoot them all the time for clients in sort of industries but lemme tell you I have never seen them as effective as they are in the case of private schools. You can that they are the deal breaker. Recently during a discussion with a private school client I told the owners that if they had to choose in between working with our team and they had to choose between doing a Rock Star You video story or create a video of nothing but parents talking candidly about how their own experiences : I will not be able to choose. That is how powerful these parents authentic stories are.
There is also a sidebar to it which we come in – don’t let these videos marinate on your website only for enrollment time of the year. Encourage the parents who are in these videos to help you spread the word about your school that they love. For example ask them to write comments on these videos on YouTube or ask them to embed them in their Facebook page.
What parents should know about your school before your next Open House
// April 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Private Schools
Around two years ago we were looking for a private school for my two daughters. We wanted some place close to our home and we wanted a place that we and our daughters would love to go every day. Obviously the first place both of us looked at was the Internet as we were shooting emails out to friends asking for recommendations for schools that were in our neighborhoods.
The first thing that shocked me on how many schools had no websites. Or the websites looked like they were made using MS-Word back in 1999. None of them made any attempt to turn the online visiting parents or grandparents curiosity into excitement as in “Hey I love this school, lets go and check them out right away.”
I found two websites that actually had some video of the school premises and not surprisingly they were the two biggest name in our metro area.
I ended up going to almost a dozen open houses before we made our decision but I could not stop thinking that how much easy it would be for a private school to raise its conversion rate from curious parent to proud student parent if they had used video to tell the story of their school and the satisfaction of the existing students parents as the first contact that prospective parents were getting.
Teachers are not closers yet almost every single open house I went to ended up a teacher trying to “convince” me half heartedly that this school was the one. The staff is no better at this either.
Choosing a private school for parents who obviously are about to spend a significant amount of money, may keep their children for years and years in your school and may even become your big referral source of their friends to your school simply cannot be left to chance.
Don’t wait for the Open House for parents to come to your private school and get excited. That is a job for your online marketing strategy especially your online video story can do immensely well.