In the old days, to market your school, there was direct mail, with perhaps a mix of printed brochures, print/radio/TV advertising, and attendance at relevant events.
Now, there’s a way to market your school more effectively, using digital means. Targeted social media marketing and advertising can be useful, as can search engine marketing. But the most effective methods involve collecting contact information and using it for email marketing purposes.
There are lots of ways to collect that information at events and through your website, for example. Then you can create “lead” profiles for every contact — current student families and prospects alike — in a “customer relationship management system” such as Salesforce. Once you have that information in the system, there’s so much you can do with it.
The cool thing about Salesforce is that you can create marketing and informational emails and store them in the system. You can shoot the emails to whichever “leads” you want, whenever you want, at the click of a button.
You can send information pieces to current student families. You can alert prospective students of open houses and other events. You can solicit and acknowledge donations. All within the Salesforce system.
The best part is that you have a record of everything that went out, to whom, and even who responded. You can easily evaluate how effective marketing campaigns were by running reports in Salesforce.
This might all sound complicated, but once you have a Salesforce system set up, it becomes second nature.
We specialize in setting up custom Salesforce systems for educational institutions. Just drop us a line and we will tell you how your school can get online in a substantial way.
Joe Paone is a content strategist at DonorLynk who loves informing nonprofits.