Tag Archives: digital prospectus

Kampus24 is more than a digital prospectus

It’s true. Kampus24 is a unique digital communications platform which schools don’t just use for their digital prospectus. The digital platform can help you recruit better staff and engage parents in virtual events — it can be used as an alumni communication tool, and you can even use it to aid your fundraising efforts.

It’s a pretty versatile tool that can help you stand out from other schools while delivering unparalleled service for prospective and current parents. 

This blog explores more about the different ways you can utilise your Kampus24 experience to transform how your school communicates. 

Recruit the best teachers

Applying for a job at a school follows almost exactly the same process regardless of the school. The school viewing, application, invited for an interview, teach a class, talk through a presentation, there might be an exam, an interview with the board. The list continues. This process is familiar to all teachers.

But getting them to apply in the first place is where the initial hurdle lies.

How do you make your school stand out? How do you make prospective teaching staff want to work for you?

With Kampus24, you can create an experience for specific job roles. You can gather together all relevant information. Perhaps a video introduction from the head talking about the position, a page about what your school values and how they support teachers and don’t forget, you can share details about how to apply for the position and your interview process on there, too.

Creating this pre-application platform gives teachers a brand new recruitment experience — an experience that shows your school in a fantastic light. 

See a recruitment example in action here.

Build better relationships with alumni

Alumni are valuable. They’re the best way to spread the word about your school. You want them to share their positive experiences from their time at your school, and you want to harness their continued support.

Building better relationships with your alumni can mean you create a community of past alumni and other stakeholders (such as donors) — and leverage these relationships to bolster your fundraising efforts by increasing attendance at your school events.

Raising essential funds is an important part of any school’s marketing strategy. But creating an engaged community can be a challenge. That’s where Kampus24 can help.

You can use the digital platform to keep in touch with alumni all in one place. Share updates and facilitate important conversations. Keeping in regular contact with your alumni means no one becomes a stranger, and they continue to advocate for you long after they’ve left.

Become a master of virtual events

Covid-19 forced us all to embrace virtual communication, and we adapted. But perhaps surprisingly, 72% of Vimeo survey respondents said they would continue attending the same amount of virtual events in 2022. So no one is in a hurry to get dressed and leave their houses for events.

Hosting virtual events means you’re not limited to who can attend. Host events for parents of international students regardless of their location or bring together all your donors in one place to inform them of the latest changes in your school.

Virtual events are more cost-effective, there are no risk assessments to consider, and you can host them right inside your Kampus24 experience using our auditorium feature. Host live events or upload recorded events so all your participants can view content in their own time. 

And don’t forget — you can use it as a digital prospectus

The time we spend on mobile devices has steadily increased over the last few years. Data from Statista shows we’ve gone from spending three hours a day in 2019, rising to 4 hours a day in 2021. Basically, we’re living on our phones. And with work and busy schedules, most of us aren’t spending this time until the evenings and weekends.

That means you must ensure parents can access important information about your school 24/7. But having a website just doesn’t cut it anymore. People crave personalised and mobile-optimised experiences, which is something your website can’t offer alone.

Other benefits of a digital prospectus using Kampus24:

  • Saves time, money and energy compared to printing and proofreading a paper prospectus
  • Helps you deliver that seamless digital experience we all expect from brands
  • Gives your school admissions and marketing teams trackable and usable data on how parents consume your content

Learn more about how our Kampus24 experience has transformed other schools’ admissions process by reading our success stories.

 

What does digital comms give your school that print doesn’t?

Digital is the preference when it comes to modern-day marketing tactics, with marketers allocating 57% of their budgets to digital marketing, with plans to increase digital spending a further 16% in 2023. This clearly shows investment in digital isn’t slowing down. 

So if your school isn’t making the most of its digital channels, you’re missing out on a lot of benefits, from being able to confidently measure ROI and automating comms to personalising all communication.

This blog explores the benefits of digital comms over print, showcasing the need for further digital adoption in your school.

It demonstrates clear ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the aim of the game when it comes to any marketing tactic, but print communication can’t deliver the same trackable ROI that digital can. 

Let’s use email versus letters as an example. Sending a letter can be a personal way to build a connection with parents, but you don’t know whether they opened the letter, whether they read it, or even received it. Plus, sending letters can be costly and it’s not the most environmentally-friendly approach.

But with email, you can see who opened it, whether the copy resonates with them enough to click through, and you can re-target audience members who’ve yet to engage with your emails.

Tap into new audiences easily

The world is essentially your oyster when it comes to digital marketing. You can create retargeting campaigns that follow users previously visiting your website around the internet, you can target relevant sites to market to similar audiences and reach new customers, and channels like social media mean you can market to anyone in the world at the click of a button.

Digital marketing opens your school to a host of prospective parents and students — whether international or local. 

Complete control over budget

If you notice a mistake in your print marketing, you can’t just delete the campaign and start again — it’s already out there in the wilderness. But with digital comms, you can pause/stop ad campaigns at the touch of a button. You can amend your budget as the campaign is running and make tweaks to the strategy throughout, rather than waiting until the end of the campaign to see if it’s been successful.

Completely controlling your budget is pretty handy when you want to deliver a reactive campaign to engage parents.

The ability to automate

Automating isn’t just a task that saves your school admissions and marketing teams precious time, it helps give your audience immediate answers to important questions and enables them to self-serve. 

  • With your website accessible 24/7, you can make the most of automation by using chatbots to help serve important school information or use it to help guide users through navigating your site to find what they’re looking for. 
  • Automate emails so whenever parents interact with your site, i.e. fill in a form or download something, they receive immediate communication from your school. 
  • Automate your feedback process to keep on top of changing parental behaviours.

How else can you use automation in a school setting? 

We’re glad you asked! Kampus24 is launching a new automated prospectus experience, allowing parents to select the subjects and topics they’re interested in, which automatically generates a bespoke, personalised prospectus experience link, delivered to them via email.

Increasing the possibility of self-service with a feature like this means parents are empowered to make their own decisions and explore your school and what it has to offer without complications. This automated prospectus functionality frees up your school teams too. It’s a win-win situation.

Super-targeted content messaging

Personalisation has long been a theme chased after by marketers, and it pays off, because by personalising web experiences brands can expect a 19% increase in sales. 

Print is static and usually created en masse — materials like brochures, leaflets, prospectuses — all these print communications speak to a large unfiltered audience. They cannot easily address specific audience concerns or problems as dynamically as digital can.

With the help of digital, you can build custom email workflows to nurture segmented audiences until they’re ready to learn more about your school. Digital gives you complete control over how you speak to your audience members.

Learn more about how Kampus24 digital prospectus can elevate your school marketing strategy. Register here to watch a 10-minute demo.

Getting stakeholder buy-in for a digital prospectus

When you come across a new idea to help your school compete with others, improve student admissions and increase parental engagement, you just want to jump straight in and get started. 

But before you can do that, you first need to persuade other stakeholders it’s a good idea. Getting stakeholders involved can mean everyone works together as a team, and the idea implementation will go smoother.

When broaching the idea of a digital prospectus, you might need to include a variety of stakeholders — teachers, headteachers, school administrators, bursars, and board members. If all these stakeholders are on board, this will make getting budget sign-off much easier.

So when it comes to getting them on board with your digital prospectus idea, how can you go about pitching it most effectively? 

Identify what motivates your stakeholders

When pitching your idea, finding out what motivates your stakeholders to make decisions is key. Are they looking for a time-saving initiative? Something that will put bums on seats? Or something that maintains the school’s high standards? Or maybe they’re looking for all three.

Understanding what to focus on in your pitch can help you tailor your proposal to get majority stakeholder buy-in.

Alongside understanding their motivations, it’s essential to address their outward concerns. For example, we’ve noticed a lot of conversation between board members and marketers about the benefits of Kampus24 and how it works alongside the school website. Kampus24 is far more tailored than a website and offers the chance to build bespoke experiences for each student and parent who shows interest in your school. Yet Kampus24 works seamlessly alongside your website to push the customer to the next stage of the funnel. Make addressing queries like these a priority to help you persuade your stakeholders further.

P.S. Check out our FAQs page to help you allay any other concerns or queries.

Let case studies do the talking for you

Case studies give real-world examples of how a digital prospectus can seamlessly integrate into and bolster your marketing efforts. According to research, 77% of B2B buyers said testimonials and case studies were the most effective types of content.

And we have plenty of success stories you can weave into your pitch. Feedback from other independent schools shows how much Kampus24 can help support you as you reach for your business objectives:

“For the customer, it’s something new and special as it’s more tailored to them than the website or other marketing collateral.”

Liz Webb, Head Of Marketing, Millfield School

 

“At King Edward VI School, we want to stay ahead of the game; schools really can’t afford to stand still. We want to recruit the best students and staff and be at the cutting edge of technology to set ourselves apart from other schools. Thanks to Kampus24, we can achieve this.”

Shane McCrink, Assistant Headmaster, K.E.S.

P.S. If you’d like a demo Kampus24 experience for your school to show in your pitch presentation, please let us know, and we can arrange that for you. Get in touch.

Focus on the long-term benefits

Although a digital prospectus might be an investment initially, what benefits will it bring you in the long term? Paint the bigger picture for your stakeholders, so they can understand what to expect and how it could enhance your school’s marketing strategy for years to come.

Long-term benefits include:

  • Improving parental relationships.
  • Creating a differentiator for your school.
  • Helping you deliver the best customer experience possible.

But make sure to tailor the benefits to the stakeholder motivations you identified earlier in this process.

Include them in every stage of the process

After getting stakeholders on board, you’ll want to keep them involved in the process as it progresses. Keeping them involved means getting everyone up and running on the new piece of software will be easier than starting from scratch. They’ll understand how it’s implemented and how you can best use the software, i.e. staff recruitment, student admissions, webinars and other events.

It’s all well and good implementing software that can provide many benefits, but if the staff don’t understand how it works and how it’ll be used by the school going forward, they can’t confidently speak about it with parents. You need everyone to be adequately informed about the software and what it can deliver — word of mouth is still a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.

If you want to see Kampus24 in action and learn exactly how it can help your school, register to watch 10-minute demo.

How digital tech can improve your student admissions process

Whether your school is running at capacity, and the emphasis is on quality, not quantity, when it comes to student admissions, or whether you’re undersubscribed and need more bums on seats — tech can help you achieve your school business objectives.

Tech makes communicating effortless — it’s become easier to personalise communications to help build that critical connection — it allows brands to reach directly into consumers’ lives, delivering value which helps convert them more quickly.

And you might have noticed already — but what works for one school might not work for another. Your school is unique, and you need to support and elevate it. 

Let’s see how digital tools can specifically improve your student admissions process.

Tech gives you access to useful data

Your school website is a fundamental part of your student admissions process (or it should be). Parents expect schools to have websites. But you must ensure your website delivers the best possible user experience for prospective students and their parents.

The good thing is that tech removes the need for manual reporting on website performance. This frees up your already busy admissions team and gives you insight into how your audience thinks, analyse content easily and measure how it’s consumed. 

For example, are your virtual school tours performing well? Maybe this is an indication that you should produce more video content. Or does data show users are getting confused and dropping off your homepage? Maybe it’s time to re-assess this page’s layout and user experience. 

Insightful data like this helps you make decisions about your future tactics, enabling you to tweak your marketing strategy as it progresses. It makes your team proactive and reactive, which are both key to a successful student recruitment marketing strategy.

What digital tech can help you achieve this?

Google Analytics — this is free and helps you understand how your audience is using your website. Using the left-hand menu, navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > All pages to analyse all your site pages — dig deeper to find pages with the highest bounce rate, the most engaging pages and more.

Hot Jar — This tech, and other tech like this, helps you monitor how users are actually navigating around your website. Which areas are they hovering over the most? And which pages do they click through to? — Basically, what does their journey around your site look like, and how can you change it for the better?

Tech makes your admissions team more efficient

Tech can help automate manually-draining processes, making teams more productive and efficient. Automation helps streamline your processes and does a fantastic job of moving prospective parents further down the marketing funnel for you — particularly when automating email workflows.

Set up automated email workflows to welcome new parents and drip feed relevant content and information to them, helping develop that strong relationship that matters so much.

Parents also want to see schools active on social media, but social media can be time-consuming for admin staff. So instead, use marketing tech (like Hootsuite or Buffer) to help schedule social posts in advance that align with your student recruitment strategy. 

Tech streamlines your processes and helps you deliver marketing personalisation, two things that can help make your admissions strategy successful. 

Digital tech helps you stand out

Every school wants to stand out from the crowd, and at Kampus24, we help schools achieve this goal. Let’s say you’re a parent researching some schooling options. All the schools have pretty much the same offering and similar student admissions process; there’s nothing to separate your options except the basic criteria, e.g. location. 

But imagine a school that has a digital experience, an experience that’s personalised to your child and their likes and interests — an experience like this can help capture your audiences’ attention straight away and show them why your school is the best fit. 

By speaking one-to-one with parents or speaking directly with their education agent, you can understand exactly what their child wants or needs from your school. This enables you to quickly create a bespoke digital prospectus, where the parent and student can immerse themselves in your school experience. The digital prospectus seamlessly guides them through getting to know your school, key members of staff, application pack access, subject summaries, and more.

To stand out from the competition, you need to show you’ve listened to what prospective parents and students want and what they’re interested in — and by building a bespoke digital experience, accessible 24/7 from any device, you’re showcasing your school in the best light possible. 

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how our digital prospectus experience can help your school, book a demo. 

Four mistakes to avoid when marketing your independent school

There’s more to marketing than a few sporadic social media posts and the odd email to parents; it’s something that, when done correctly, can fill your student pipeline for years to come. Good marketing can be the difference between a parent choosing your school over another; it’s as simple as that.

So when it comes to actively marketing your independent school, what should you avoid doing? Here are four common mistakes made by others that you should give a wide berth.

Not taking time to understand your target audience

Let’s say you’ve come up with a brilliant campaign idea, you love it, and everyone in your marketing and admissions team loves it. But have you considered the people you want it to resonate with? Will they love it, too?

What you think ultimately doesn’t matter, and that’s why understanding who you’re targeting is crucial to the success of any school marketing campaign. Take time to understand how your school differs from others and how does that align with what parents and students want?

People want a personal approach when getting marketed too, and the only way you can deliver a personal approach is by intimately understanding your audience. Fifty-six per cent of companies have generated higher quality leads using buyer personas, so take time to create detailed personas to understand their challenges and pain points. 

Suggested reading: The importance of a personalised admissions process.

 

Focusing on vanity metrics

You need to focus on metrics that mean something. For example, website traffic is an empty metric on its own; it’s just numbers — you don’t know who those people are, whether they’re relevant, or even looking to apply for an independent school. 

Instead, focus on conversions, bounce rate and top organic landing pages. Data from analysing these metrics can help paint a picture of how your audience is using your site. For example, if your bounce rate is high, your marketing messaging isn’t matching up with wherever they’ve come from. Make sure any ad copy or social copy written matches the page you’re directing the user to.

If it doesn’t match or add immediate value to the user, they’ll leave and look elsewhere.

Measuring conversions is one of the more useful metrics you can focus on. Whether they’ve filled in a form, downloaded your prospectus or accessed gated content, you can get a real feel for which content on your site helps drive actions and optimise these pages to ensure maximum conversions.

 

Spreading resources too thinly

When TikTok popped up, many brands jumped at the chance to create engaging, viral content to wow prospective customers. And although TikTok can deliver some great content reach, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should set up an account immediately.

You need to consider your internal resources. Sure, there’s an expectation that schools should be present on social media platforms, but you need to be realistic about delivering a targeted strategy.

Lack of resources seems to be a big problem, with more than 25% of social media marketers saying a resource shortage is their biggest obstacle to a successful social media plan. If you only have three staff members in your school marketing and admissions team, with a whole host of other tasks to complete, do you have time to pour energy and strategic thinking into several social media channels? 

Focus on the channels you know your audience use and take it from there. Build an engaged following, create and distribute content that they want to see and interact with — prioritise your audience and their needs but never forget about your resource capacity.

 

Not embracing the power of a digital prospectus

Paper is old-hat. How many times have you visited a trade show or a conference event and collected bits of paper information? And then how many of them went straight in the bin? 

When parents are deciding on the perfect school for their child, they’re going to be inundated with many paper prospectuses. They’ll be flicked through once, perhaps twice, and then they might gravitate towards the school website. But what about giving them that effortless digital experience from the start?

A dynamic online prospectus delivers personalised comms by quickly gathering information about subjects and clubs individual students are interested in. And in a matter of minutes, voila, you’ve created something exceptionally different to other schools. You’ve created an instant connection with that new family, and you can track all their movements easily on a dashboard. Strike up a conversation about the rowing club page they’ve visited 10 times — make each conversation count!

 

If you’re wondering how to deliver more personalisation in your school admissions process, check out how Kampus24 can help you. Register to watch a demo.

The importance of a personalised school admissions process

Why you should personalise your school admissions process

If someone took the time to listen and understand what you wanted from the school admissions process and then delivered it, you’d feel pretty special — like they cared about you. And that’s exactly what personalising the process does for parents. Personalisation means parents are no longer just a number, a cog in a machine, but a valued potential customer.

The school admissions process has largely remained the same for many years. Parents show interest in the school; they look through a paper prospectus, attend an open day (perhaps virtually if international), and register for the entrance exam. 

But it’s time for a change. No longer should parents be subject to a cold and traditional admissions process — with 99% of marketers agreeing that personalisation helps advance customer relationships, it’s the age of personalisation!

It helps you stand out from other schools

If every other school or college you’re competing with offers the same admissions process, it’ll be the usual things that separate them from others — location, reputation, subjects offered etc. But what if you could stand out additionally by providing a truly unique digital experience, a superbly personalised one? 

Data shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Whether buying from a brand or a school, the experience should be no different. If anything buying from a school is more important because it’s a personal decision they’re making on behalf of their child.

Delivering personalised experiences is the expectation. 

You can solve specific problems with personalisation

Not every child is interested in the same subjects; that much is obvious. So why share information on every subject? Instead, consider personalising their journey with you by highlighting subjects of major interest. They want to learn more about how they can fit into your school or college as an individual, so treat each student needs as an individual.

Building a personalised admissions process means the student gets to learn about your school on a more intimate level, and you them. The discovery period, where you find out all about their child’s needs and wants, helps you understand the motivation behind their interest in your school. 

It enables parent and student relationships to be nurtured

Parents considering your school are making a considerable financial commitment, perhaps one of the biggest in their lives, so they should receive an outstanding, tailored service. If the approach centres around the child, it’s easy to show them where your priorities lie — which is delivering the best possible educational experience for their child.

Being able to generate a personalised experience outside of the standard website offering generic information, you stand to start every new parent and student relationship on a positive note. They feel truly welcomed and special — and that’s where our digital experience comes into play.

It helps you understand your target audience better

Personalisation can help you inform your communication strategies with other parents going forward because you’re learning more about each parent through the admissions process. Instead of getting to know parents and students when they start at the school, you’re starting the relationship earlier.

Understanding their reasons for considering your school, in particular, can help you re-frame the picture you had of your target customer. After all, personas change all the time, and it’s essential to stay informed of these to give you that competitive edge you so desperately need when connecting with new parents.

But you need to remain consistent across all touchpoints 

To ensure your personalised admissions process is successful, you need to make sure you’re consistent across all channels. If you’re inviting them to an event, make sure it’s relevant to their needs and gives them value. Otherwise, you’ve built a personal relationship with them just to ruin it with en mass, generic communication. If you’re wondering how you can do this, audience segmentation can help you sift out customers who might not be relevant to receive particular communications.

It’s a good idea to keep a bank of notes in your CRM system so you can refer to any personal conversations you’ve had previously with particular families. This can help you keep that well-crafted bond intact, regardless of who they deal with at your school.

 

If you’re wondering how to deliver more personalisation in your school admissions process, check out how Kampus24 can help you. Register to watch a demo.

Admissions: What is the key to recruiting students today?

When talking with schools and colleagues, I hear the same sentiment around student recruitment crop up in almost every conversation. Regardless of the school, everyone acknowledges that attracting new students in today’s world is more complex than ever.

The five main pain points for every school marketer

  • Brexit – Everyone is unsure what Brexit means for international families and how it impacts their decision to send their child to the UK. There is also the additional concern about what it will mean for the future, further increasing the sense of instability and uncertainty.
  • Covid-19– The pandemic changed everything – and that is not an overstatement. Many traditional marketing activities were obliterated as travel restrictions and lockdowns brought admissions events to a screeching halt. And while the restrictions and lockdowns are gone, the changes they brought about are here to stay.
  • Financial pressures – Schools today are under immense financial pressure. Increasing fees, a more discerning parent base, and other external policy factors like pensions mean schools are operating on tighter budgets and smaller margins.
  • Changing demographics – Current birth rates and increasing competition from local state schools mean that there is a smaller recruitment pool, further tightening the window of opportunities for fee-paying schools.
  • Consumer behaviour – Apart from the expectation of a long tradition of academic excellence in your school, parents now also expect a superior customer experience. In some cases, parents are long listing schools as they expand their search and take their time exploring the other facets of a school, such as pastoral support and wellbeing.

A direct consequence of these issues is that parents are taking longer deciding and are becoming more selective. Schools must rethink how they market and attract students – and staff.

Matching marketing to optimum student recruitment

What schools need is a way to adapt and align their marketing efforts with the phases of the student recruitment journey to optimise opportunities and meet the needs of the modern discerning parent.

Let’s look at each step and the best practices for this phase:

  • Initial enquiry
  • Open event
  • Follow up
  • Prospectus

Initial enquiry

Many parents start their journey on your website. If we think of our website as akin to a shop window, what does your website say about your school? What items are you highlighting? Are you giving a potential family insight into your school if you have only a few areas on show? Will those resonate with each parent?

Here is where schools must offer a more personalised shopping experience. Schools can no longer presume that parents will travel globally or even regionally to get a sense of the school – the website must do that. The power of a great website is invaluable, especially, when you combine it with content that is adapted to a prospective student. If someone is coming from overseas, it addresses concerns about accommodation, airport pickups, what the classes are like, and what is on offer in terms of the weekend and after school activities. It can also demonstrate how parents monitor and stay connected with their children.

Your website and any interaction with parents from the website must offer intimacy and an array of content that illustrates why your school is the best fit. From video to Zoom calls, it is about enabling a digital-first and customer-centric approach. Great content will give parents the necessary insights and material to decide. While all formats are recommended, video must play a pivotal role. Video helps prospective families get a sense of your school in real life. It brings the viewer into the classroom and onto the cricket field in a way that marketing copy simply cannot.

Personalise communications

When schools receive an enquiry, they often follow up with a generic link to the website or a standard prospectus. This is a huge missed opportunity. Your school will likely offer a personalised learning path once the student is with you; why not reflect that by providing a personalised approach to your school. Replicate the same personalised experience across all your interactions with the customer, even your digital interactions.

Top tips for personalising the follow up:

  • Tailor your response for each family by summarising their specific needs or, at the very least, segment families into different needs and requirements for follow-up.
  • Link prospects up with similar current families who can give them affirmation and feedback that answers their specific queries while advocating for your school.
  • Arrange calls with specific staff who would be dealing directly with the family –  for example, a hockey or tennis coach.
  • Look at analytics on content that has resonated well with different segments of parents, such as YouTube videos or social content, and reshare it.
  • Share specific links to various areas of your school- again, if they align with the family’s needs.
  • Host regular Q+A or Ask the Expert sessions so that they can continue to interact and learn more about your school.
  • For schools with more significant numbers, leverage the full power of your customer relationship management (CRM) system to automate the workflow and deploy an email nurture campaign.

Open Day event

Focus on conversion rates not sign ups

There is a serious opportunity that many schools are missing out on, and that is leveraging the Open Day event to continue the conversation and possible conversion. Ask yourself what marketing activities you have planned for those who sign up for this event.

Build a communication plan that incorporates interaction and engagement both pre- and post-event. Communicate with families regularly in the run-up to the event; make these interactions as personalised as possible. You want to drum up excitement and ensure that those brought on the journey stay the course. It is also essential to evaluate those attending the event so that those in attendance are genuine prospects, and you will see the conversion rates that you want.

Personalise the experience

Make sure each family feels as though the event is for them on the day itself. Preparation is key to providing a custom experience that answers questions and shows the areas and facilitates that resonate with that individual family. This means you have to understand and know each family before the event. Still, if the result is that the family moves your school to the top of their list, then the time is well spent.

Follow up

Again, as I mentioned earlier, it is critical to ensure that each step of the journey is aligned with a marketing activity or interaction. Once the event is over, continue the conversation to reinforce what the family has seen and enjoyed in person.

Take the time to ensure that these communications are sent promptly after the event and tailor them to each family again. Remind them of what they saw and experienced at your school and aim to further the conversation by asking if there is anything more they’d like to know.

Also, schools should consider offering hybrid events. The pandemic provided us with a new experience. Many people now recognise the benefits that online offers, especially those who have multiple commitments, travel issues, or would rather attend virtually for medical or social reasons.

Prospectus

Your school’s digital prospectus plays a critical role in attracting new families. It also can provide insight into behaviour and trends if you utilise the data it generates for analytics. For example, it can illustrate what content is driving conversion, popular format, and what areas underperform.

Personalise the prospectus to fit the stage of the buying journey

A one size fits all prospectus is simply no longer a viable marketing tool. Schools need to personalise the prospectus to match each stage of the buying journey, tailoring the content to each parent’s needs and concerns.

A digital prospectus generates a wealth of opportunity and discovery while

meeting the needs of parents in a digital world. Expand and drive your reach by sharing your prospectus in a format that is easily accessible, on-demand, 24/7, from anywhere in the world. A digital prospectus opens up your options and means that you can include video, providing a unique glimpse into the day-to-day experience of your school.

Creating a digital prospectus allows you to include more dynamic and immersive content like videos, user-generated content, podcasts, fireside chats, photo albums, links to other websites, and downloadable content. Content that enables you to present a better, more memorable experience of your school.

Future-proofing your student recruitment efforts

The key to ensuring that you continue to attract students lies in how you share your school with prospects. It is imperative that you employ a digital-first approach to raise your brand profile and stay competitive. It is also essential that you make the student recruitment journey highly personal, one which resonates with each family. If you show that you are continuously looking for ways to make families feel connected with your school from the very first interaction, you will see success in your admission numbers.

If you’re wondering how to deliver more personalisation in your school admissions process, check out how Kampus24 can help you. Register to watch a demo.

Steve Spriggs, Managing Director of Kampus24

 

Why it is Time to Move to a Digital Prospectus

Deciding what school to choose for your child is difficult. And when that choice involves moving location, country, perhaps even continent, it becomes exponentially more complex. Parents will want to conduct as much research as possible to ensure that the school they select will be the perfect fit for their child. How they conduct this research and how easy it is to find out as much as possible about each school can be tricky. Typically, schools offer open days and, of course, a printed brochure. The power and the potential of a digital prospectus are such that schools can no longer afford to ignore it. Covid-19 accelerated the switch to digital, but even before the pandemic, schools were taking notice of the shift in both expectations and research habits of parents.

Taking steps towards a digital prospectus

Most schools are taking steps to move towards a more digital approach using a mix of print and digital PDF versions. 

Aside from the obvious sustainability benefits, a digital prospectus offers huge scope to reconsider what content parents would best engage with. There is always the temptation to replicate the generic print prospectus online in a digital PDF format. Yet, that feels like a missed opportunity when you consider the potential of digital. With a digital prospectus, you can share all types of authentic content that will offer a real life view into your school and what it’s truly like to study there. Consider things like impactful videos, podcasts or student soundbites. This content reflects what your school is about in a way paper cannot do. 

The blog below outlines why schools that embrace a fully digital prospectus will be ahead of the game when it comes to offering a heightened customer experience and differentiating themselves from their competitors.

Meeting the needs of parents in a digital world

For starters, we know that 68% of Gen Y, or millennials, expect that the buying journey, whether it’s for a fridge or a new car, provides the convenience of omnichannel accessibility. This expectation that as buyers we can experience the product or service in multiple formats, is now so de rigueur that schools put themselves at a considerable disadvantage without it. 

Only through a digital prospectus can schools offer a more immersive experience of their school through high impact photos, videos and user generated content accessible across any device. Long gone are the days where parents spent their weekends and evenings flicking through a pile of generic print prospectuses. Prospective parents expect an experience of your school that is both accessible and convenient. Only with digital can parents and families decide where and how they want to consume the story of your school. 

Offers flexibility and adaptability 

A key differentiator between the digital prospectus and the traditional print item is that you can shape it to fit each stage of the buying journey. It is not something that is only available when parents come to your open day – it’s always on. You can easily adapt it to truly reflect your school’s community. Because it is digital, you can provide prospective parents and students with the ability to watch targeted video content, listen to podcasts, fireside chats, soundbites from current pupils and staff. You can also optimise any user-generated content, which will always resonate well as it gives people the experience we are so accustomed to in our personal buying life and habits. It can capture and reflect your school’s identity and culture in a way that a one-dimensional, generic, print brochure cannot. 

What is unique about a digital prospectus is that you can apply it to every stage of the admissions journey. Whether the family is researching your school or has completed a tour, it can serve as additional content that reinforces why your school is the best choice.  We have already seen schools use digital as the first point of contact after an initial enquiry, while other schools have successfully used it as a follow-up after an open event. 

A digital prospectus customised for each family

By its very nature, the traditional one-size-fits-all print prospectus does not address the needs of every family. It can leave prospective parents feeling like the needs of their child don’t matter. However, the beauty of a digital brochure means that you can tailor it to speak to each family individually. For example, if you know that a student wants to pursue a career in engineering and is a keen rower, you can illustrate how your school will meet and deliver on these requests and interests. The ability to shape each prospectus for each student means that you can include the relevant content for your audience. You can even, if needed, offer the prospectus in the family’s preferred language. Or, if you’re dealing with an international student, you can share information about visas and other helpful information. By speaking to each individual family, your school can provide a customer experience that sets it apart from the rest. 

Generates key reporting metrics

Data is the equivalent of gold or oil in the current climate. The more you can mine, the better you are positioned to understand your audience. With this data, you can then make any necessary adjustments to your marketing programme to meet these needs.  Metrics are also a critical way to demonstrate the value of your services to your key stakeholders. With a digital prospectus, you can better monitor parent engagement and adapt content quickly. As we illustrate in our blog, Personal parent engagement and analytics, there are some essential metrics that you should be monitoring if you want to ensure that your campaigns are effective. For example, if you can identify who is viewing your content and for how long, and what content visitors are not viewing, you are better equipped to plan the content for your next marketing campaign.  

The traditional print prospectus simply doesn’t allow for school marketers to take actionable insights on their future marketing activity. Hundreds of printed prospectuses are sent out without any knowledge of whether your school brand and message has landed well. Schools should move towards a digital prospectus to be able to better track the ROI of their prospectus and gain valuable insights into how prospects are engaging with their school content. 

Introducing a New Way to Communicate with Prospective Families

Kampus24 is changing the way school marketing and admissions teams communicate with prospective parents and their wider community online, helping to drive more enquiries through to application.

An easy-to-use digital student recruitment tool, Kampus24 allows a school to create tailored communications, such as prospectuses, that meet an individual family’s interests in minutes. With a fully trackable analytics dashboard, schools can get a quick access snapshot of how prospective families are engaging with your school content and how they are progressing through the admissions pipeline from enquiry through to application

For more information about a digital prospectus with Kampus24, register for our recent webinar recording ‘Why the Future of your School Prospectus is Digital’.

Top 5 Tips to Improve your School Digital Marketing

School Partnerships Manager, Sophie Clark speaks with schools and their marketing and admissions teams on a daily basis both for Kampus24 and The Friday Club. She is lucky enough to speak with world class school marketers who are putting together messaging and campaigns to share with prospective parents and students digitally around the world. Here she tells us the 5 things she’s learned about digital marketing for schools:

Content is king

Put the best content out there that you can. Parents are making one of the biggest decisions they’ll ever make for their children when they look at potential schools, so it stands to reason they’ll consider several different schools. Every school has a nice website, every school has a shiny prospectus – and it’s no wonder parents find that most schools ‘look’ the same. 

Sharing authentic content, showcasing current students, parents, staff and even alumni tells a parent how it feels to be part of your school community. 

Schools win when they make it their business to capture the everyday moments that students remember years later – eating lunch with the Head, rehearsing for their end-of-year theatre production, weekend outings with their fellow boarders and Housemaster. As Sarah Flaherty, Alexandra College, Dublin told me recently – capturing the photo or filming the Instagram reel on an iPhone is better than not having the content at all. Parents and students love the insight into daily life that you just don’t get from a corporately lovely school website.

We’ve been really lucky to see some brilliant innovations in school content production this year. If you’re looking for inspiration, I recommend following Felsted School’s TikTok account (@felstedschool) and Jane Forster’s weekly school newsletter for NLCS Jeju.

Customer experience has to be an integral part of a school’s brand

Maya Angelou famously wrote “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  Of course, what we say and how we say it is important, but families who are visiting half a dozen independent schools will see and hear a lot! 

Lucy Barnwell, Director of Development and Marketing, Manchester High School for Girls, showed me that families remember the admissions team that put them at ease, followed up on time, remembered the niche interests of their child, and made the admissions process as easy as possible. 

Experience is probably the fastest and most impactful way for a school to stand out from the crowd. If you’d like some practical tips on best practice customer service for parent visits, check out the session I hosted with Lucy here.

Marketing happens at every stage of a student’s journey, from admissions to alumni

It goes without saying that communicating a school’s culture, ethos and news is paramount for student recruitment. But what about everyone else?

Parents bought into your school culture when they accepted a place for their child and a school needs to keep reminding them of their ‘why’ as their child progresses through the school. A marketer can help their admissions team by delivering communications that help retain students year on year – and parents of course need more, different information as their child progresses from prep school into senior school and onto A-Levels.

I’ve been really privileged to meet with some brilliant advocates of retention strategy – Jason Hoppner told me all about Dulwich College Singapore’s metrics for measuring parent satisfaction and all of the work they do around understanding and modelling parent personas to vary messaging and qualify their admissions pipeline.

Alumni also play a vital role in a school’s branding and can be a school’s best advocates. School’s can keep in touch with their alumni through brilliant marketing and communications, as Nicole Rule of Fernleaf Community Charter School explained when we spoke on The Friday Club.

Alumni are invested in a school for the rest of their lives, and will often become supporters and even donors to the school if they find themselves in a position to do so. They can also help schools with great content about their journey, life and career as a success story for the school!

Advocacy is a growing recruitment channel

Word of mouth and peer referral is more important than ever. Parents are a school’s ‘buyers’ and they can also be an admissions team’s greatest asset. 

Making sure your parents know what your school stands for, and making it easy for them to show what their child gets up to all day means they can share with other parents and amplify the great work your school does.

I loved hearing from Eugene Low at The Grange Institution telling us how he makes it his job to communicate what his school is and what his school isn’t to every parent – that way those parents can share that with other families looking to place their child. 

This means that families have a better understanding of the school by the time they speak with admissions and are more likely to be the right fit.  It shouldn’t be a scary thing to say that you might not be the right fit for a family – and the authenticity a school portrays in it’s messaging pays dividends in the long run.

“We are all marketers”

And lastly, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite lines from The Friday Club Break Time with interviews to date – “We are all Marketers”. Stefan Tueger of Shrewsbury International School, Hong Kong shared his view on this with me in this episode, explaining that he wants every teacher and every team member working hard behind the scenes to understand the school’s mission statement and demonstrate those values.

I’ve also discussed and heard about how school marketing and admissions teams can use the expertise of subject heads to showcase the school’s accomplishments.

 

Find out more about Kampus24 here.

Personalisation: The future of student admissions

The UK boarding environment has quickly adapted to the challenges posed by Covid-19. Recruitment of international boarders, in particular, is now taking a far more digital approach to reach a broader audience of parents. But how can schools differentiate and drive maximum parent engagement? The answer is by providing a personalised, digital student admissions experience.

Digital marketing is transforming the student admissions process for international boarders. Many schools are using a digital marketing mix to grow their reach in international markets. But it is when these tools are used to personalise the customer journey that schools are seeing real success.

Schools realise that personalisation should be intrinsic to their marketing activities to make a real impression on the customer. Parents are making a financial and emotional investment in choosing a school for their child. Only by tapping into this through a personalised student admissions process can schools differentiate and drive more admissions.

Digital: moving away from the impersonal

In past years, recruitment in international boarding has lacked personalisation. Most schools have offered a standard brochure or website sharing generic information but with nothing tailored to an individual family’s interests. Parallel, costly and environmentally unfriendly recruitment techniques such as school shows have involved expensive air travel, hotel rooms and print prospectuses. While this in-person approach allowed schools to build a one-on-one connection with the family, often momentum was lost when parents were sent home with a broad-based prospectus which didn’t reflect their interaction with the school. 

The benefits of digital marketing – long proven in many consumer arenas – are now being rolled out across the education sector. International boarding recruitment needs personalised, digital tactics; we know online advertising, email and social media marketing are cost-effective, easy to implement, they secure a wide reach, and offer a level of personalisation.

Yet it is possible to go further still by using a marketing and admissions tool which delivers the flexibility and capability to tailor information about a school to each and every family’s needs. The aim is to establish an emotional connection with a prospective family in order to offer a more complete experience of school life. And it works. Ian Hunt, CEO of Kazakhstan-based schools, Haileybury Almaty and Haileybury Astana, is using a personalised communications platform to drive more student applications. Ian says; “Each family will embark upon a journey with us and at each stage we acknowledge their individual needs. This is a very powerful way to build up a rapport with a family who are making one of the biggest financial decisions that they will ever make. It certainly helps enormously to secure student admissions to the school.”

A bespoke, student admissions experience stands out

An independent school’s primary income stream is tuition fees and with so many UK-based boarding schools recruiting internationally, the level of competition is high. 

On average, a family will consider six or seven schools, each one with its own website and prospectus detailing information on the curriculum, extracurricular activities, pastoral care and more. With so many competing choices, how can a parent truly understand which school will be the best fit?

International parents are looking for a school which understands their child. And ultimately, they need a school that can support them through the momentous decision of where to send their child to school in the UK. Most schools currently provide the same information to each enquiry they receive. This can come across as impersonal and thereby, not meet parents’ expectations. Only through digital marketing tools is there the flexibility to offer a tailored, student-centred admissions experience. 

Art, drama, sport…most pupils have their preferred subjects and passions. Digital marketing offers the capacity to customise promotional content to reflect the interests and priorities of each prospective student. Most schools have fantastic video and audio content as well as 360 degree tours – it is only through deploying this digital content that a family can truly visualise their child’s new life in its entirety. 

The British boarding lifestyle: your school’s own offering 

Boarding school is a major life experience. Such a change, especially for an international student leaving their roots miles away, provokes many questions and concerns. Schools need to address any worries about the language, the culture and friendships in order to progress the customer enquiry. 

Personalised, digital marketing is a means of communicating – and reassuring – the entire family on their specific concerns and queries. Schools can communicate everything that boarding life includes better through digital. They can capture everything authentically in video format including daily routine, from wake-up bells to breakfast to afternoon games to evening supper. Day-to-day life in the dorms, including the quirks of sharing rooms and bathrooms, shown in your school’s own unique context. Schools can offer families an almost sensory-like experience, as though they can touch and feel the school from their own living rooms. Such strong visual content means that prospective boarders can almost envisage themselves there. Do your current marketing tools provide such an immersive student admissions experience? 

Monitoring and tracking parental engagement

To progress more enquiries faster, marketing and admissions staff need to know how families are engaging with their content. The digital platforms they use need to provide easy-to-read data at each point of the student admissions process allowing them to react at every stage of the funnel, ensuring fewer drop-offs. It is these near-misses that can make the difference. Ian Hunt reminds us that ‘we should be taking families on a personalised journey…and showing them why our school is the right choice.’

Most digital tools track and display customer data in one place offering a snapshot of the admissions funnel. Schools should be monitoring which content parents are engaging with the most, how long they have spent viewing certain content – videos, for instance – and the all-important click-through-rate. These insights into the performance of your campaign can help inform future marketing activity. 

And over time, this data can lead to a competitive advantage. It can provide a clearer picture of a school’s potential customer base for more effective segmentation. Getting to know your customers better can help you plan more effective marketing strategies to reach more prospects.  

Being able to leverage the best of digital marketing to offer a personalised student admissions experience is the best way to drive student recruitment. 

Find out more about how Kampus24 can transform your student admissions experience by watching a demo.