• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Looking for something?

Let’s connect!

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

The Virtual Marketer

Digital Marketing for Schools

  • Home
  • About
  • Training
    • Google Analytics
    • Google Ads (PPC)
    • Facebook & Instagram Advertising
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
  • Services
    • Virtual Open Days
    • PPC Advertising
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Digital Marketing Strategy
    • Google Analytics Reporting
    • School Website Optimisation
  • School Marketing Blog
    • Read the Latest
    • Select by Topic
  • School Marketing Webinars
  • Contact

Improve Your School Marketing in Just 15 Minutes

Oct 30 2018

School marketing is a tough job. As marketers we’re often pulled in many different directions, trying to do it all with little resources and even less time. But as school marketers, you have it even tougher! That’s why it’s so important to be strategic with our marketing efforts. However, when we think strategies we’re often thinking bigger picture. Yet, if you break it down there are a lot of activities that can be accomplished in just 15 minutes that can have a substantial impact on your school marketing efforts.

So the next time you have 15 minutes to spare, why not choose a task from the list below and improve your school marketing ROI …

Increase Your Social Media Engagement

Uncover Your Best Posting Times

Posting when your audience is most frequently online or engaging with your content only makes sense. There are plenty of articles out there with insight into the best times to post (like this Sprout Social article for instance), but I’d suggest you use a simple spreadsheet to track your own stats. Take 15 minutes a week over the course of a few weeks to uncover the times that your audiences engage the most. To get a true sense of this you’ll want to share the same post over multiple times and multiple days. Before long you’ll see a pattern emerging as to the time – and day of the week – that your school posts get the most engagement.

Find the Right Content for the Right Channel

As each of your social media channels will potentially have a different audience, what engages on one platform may not necessarily on another. You may want to take another 15 minutes out of your week to see which posts get the most engagement on each of your social platforms. Again, track to see if there is a pattern that emerges. Do videos do better on Facebook than on Instagram for your school? Do your school blogs get shared more on Twitter? It might be that you share the same content but delivering it in different ways on the various platforms. Spend 15 minutes reviewing your social analytics to determine the content that works best for each of your social channels.

Get Creative with Gifs

We’re all aware by now the impact video has on social engagement, but with research showing that the majority of videos aren’t watched beyond 15 seconds, gifs can be just as powerful in getting the attention of potential followers. The best part is gifs are easy to create, cost much less than video and yet are far more engaging than simply posting a photo.

There are all kinds of free gif tools that make it easy for even the most technically challenged. Boomerang – an Instagram app – is great for creating gifs directly from your mobile. EzGif is an online tool that works well for creating gifs from either existing photos or video. It may not be the slickest looking tool but it’s actually really quite good. And of course, you have the old standby Giphy which is a great option for the novice gif maker. Here’s a quick article by Social Media Examiner that simplifies Giphy for you: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-make-animated-gif-guide-for-marketers/

Why not take 15 minutes this week to set up a template that allows you to easily create an animated gif for sharing your next school photos? It may take you more than 15 minutes on your first attempt but once you get the hang of it you’ll be creating gifs in no time!

Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Rankings

Update Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

Your website meta titles and description are the copy that is seen in search results. While meta descriptions have no direct influence on your search rankings, they can inspire searchers to click through to your website.

Have a look at your both your meta titles and meta descriptions. Are the descriptions all the same? Are your titles too long? If the majority of your audience is on mobile, you’ll want to ensure your meta tags aren’t cut off on a mobile view. This handy tool by SerpSim allows you to see how your meta tags look on both a desktop and a mobile.

15 minutes spent reviewing and updating your meta tags will be 15 minutes well spent! Remember you’ll want to have unique meta titles and descriptions for each page of your website – or at the very least, your top-level pages.

(For more SEO tips read my blog: 5 SEO Tips That Every School Marketer Can Implement)

Add Testimonials to Your Website

Many schools already have great testimonials on their Facebook page or Google My Business page. Why not take those and add them to your website as well? Testimonials are a great way to gain the trust of potential parents or students and are the type of content that moves a visitor through your admissions sales funnel. Take 15 minutes and copy and paste your testimonials throughout your school website, reinforcing the messages your school is wanting to convey.

From an SEO perspective reviews on Google My Business carry the most weight so if you haven’t got any there, perhaps spend 15 minutes to email a few key parents asking for their reviews. (Not sure you have a GMB page – pop me an email!)

Remove Obsolete Website Pages

Pages on your school website that are no longer viewed (if they ever were!) can hinder your site. Not only can they slow it down, but they also indicate to Google that your website is full of meaningless information, which in turn can affect your SEO.

Take 15 minutes to look at your Google Analytics and discover the pages that haven’t been looked at for ages and remove them. Not only can it improve your website’s performance but it will save you hours of work down the road should you redesign your school website at some point.

Build Your Links

Both backlinks (links from other sites to yours) and internal links (links within your own site) remain a big component of SEO. Review your backlinks using Google Search Console. Do you have links from authoritative sites or those that attract a lot of traffic? Look to expand your reach by building on your backlinks. Are there directories you can be listed on? Can you guest post a blog for an education site? Take 15 minutes to find new opportunities to grow your backlinks. With internal links, create links from pages that already show up in search results to those that don’t but you’d like to be seen. Leverage the visibility of one page to get exposure of another.

Develop Better Communication

Build Your Persona Profiles

Understanding your audience is crucial to being an effective marketer. Building strong profiles of both your current and prospective parents (and in some cases pupils) is key to connecting in a way that matters to them. When you have 15 minutes to spare why not gather some intel on your audiences to develop your profiles.

Google Analytics is a great place to start. Here you can learn:

  • their age
  • their gender
  • where they’re located
  • the devices they use
  • the content they read the most
  • the times of day they most visit your website
  • the keywords they’re finding you on

The list goes on…

Spend 15 minutes each week to expand on your profiles. In addition to both social and Google analytics for insights, you may even want to do your own market research with current parent focus groups and surveys. Remember the more you know about who your target audiences are, the better your chances are connecting in a meaningful way.

The above is just a handful of ways you can improve your school marketing with 15 minutes here and there. Why not grab yourself a coffee and tackle one now!

As always, if you have any questions about my blog or digital marketing in general, please don’t be shy — just ask! 

Related Posts

  • #TellMeHow … to Post to Instagram from My Desktop
  • How to Successfully Collect and Use Parent and Pupil TestimonialsHow to Successfully Collect and Use Parent and Pupil Testimonials
  • How Schools Can Attract and Engage New Parents via Social Media
  • 5 SEO Tips That Every School Marketer Can Implement5 SEO Tips That Every School Marketer Can Implement

Categorized: Content, SEO, Social Media, Strategy

Primary Sidebar

Alta Justus, The Virtual Marketer

Alta Justus, The Virtual Marketer

Recent Posts

2021 Digital Marketing Checklist for Schools

Facebook vs Google Ads: Which Should Your School Use?

How Can I Help?

A passionate digital marketer with 18 years marketing experience, I’ll work with your school to maximise your online presence. Don’t get left behind — contact me today!


Contact Me

Blog Categories

FOLLOW ME

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Strategy
  • Social
  • Training
  • Reporting

Footer

ABOUT ME

An equally creative and analytical Digital Marketing Consultant with over 18 years education and commercial marketing experience, I'm passionate about helping schools succeed in the digital arena. Read More…

CONTACT ME

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Follow me on social media, fill out my contact form or reach me directly @

  alta.justus@thevirtualmarketer.co.uk

 (44) 0742 879 2799

#tuesdaytip: Have a Google account? Use it or lose #tuesdaytip: Have a Google account? Use it or lose it! Google's recently announced accounts that haven't been used in a couple of years, or exceeded their storage, will be at risk of deletion. If you're like most school marketers you'll probably have a few Gmail accounts and a Google Drive or two that you haven't looked at for a while. Of course, I'd always recommend using a verified school email over a Gmail account but if are using a random Gmail and Drive to store photos or to access your Google Analytics, etc, make a point to check those accounts. It will be a while before your data is deleted, and you'll receive a couple of warnings, but as we all know tasks like this can be set aside until it's too late. Don't risk losing valuable data or photos - review your Google accounts today. And while you're at it why not switched to a Google verified work email so you don't miss any important messages like this one 😁

How to verify your school email with Google: 
Visit my blog via my bio or go to
👉 https://thevirtualmarketer.co.uk/how-to-use-my-school-email-for-my-google-accounts/

#vmdigitaltips #digitalmarketing #googlenews #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing
I love this quote about being productive vs busy. I love this quote about being productive vs busy. And this article — 11 Differences Between Busy People And Productive People — gives some great examples of the differences as well as tips to become a more productive person. I know I'm bad at saying 'Yes' a little too quickly for my own good so a great reminder for me. Who couldn't use a few tips for improving productivity... 😁

👉https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/11-differences-between-busy-people-and-productive-people.html

#mondaymotivation #timemanagementtips #digitalmarketing #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing  #strategicmarketing
I'm so pleased to see an increase in schools reach I'm so pleased to see an increase in schools reaching out for SEO training and support. Yes, digital advertising is the fastest way to get in front of your parents, but you should still be thinking long-term. That may very well include digital campaigns, but ideally, you'll want to grow your organic traffic to the point that you can reduce your advertising spend. At the very least you'll want to maintain your school website's SEO rankings.

When it comes to optimising a website for search engines there are a few things that have remained consistent throughout the years - like these 5 SEO tips. Still relevant after all these years and yet many schools have failed to do them. Why not grab a cuppa, have a read then make a plan to optimise your school website in 2021. Every little helps...

👉 Visit my blog via my bio or copy the link below

https://thevirtualmarketer.co.uk/5-seo-tips-every-school-marketer-can-implement/

#thursdaythoughts #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing #seotips #seostrategy #studentrecruitment #2021goals
Do the computers in your ICT classroom default to Do the computers in your ICT classroom default to your school website? If they do you'll want to filter out your internal traffic from Google Analytics to get a true sense of your data. It's not difficult to do but you'll first want to have a chat with IT to get a list of your IP addresses.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗱 𝗮 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀:

👉 Start by creating a new view. Once you filter traffic out of GA you can't get it back so create an additional view such as 'Filtered Traffic'
👉 Next, create a filter on your new view. Go to Admin > Filters and click +Add Filter
👉 Name = Exclude Internal IPs (or whatever you choose to call it)
👉 Filter Type = Predefined
👉 Select filter type = Exclude
👉 Source = Traffic from the IP addresses
👉 That are equal to = your IP address or range

For more details on how to create your new view or filter visit https://support.google.com/ or ping me a message 😊

That's it! Now you'll be able to see both your filtered and all data dependent on the view you select! 👍📊

#tuesdaytip #vmdigitaltips #googleanalytics #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing #strategicmarketing
I'm not sure about you but I certainly don't belie I'm not sure about you but I certainly don't believe marketing can be learned in a day! And as marketing is continuously evolving, are any of us ever 'Masters'? But I agree with the intent behind the message—marketing is a profession where your training never ends. Or shouldn't! When was the last time you did any training—digital or otherwise? Why not make CPD a priority in 2021! 👍

#digitalmarketingtraining
#socialmediamarketing
#digitaladvertising
#seo
#googleanalytics
#schoolmarketing
#educationmarketing 
#studentrecruitment 
#mondaymotivation
Does your school brand reflect what parents are lo Does your school brand reflect what parents are looking for and engaging with online? The internet has evolved over the years and so have our audiences. They're savvy to sales pitches and blatant self-promotion. What they want is to connect with businesses and people they can trust—especially with their child. For brand authenticity, you need to be perceived as reliable, respectful, and 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡. Does that sound like your school...?

#morningcoffeethoughts 
#brandidentity 
#schoolmarketing 
#educationmarketing 
#contentmarketing 
#socialmediamarketing 
#schoolwebsite
You've probably heard me mention many times the im You've probably heard me mention many times the importance of gaining control and optimising your Google My Business account to improve your search engine rankings.
 
One of the fields that has a direct impact on your SEO is your Business Category. You may currently have one or two added, but did you know you can have up to 10 categories? Google is updating their categories all the time so it's worth looking at this field when you're adding new photos or sharing your latest blog within the platform. 
 
I came across this fab website the other day that can quickly show the different categories available outside of GMB. Select your country and add your term (i.e. 'school') and see all the options available. Of course, you can also do the same in GMB but this may be the prompt you need to add those additional categories and improve your school's SEO!
 
👉https://pleper.com/index.php?do=tools&sdo=gmb_categories
 
Just a note, I'm having difficulties accessing this site this morning (not sure if it's me or them??) but hopefully, you'll have no problem getting in 🤞
 
Not sure what Google My Business is? Have a peek here: https://www.google.com/intl/en_gb/business/
 
#tuesdaytip #vmdigitaltips #digitalmarketing #seotools #seotips #seostrategy #seoservices #schoolmarketing
Since how you think dictates how your week goes, w Since how you think dictates how your week goes, why not start on a positive note?! It's not always easy but there are ways to help you develop a more positive mindset. 

If you have 5 minutes, grab a cuppa and have a read of this article by @womenontopp, 𝟱 𝗪𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹:

👉https://www.womenontopp.com/5-ways-to-develop-a-positive-mindset-to-help-you-become-more-successful/

(you can also search 'improve your mindset' in Google to find it) 

There's some great advice in there to help shift your mindset, so definitely worth the read. 

Here's to a fantastic week, everyone! 😊

#digitalmarketing #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing #digitalmarketingtraining #wellbeing #mondaymotivation
I know Monday is the last thing on your mind on a I know Monday is the last thing on your mind on a Friday afternoon but if you can do these few tasks today I guarantee you'll feel so much more positive and in control of your week:

👉 Plan for the week ahead. Tuesdays are apparently the most productive day of the week so schedule any of your big projects for that day and see if that's the case for you.

👉 Keep Monday as your flexible day. Monday is the day that sets the tone for the week and if you pack too much into the day you'll start the week off feeling behind. Schedule smaller tasks and keep as much time open as you can.

👉 Do a little digital housekeeping today. With energy usually low on a Friday afternoon it's a great time to tidy up your computer files. It's easy work, but also immensely rewarding. While you're at it, maybe give your desk a little dusting off as well. A clutter-free desk and mind are the best way to start your week!

I'm off to clear my own desktop files. I'm terrible at 'I'll file that away later'... 😁

Have a fabulous weekend everyone. See you Monday!

#fridayfeeling #organisedchaos #schoolmarketing #educationmarketing #digitalmarketing #digitalmarketingtraining
Follow on Instagram
  • Home
  • Training
  • Services
  • Blog
  • Webinars
  • Contact

Copyright © 2021 · vivien theme by Lovely Confetti DMCA.com Protection Status

Welcome to my website! Just so you're aware, I use basic cookies to ensure you have the best possible experience when visiting. If you continue on my site, I'll assume that you're happy with that. If not, I'll use a cookie to remember your preference and you won't be tracked. Easy peasy. Have a lovely day! OkNo