The pandemic forced a great deal of change on educational institutions around the world. From adopting new teaching and learning models to operating with smaller budgets, staff has had to learn how to pivot and embrace a new way of doing things. As many institutions gear up for summer vacation, now is an opportune time to reevaluate and reassess school budgets, including your marketing goals. Whether you have a smaller team or your budget has been cut, the experts at beMarketing provide you with some helpful tools and resources to help you create a realistic school marketing budget.
Establishing an Effective School Marketing Plan
What are the components that make up a great school marketing plan? Typically, your plan should include a mix of a functioning and optimized website, PPC campaigns, Facebook ads, social media strategies that align with your mission, reputation management tactics, and full reporting and analysis of these strategies. Phew, that seems complicated and expensive! But we’re here to tell you it doesn’t have to be. When you utilize school digital marketing tactics curated by beMarketing, we can guarantee you’ll receive the results you want at a competitive price. Remember these steps when creating your marketing budget for the new school year.
- Remember your marketing goals.
What does your organization want to accomplish? How does your marketing plan support these goals? What are your KPIs? Once you answer these questions, you can determine whether your school needs to:
- Raise brand awareness
- Increase audience engagement
- Drive enrollment leads
- Improve parent/school communications
- Boost recruitment efforts
Each of those strategies requires a different set of tools and resources to accomplish, which could affect the overall cost. Remember to keep your specific goals and objectives front and center when creating your budget.
- List your fixed costs.
A critical part of the planning process, listing your fixed costs over the past 12 months can help give you a realistic starting point for how much you currently spend on operations. These costs can include technologies, software, branded merchandise, contractor fees, and printing fees.
- Work out which tactics bring the highest impact for the lowest cost.
After establishing your current marketing operating costs, you’ll likely want to eliminate areas that cost you the most money. Instead, choose the strategies that garner higher results for the lowest price. Marketing investments that deliver a positive ROI include:
- Blogging
- Creating white papers, brochures, and checklists
- Infographics
- Social media
- Consider additional resources.
Now is your opportunity to reflect on the past year—were there any resources or technologies you felt your marketing plan was missing? Do you need to add new software, more staff members, or hire additional contractors? Consider how your technology stack and resources are supporting your marketing goals for the next year, and make adjustments as necessary.
- Settle on a realistic number.
The final step in your school budgeting process is settling on a realistic number that will allow you to accomplish your goals. You should inflate this number slightly to accommodate for unexpected costs that might come up.
Everyone’s budget will look different, but with a little research and careful planning, you can come up with a concrete number that will be easy to stick to for the upcoming school year.
Why Choose beMarketing for Your Digital Marketing Success?
At beMarketing, our team of digital experts is here to provide you with cutting-edge tactics and strategies to propel your educational institutions to the top. If you’re ready to learn more about our digital marketing services and ace your marketing goals to get the results you want, contact us today to get started on a project.
