The Key for School Leaders | NASBM
School business management toolkit
Marketing your school effectively
Marketing strategies for schools
Six-stage marketing cycle
An article in SMT Magazine, a publication focused on school
management, says that since parents have an increasing
amount of choice when it comes to finding a school, schools
need to respond by using better marketing techniques to attract
them.
The article describes a six-stage 'marketing cycle' that schools
can work through to ensure they "stand out":
1. Market research – interviewing and surveying current and
prospective parents and analysing the findings
2. Meeting market needs – for example, you could consider what
your school does to meets the needs of prospective parents, and
what it could do
3. Message and brand development – identifying three or four
key statements about the school and a simple visual design for
the website
4. Evidence gathering – regularly collecting news stories about
the school that support your key messages
5. Using mass media – the stories gathered in the previous stage
can be communicated to the local community through posters,
social media and publications
6. Relationship management – keeping in touch with anyone
who has shown interest in the school, whether they attended an
event, asked for a prospectus or spoke to a member of staff
Link on our website
How does your school stand out from the crowd?, SMT
Magazine, 2 October 2013
Guidance from NASBM:
Why marketing matters to schools
Your school is most likely using a number of marketing
techniques already to engage with stakeholders, recruit pupils
and market your school to ensure financial sustainability and
therefore maintain high-quality learning opportunities for pupils.
There might be a number of areas, however, where you could
make improvements, considering your overall vision and goals,
and how you plan to achieve these.
We say that, marketing is about:
Ensuring the development of a marketing and communication
strategy which promotes the school/trust and defines the
brand, aims and goals … develop(ing) pupil recruitment, and
stakeholder engagement via appropriate communication
channels and maximis(ing) income generation
So, what are the areas you might want to look at to improve your
marketing strategy and the areas within it?
• When engaging with stakeholders, for example, are you
advertising in the local press?
• When developing events like the school fete, are you linking up
with local businesses to procure services? If you are, is it working
well for you?
• Are you also advertising events in the local press, and what deals
can you get for doing this? Are these branded as the school fete, or
as a community event taking place in the school? The community
event approach, for example, might work better for you
These are the kinds of questions schools will need to
increasingly ask themselves, as pupil numbers are set to rise
and competition in local areas will continue to grow. A sound
marketing strategy and good communication channels with
identified stakeholders is a must for schools.