5 strategic tips for effective education marketing campaigns
We’ve worked with many clients in the education sector, including highly-prestigious organisations such as Cambridge University, Cambridge Trust, University of Cambridge Museums and the Eastern Learning Alliance.
Through these exciting projects, we’ve gleaned the most critical factors that make for a successful education marketing campaign.
From having a clear understanding of your target audience to making sure your carefully tailor your approach, take a tip from our recent successful marketing campaigns for schools, universities and educational institutions and get lots of inspiration for the best education marketing campaigns for your own organisation.
1. Understand the audience you’re targeting
Knowing your audience is an essential starting point when you’re marketing for schools and for any education marketing activity, coupled with a clear understanding of the project goals.
Our work with the multi-academy trust Eastern Learning Alliance (ELA) was multi-faceted and required us to flex the tone, content, and activities to suit the multiple audiences of this innovative and exciting family of schools based in the East of England.
Support included content planning for social media, drafting press releases, and creating bus/train posters and advertorials for local and national press. We also provided ELA with a new strategy to boost its impact and worked closely with numerous schools under the ELA umbrella.
The breadth of different stakeholders we needed to appeal to meant ensuring we always used the right tone.
Our activities helped ELA schools with everything from recruiting new teaching staff to impressing students and parents alike on Open Days. This was achieved by paying close attention to the individual needs and communication preferences of each audience segment.
2. Craft messaging that provokes action
The messaging you use will help make or break the success of your education marketing campaign. Decide what you need to achieve: is the goal simply awareness, or do you want people to do something after engaging with your content?
During the summer of 2021, our smart approach to messaging helped tempt visitors back to the eight University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM).
These venues house the UK’s highest concentration of internationally important collections outside of London, comprised of over five million artworks, artefacts and specimens.
The arts and cultural sector was hit badly by the pandemic, and visitors needed extra encouragement to visit these communal spaces once more.
With such high stakes, we knew our messaging had to be on point! The first step was to create a simple tagline and messaging designed to beckon people back to these vital cultural venues.
We developed a five-month campaign centred around the hashtag #ComeOnInCam, targeting local communities including those which had traditionally been hard to reach. This helped us to widen arts participation across Cambridgeshire.
Our campaign focused largely on Instagram Reels, alongside paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. We also created an animated ident which was adapted to reflect the changing seasons, with falling leaves giving way to scenic snowscapes.
A keen attention to detail, coupled with Sookio’s understanding of our client’s challenges, made for a successful campaign, generating 5,684 clicks to the UCM website, over 800k impressions across Cambridgeshire, and 988 post reactions. It’s harder to measure how many people headed to the museums because of our messaging, but we took steps to ensure the good work continued.
Training the internal communications staff at UCM meant they gained the skills needed to convey the new messaging - giving these important cultural hubs the attention they deserve, long after our involvement.
3. Give your education marketing methods a refresh
Educational organisations often use the same marketing tools and methods for decades. This can lead to stagnation in your school or university marketing strategy as newer approaches offer a greater return on investment.
When Cambridge Trust sought to expand its online presence, capitalise on an extensive alumni network and reach new audiences, we carefully chose the contemporary tools that would have the most impact.
The Trust awards around 500 scholarships each year from 85 global destinations, helping people study at the University of Cambridge. Our goal was to engage with a multitude of different audiences and highlight key opportunities to join a world-class educational establishment.
We’ve worked closely with the Cambridge Trust since 2018, which gave us a fantastic groundwork to build on with the campaign.
Our approach was multifaceted – including strategic marketing support, social media training, virtual events support and paid/organic social media campaigns. The centrepiece was our range of video content, which built on all of these elements.
Videos created during the campaign included pre-recorded segments for live events, a visit from HRH King Charles, and a clip in which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams introduced his new scholarship.
Our work proved impactful in many ways, helping to enhance the profile of the Trust by moving from print to in-person events and incorporating contemporary techniques such as video into the marketing mix.
We also helped the team get to grips with social media and online events, boosting their confidence in the process. The Cambridge Trust Facebook page has grown from close to zero to more than 150k people, with our campaign ensuring prospective students everywhere from large cities to remote villages have the chance to join a prestigious academic organisation.
4. Train internal teams for more consistent communication
Consistency is key to communicating with your target audience, but when the communications strategy is divided amongst different departments, this consistency can be lost.
Building strong, clear and consistent communication has been a cornerstone of our work with the University of Cambridge, due in part to the distinctive, decentralised nature of the institution.
Its collegiate system is comprised of 31 colleges spanning more than 150 departments and six schools covering everything from Arts and Humanities to Technology. The structure of the University means there are over 400 people running thousands of different communication channels, making it difficult to ensure consistency in digital communications.
To help tackle this challenge, we provided training sessions on writing for the web, training more than 150 people at all levels of the University in the first phase of our involvement.
We have since hosted sessions for numerous colleges and alumni organisations within Cambridge University, as well as both the Cambridge Judge Business School and the University of Cambridge Museums. Topics covered have included social media, email marketing and creating an effective communications strategy.
Thanks to the flexible nature of our training, we were able to move the sessions online during the pandemic, allowing us to successfully train people around the globe. This targeted, communications-led approach has helped the University of Cambridge to create open and welcoming messaging that appeals to the audiences the University is aiming to reach.
5. Tailor your approach with care
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to marketing in the education sector. Your education marketing strategy will depend on the audience you’re targeting, the resources at your disposal, and the product or service you offer.
However, these examples provide a helpful glimpse of the best marketing strategies for higher education, schools and other educational organisations. It’s amazing what you can achieve with the right combination of information and marketing know-how!
Remember to:
get to know your audience - the essential starting point of any effective marketing campaign for schools and universities
create messaging that taps into students, parents and staff’s needs, wants and concerns
rethink how and where you market your product or services
keep your marketing content consistent to help build a recognisable brand.
Need a helping hand with your education marketing?
Talk to Sookio and discover how to create an education marketing campaign with real impact.