Join the experts as they answer all your questions live on Thursdays on YouTube at 10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET. Charter School Capital – YouTube

In this week’s session, Michael Barber and Ashely McQuarrie discussed social media, website best practices, and pay-per-click ads. You can watch the recording here, or read the transcript below.

Michael B. (00:18):

All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to our weekly Thursday series on all things enrollment marketing. I’m Michael Barber and I’m joined by my colleague Ashley MacQuarrie. Ashley, how are you?

Ashley M. (00:28):

Hey Michael. I’m good. Hi everybody.

Michael B. (00:31):

So good to have you on today. Hey, we do this every single week. For those of you that have been on this journey with us last few weeks, we’re here every Thursday for 10 minutes talking all things enrollment marketing. Want to let you all know that we’re taking a little break on the enrollment marketing topic next week. We will have Dr. Charlotte Polands here. She’s an expert on teacher retention, specifically teacher retention for black and brown school leaders. So we will have her here, answering all your questions related to a webinar we’re doing on Tuesday. If you need more information, just drop your question to the chat. We’ll make sure you’ve got that URL.

(01:06):

But we’re going to spend the next nine or so minutes back on our main topic of our weekly Thursday chats around all things enrollment marketing efforts. And Ashley, I know our team, your team did two webinars over the last two weeks. One for the Texas Charter Schools Association and another for the Illinois network of charter schools. I would love your perspective, what did you hear from school leaders? What questions are they asking you on these webinars?

Ashley M. (01:31):

Yeah, yeah. One of the questions I’ve been hearing is what social media accounts should charter schools be on? And that’s a really common question. I think especially when a social media channel like say TikTok starts gaining traction, is like, do I need to be doing that? And I think the answer, what I shared in the webinar this morning was it really just depends on your community. It’s always going to go back to where is your community and what do they want from you.

(02:00):

So it may be that you have families who are really active and engaged on Facebook. Maybe you have older parents or even grandparents who are really involved in their children’s education, their student’s education. And maybe they prefer to get their information from you on Facebook or maybe you’re actually speaking primarily to students themselves. And so they may very well be on Instagram. If you’re speaking to high school students, they may also be on TikTok. And so that could be something to begin testing the waters. I think what I shared is we’re here on YouTube. YouTube is the most popular social media account for kids and adults. So if you were going to pick a new platform to really start paying attention to, I would say schools can get a lot of value from posting video content on YouTube this year.

Michael B. (02:48):

I think it’s such a good point you make, I was actually, we had a little community meeting in my neighborhood yesterday and definitely some diverse voices at the table in terms of ages and backgrounds. And one of the things that was a common theme was that all of us, depending upon age or demographic or background, use different platforms to communicate. So when someone was like, “Oh, we should have a Facebook community group.”, there was someone sitting there that’s like, “I’m anti-Facebook I’ve not been there for a couple of years. I’m on Instagram.” To which I’m like, “That’s still Facebook.” You have to be the marketer in the room that’s like, “That’s still Facebook.”

(03:25):

But I think it’s such a good point from an enrollment perspective to understand, hey, depending upon who is helping your kid make a decision on school, they could be in different places. And as school leaders, we’ve got to figure out like, okay, if we’re trying to attract the student audience, we’re probably going to be in a different place than if we’re trying to attract a parent and/ or a grandparent audience. And so it’s nice to hear that that’s reflected also from an enrollment perspective. And we got to give a quick shout out to Bruce in the background here. Your pup just made a little appearance, such a cutie pie that cannot go acknowledged. We are a dog company for sure. And so just give a little shout out to Bruce.

Ashley M. (04:09):

[inaudible 00:04:10].

Michael B. (04:10):

Yeah, okay. Let’s get back to questions. I know there was another one that came up related to search marketing efforts and would love you to hear what that perspective and question was during these conversations.

Ashley M. (04:22):

Yeah, we’d been talking about really the value of SEO as well as the value of some paid search efforts like pay per click, Google campaigns. And the question, and we get this question a lot with all sorts of things from websites to social, is do I really need to hire a vendor to do these things for me? Can I do SEO and PPC on my own? And the answer is if you have the bandwidth and the know-how, certainly. If you’re a large organization that has the ability to invest in somebody in-house who can do that marketing and has the expertise, because it’s always a really rapidly changing technology. And so the tactics that we’re using are often different.

(05:03):

So if you have somebody who knows how to do it, can keep up, you could probably do it in house. If you’re a one person show and you’re trying to do it all and you have so many other things, more important things really like educating kids, then you probably do want to invest in a trusted vendor. And that’s really why we created this enrollment marketing program because we know that school leaders have more important things to do than mess around with paid search and try to figure out SEO keywords.

Michael B. (05:36):

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that the good news is, if there’s any good news is that to their credit, Google and Meta and Twitter and other places and TikTok have done an extraordinary job over the last decade or so making these platforms as user-friendly as possible so that the average individual who doesn’t have a lot of technical knowledge could hop in and create these campaigns. My lesson learned is that usually if you’re not engaging an expert, you can use these platforms really, really well, but what you will end up doing is probably spending more. And I would love your perspective on that is just how you’ve seen as we have approached schools, there had to have been old accounts that you’ve hopped into and optimized and what the impact when you have an expert involved in that management does for a school.

Ashley M. (06:26):

Yeah, yeah. We do sometimes work with schools who have played around with search campaigns and sometimes they’ve reached large audiences. But something that I’ve heard often is yeah, we tried this and we didn’t really see anything or we reached a lot of people, we got a lot of interest, but none of it actually turned into enrollment. So maybe they weren’t quite reaching the right people. And if you’re paying per click, you want to get the right people clicking. So yeah, I’ve seen that sometimes schools are spending money and they’re getting a lot of views or they’re getting a lot of traffic, but it’s not really turning into anything. And our goal is always if we reach 50 of the right people that actually end up taking an action and enroll, that’s better than reaching 500 people who don’t take any action. So we don’t-

Michael B. (07:18):

Yeah. I agree. Don’t you’re going to overspend and not target the right audience for sure.

Ashley M. (07:24):

Absolutely.

Michael B. (07:25):

After that, staying on the pay per click opportunity for schools, one of the things I know we’re always advising school leaders on is landing pages and what they can do. Because search half the battle when you’re running paid media campaigns, when you’re investing dollars into display ads or search ads is making sure that when someone gets to your website, they’re going to convert. Any best practices there that you could share for school leaders?

Ashley M. (07:49):

Yeah, I mean really a landing page should give just a high level overview of your school and your differentiators and what you offer as well as really easy to take next step, how to get in touch with you. So we always include an interest form with just the bare minimum of information you need from a family to follow up with them. So it’s usually name, an email or phone number. Sometimes we don’t even require both, we just require one because we work with schools where they’re like, sometimes our parents don’t have email addresses, everything’s on the phone. So just keeping it really simple, we don’t include a lot of other links on our landing page because we want them to only take one action and that’s just fill out the form and get in touch.

(08:33):

So we don’t necessarily want to include links to other pages on the website because we know sometimes they’re not going to come back. And the other thing that that’s really valuable, again going back to video is including a video on your landing page is a really good idea. And then just lastly, making sure that if you’re running search ads or social ads, that the copy on the landing page is very similar to the copy that’s in your ad so that people know that they’re in the right place because they clicked on this ad that said one thing and they’ve landed on a page that says the same thing and they know how to take the next step.

Michael B. (09:08):

Yeah. Such good advice. I’ve got a follow up question. I’m just going to ask people if you’ve got any questions for us today, we’re here every single week on Thursday at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. Would love any questions. Otherwise I’ll end with this for our chat today as we’re getting up to that 10-minute mark on those landing pages, I know it’s important to provide a hierarchy to get someone to do what you’re doing. Can you talk about how we think about that hierarchy?

Ashley M. (09:37):

Yeah, so we are always using our story arcs to develop the content on our landing page. And we’re keeping it pretty simple. So we’ll typically have just a high level overview of the school and who they serve, and then some bulleted list items about what they offer and then some other kind of call outs. We like to include data about their graduation rate, for example, or a small class size ratio, any sort of numbers that we can include, especially if we can include them visually on the page, we find that helpful. And then, like I said, maybe a video and some testimonials so that social proof, but we also always keep that form at the top. We want that form to be right at the top, what we call above the fold. So before you even start really scrolling, you see that form and you can take that step even if you don’t explore the rest of the page.

Michael B. (10:39):

And one tip I know your team has shared with school leaders, because I’ve heard it in presentations from them, is if you ever have a concern of what bullets should we include, what questions can we answer? Best tip you can tell is like go ask your front desk admin what are the 10 questions that you get from perspective parents when they’re calling or from forms you may be getting on your website or for conversations that you have during open houses. Those are literally the best insights because you help answer those questions right away on that form. And that helps generate some sense of trust and hopefully leads to that form getting filled out and maybe a kid that joins your school. So if you’re ever wondering what sort of questions and bullets you can answer on that sort of landing page, that’s a great place to start.

Ashley M. (11:26):

Yeah, absolutely. You can just remove their questions right off the bat so that they feel confident in just filling out that form and taking that step and they don’t need to get other questions answered first.

Michael B. (11:37):

For sure. Well, that takes us up to 11 minutes after the hour. So we’re done with our 10 minutes this week. We hit some good questions. As a reminder, we will be back here next week with Dr. Charlotte Polands on all things teacher retention, which will be a follow up YouTube live from our webinar that’s happening on Tuesday. That webinar is at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. And then we’ll be back here on Thursday on YouTube live, taking your questions on all things teacher retention.

(12:03):

We have close to 350 school leaders joining us for that conversation. So hopefully you’ll be there. If you have or would like to sign up to join us or get the recording, just head over to charter school capital.com. And then Ashley and I will be back with one of our colleagues, Nikki, one of our graphic designers that works on our school’s branding and design efforts. Nikki Blaker will be with us on Thursday, February 2nd, to answer all your design and brand questions. So we look forward to seeing you there. So until next time, I’m going to say bye to Ashley and bye to you all and have a great week.

In this session, Ashley MacQuarrie, Betsy Roberts, and Michael Barber discuss the importance of “Ground Game”—all the marketing you do that isn’t online. They offered great tips for your school’s signage, banners, and yard signs.

Join the experts as they answer all your questions live on Thursdays on YouTube at 10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET. Charter School Capital – YouTube

VIDEO EMBED:

Read the full transcript here:

Michael B. (00:00):

Can you take a second to introduce yourself to everyone on YouTube?

Betsy R. (00:03):

Hi everybody. My name is Betsy Roberts. I’m an enrollment marketing project manager. This is my third season with CSC and I’m very excited to be here.

Michael B. (00:12):

We’re excited to have you. We asked for your presence here today because we want to talk about something that you are incredibly good at and that’s ground game. So we’re going to get into some questions today over the next 10 or so minutes that focus all on ground game for charter schools as they’re thinking about enrollment marketing. And feel free to pop in your questions into the chat. As a reminder, we’re here every week, Thursdays 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, talking all things EM. Let’s hop right into the conversation this morning. Betsy, tell us what ground game means. It sounds like a fancy term, but I would love for you to define it and how you talk to it with charter school leaders.

Betsy R. (00:50):

Yeah, we in enrollment marketing department, we use the word ground game as all the stuff besides everything that we’re doing electronically through the website or through SEO and through digital ads, et cetera. So flyers, postcards, banners, billboards, tchotchkes for signing up, enrolling out of school and kind of everything in between. I mean, it depends what your grade levels are and what people are looking for, but it’s to help with your branding, your marketing and get your message out there.

Michael B. (01:30):

For sure. So there’s a lot of things that schools can be doing when it comes to ground game. Can you talk about the top five or six that you think have been impactful for schools as you’ve been working with school leaders for the past several years?

Betsy R. (01:45):

Yeah, one of the main things that we like every school to have is just a postcard size, little quick facts about their enrollment marketing process, who you are, where you are, [inaudible 00:02:00] that your free public charter school always needs to be highlighted, has your website, has contact information and usually it’s colored. We love pictures of students on there, double side with the top bullet points of your school. And to be able to have that when people walk in or if you’re out somewhere meeting with an elementary school if you’re a middle school, just to have something to hand a little takeaway. So I think that is the main thing that we like all our schools to have is to be able to hand something to somebody so that if they’re going home, they have something to reference.

Michael B. (02:44):

Such a good point. Ashley, do you have anything to add there?

Ashley M. (02:47):

Yeah, I think Betsy’s right on. And we actually really like the postcard. We think of postcards as coming in the mail, but I’ve heard schools really request a postcard, like a thicker card stock because they might give it to their kids to take home. And if it’s a flyer, like a piece of paper, it’s just going to get shoved in a backpack, postcard, something eye-catching, more likely to stick it up on the fridge versus an eight and a half by 11 flimsy piece of paper. So I think that’s great. I think the other piece of ground game too is how you’re appearing in the community. I mean, your signage, a lot of times charter schools that we work with, they might be in more non-traditional spaces that maybe you wouldn’t expect a school to be in. So we do a lot of banners and yard signs and just different things to attract the ye and let people know that you’re a school, that you’re enrolling.

(03:38):

Those quick facts Betsy talks about, often the grid level, maybe tuition fee, something like that just to grab those people when they are walking around on the ground around your school.

Michael B. (03:50):

And one of the things a few of us had the chance to talk about was the importance of signage. The other day we were all gathered having a little meal together and there was a lot of hot debate, a heated debate I should say, about signage. Can you talk about some of the struggles you’ve seen schools have with signage and some of the recommendations our team has made? Because it’s such an important part of having a presence when you’ve got a physical location.

Betsy R. (04:17):

Yeah, that’s so true. When we come in, we like to be really objective and look at the school in a way that no one’s ever seen it before. So the people who work at the school obviously think, “Well, no, that’s school because we see it every day.” But if you look at it as someone who’s never seen it before, it’s like, “Well, is it a school or is it a church or is it a youth center? It’s really hard to tell because it’s not really being explicit.” So we go in and we like to make sure that the signage is very clear. Where’s the entrance? Where’s the parking? Where’s the front desk? Where can I find somebody to talk to? All these things are very, very important as far as getting more kids into seats at your school. You need to be very present in your community so they know who you are, who you’re serving, that you’re a free public charter school, the grades of your students, and how to get in there.

(05:17):

So yeah, like Ashley said, we do banners, we do feather flags, we’ve done yard signs out front. We’ve done directional signs. We’ve had a school that had people walking right past their entrance and into the school next door because that one looked like a school and they were right next door to each other and their enrolled kids were going right into somebody else’s front door so [inaudible 00:05:44] to point out, “This is where you go to check in for this school.”

Michael B. (05:52):

That way finding is so important. You’ve got to make sure you’re leading that experience. That’s something Ashley and I have talked about in weeks past. The experience of enrollment is not just driving awareness, it’s how you go about getting those kids and parents to the school, how you make sure that their experience when they get on property is a positive one. And I’m sure if the signs aren’t great, you’re not leaving the best impression for potential parents and students alike. So important.

Betsy R. (06:22):

So true. If you have a tough parking situation where it’s kind of a mess and no one knows what direction to go, a parent might be like, “Well, I don’t want to have to deal with this at drop off and pick up every day.” So you need to make sure all of those things are working. So it’s part of what we help provide at CSCs enrollment marketing department.

Michael B. (06:43):

None of us are designers, so I’m going to say that out loud, because you have three strategists slash PMs here. People that help the work, make the work happen. But we’ve all worked with designers with different schools, and our team has designers that we work with on a regular basis. Can both of you give me some insights from our designers that we’ve worked with about certain specific things when it comes to signage and it comes to those ground game elements that we want to be cognizant of, like contrasting colors that we need to be able to create that contrast so people’s eyes can see those things, or certain colors that are like, “Absolutely not, we shouldn’t be doing that.” Any thoughts there?

Betsy R. (07:22):

Yeah, I mean, I feel the school colors as far as the branding is very, very important. That’s something that we do in Auditive when we take a school on, is to make sure that their colors are in brand and that they’re consistent. But yeah, definitely large enough to see. Most of our outdoor banners, if it’s in front of somewhere where it’s going to be cars, very, very few words. Basically the school, the grades, the website. So if it’s a banner for someone walking by versus driving by, we take all those things into consideration. I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to colors. That’s why we have such a broad team behind the project managers. We have SEO, we have advertising, we have digital marketing, and a great graphics team.

Michael B. (08:18):

We’ll have to bring some of those team members on board. Maybe that’s our topic for next week that we can talk about. Ashley, I saw you sort of lean in to start some thoughts there. I would love your two cents as well.

Ashley M. (08:28):

Yeah, I was going to say just what Betsy said towards the end there, fewer words. So we’re always looking for ways that we can keep it really simple, keep it really actionable. So we almost always put [inaudible 00:08:42] grades, but also look at the logo. Sometimes the school’s logo maybe has elementary school or maybe has immersion school, something like that that’s a differentiator, but might be really small, too hard to read. So we might look at that and we might use more a simplified version of the logo and put the elementary school piece or the immersion piece, whatever that is, except that it really stands out because you might not be able to see it in that little logo. Or if the logo’s big and really legible and it has high school right on there and you can see it, then we don’t necessarily need to put high school in the text of the banner.

(09:14):

So we’re looking for ways to make it really clear, to use fewer words. And we do use those kind of accent pop colors more sparingly for the things that really need to stand out. We often don’t put necessarily a phone number or anything like that on a big sign because we know that somebody … it does, to Betsy’s point, depend on whether they’re walking or driving by. But we know that somebody who’s driving by is not going to have time to grab a phone number. So with a lot of times those big signage things, we expect to see maybe an increase in organic search terms of traffic for people coming from just Googling the name of the school. So we want that name of the school to be really prominent because that might be how they get to the website rather than remembering a URL or remembering a phone number.

Michael B. (10:00):

Such good points I’ve learned from this conversation from the both of you; it is school name, grades, it is website. Those are the things we’ve got to repeat over and over again. Does it have that information? Maybe that’s our takeaway for this week when it relates to ground game is school name, grades and website. We’re right at our 10. Go ahead Nancy.

Betsy R. (10:19):

Sorry.

Michael B. (10:19):

No, go right ahead.

Betsy R. (10:19):

I was just going to jump in on the logo thing is that a lot of schools that we’ve worked with have logos that they can’t really use anymore because they’re so old and they’re not scalable digitally to be able to put on banners. So our graphics team has recreated so many logos that schools are excited to be able to use.

Michael B. (10:40):

Yeah. If a school doesn’t have an SVG, they need an SVG logo. It’s fancy term for saying something that you could make as big as possible and as small as possible, and it looks clear and crisp regardless if you’re on a website or on a signage or a T-shirt or something like that. You need to be able to scale that logo up and down. Before we wrap up, I’m going to just ask if anybody has any questions, now’s the time. Otherwise, I’m going to ask my last question for the day and that is this. Hot topic related to ground game is clothing and uniforms, whether it’s your school leaders and your teachers that are wearing them or kids and parents potentially. Any thoughts on what schools can do when it comes to uniforms and/or clothing that they’re giving out to help increase that ground game opportunity? I’ll start with you, Betsy. Any thoughts there?

Betsy R. (11:34):

Yeah, several schools, typically schools with lower income families, we give T-shirts out once they enroll and we see those shirts get worn a ton, which is wonderful. We had one school in Arizona that serviced people from the nations, the reservations, the indigenous population there, and the kids that went back to their nations after school wearing the shirts, everyone’s asking about the school. The kids are wearing them on their social media pages. So in that case, it turned out to be like wildfire where the pictures of the shirts were everywhere and we weren’t expecting the T-shirts to get us so much attention that all the high school students were posting pictures of them in their shirts. So you never know which direction it’s going to go. You just have to think about your audience and how it’s going to benefit you, but also benefit your students.

Michael B. (12:37):

Agreed. Any last thoughts there, Ashley?

Ashley M. (12:40):

Oh, I think Betsy covered it. Yeah. A lot of our schools don’t necessarily have branded uniforms. Sometimes they do, but we do see a lot of impact from those T-shirts that students can wear or that they can wear on their free dress day or wear out in the community. And we do just always encourage schools to retain those higher value articles of clothing, swag items for when students enroll. It’s a great thing to include in a welcome packet. We also, to Betsy’s point, with the students in the nations, we also see the opposite. We’ve seen schools in colder areas, rural Ohio, wanting hoodies and things like that because a lot of their kids don’t have winter jackets even. And so you can look at different ways to both make a difference in students’ lives and potentially address clothing insecurities. And also getting your brand out there and it can serve two purposes.

Michael B. (13:35):

Such a good point, such a good point. We’ll leave it there for today on the conversation of ground game because I feel like that’s just such a nice little period to put on that conversation about what branded and related elements and clothing can do, not only for enrollment, but also serving the students in particular areas of challenge. Okay, we’re going to call it a day. I wanted to let everyone know we’ll be back next Thursday and perhaps we’ll touch on a topic we touched on here, which was design. Maybe we can get one of our designers to come join us for our conversation next week and talk all things brand color, fonts and whatnot. So we’ll tentatively say that’s what we’re going to chat about next week. And then I want to let everybody know we’re going to take a little break from enrollment marketing on the 26th of January.

(14:18):

We’re having a webinar on all things teacher retention, what’s happening in the marketplace, strategies and tactics for school leaders to retain teachers. That’s happening on Tuesday, January 24th, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. You can find all of that information on charterschoolcapital.com in our resources area. Just look for that upcoming webinar. And we will be having Dr. Charlotte Pullens join us on our YouTube live that Thursday, January 26th. So we’re going to take a little break from our conversations on EM and talk teacher retention, which is another challenge that of course school leaders are facing. So we look forward to seeing you next week on the 19th. We’ll talk design tentatively and then on the 26th, we’re going to welcome Dr. Charlotte Pullens for our conversation on teacher retention. So tune in, subscribe to our channel, hit that subscribe button, and you’ll be notified when we’re going live every Thursday, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. Thanks for taking the time to join us.

In this session, Ashley MacQuarrie and Michael Barber discussed enrollment marketing tips for January.

Watch the video or read the transcript below for more.

Join the experts as they answer all your questions live on Thursdays on YouTube at 10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET. Charter School Capital – YouTube

Read Full Transcript

Michael B (00:09):

All right. Hi, everyone and welcome to our Thursday Enrollment EM Live. We’re welcoming you all back from a few weeks of vacation. I have my colleague here, Ashley MacQuarrie. Ashley, how were your holidays?

Ashley M (00:24):

They were nice. Yeah, it was good. Some crazy weather here in Portland, but yeah, it was good. Relaxing. How about yours?

Michael B (00:32):

Yeah, they were good as well. I feel like the whole country had some crazy weather the last few weeks, so we will chalk it up to the winter months, and hop right into some EM questions. As always, before we hop in, we are here every Thursday, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, answering all your questions related to enrollment marketing.

(00:52):

We are going to kick it off with of course a very cliche first of the year question. Ashley, it is the first week of January, as we all know. What should school leaders be thinking about related to driving enrollment efforts? Would love your thoughts there.

Ashley M (01:06):

Yeah. So for a lot of our schools, it’s lottery season. A lot of lotteries have opened up, or are opening up in this period. I can think of a handful of schools with mid-February lotteries. So that is really where a lot of schools’ focus is right now. And even for schools that don’t have a lottery, it’s really all about driving those pre-interest forms for those early planning parents.

(01:29):

So what I would focus on is how you’re going to communicate with those families once they express interest or enter your lottery. A lot of times we see that they get a lot of interest early on, and then that interest tends to fade and drop off. So how are you going to make your lottery families really feel like they won the lottery? How are you going to communicate with them throughout the spring and summer? And so we’re putting together ideas like sending welcome swag bags or yard signs, or putting in place writing communication plans for emails and things like that that are going to go out throughout that the spring and summer to keep families engaged.

Michael B (02:12):

I think it’s a great insight there. When we think about enrollment, it’s not just about obviously driving interest in the school, it’s also about maintaining interest in your lottery parents and your lottery list. It’s in maintaining that experience when someone has requested more information, what do we do with that individual? How do we drive them to become a student? Which leads me to my question number two. We had this question I think the last time we were together from video guy Jared, who’s an avid viewer of our live streams, and I believe is starting a school. But I wanted to circle back to this one. But what’s your ratio for student leads? In other words, what’s the average conversion rate from ads, is sort of a part one question there. So how many impressions to actually driving conversions across the site? And then conversion to an enrolled student. Would love some thoughts there from you?

Ashley M (03:06):

Yeah, so those numbers really vary really wildly. We work with schools in really small rural communities and then also really big metros. We work with schools where they draw from a very narrow radius around the school, and then others where parents are willing to drive 10, 20 miles. So it definitely depends. I would say 100,000 to 200,000 ad impressions in a season somewhere around 10 to 100,000 website impressions is typical. And then from there we typically see anywhere from a one to 5% conversion rate from an interest form, so completing our form on our landing page, or calling. So turning into a lead from viewing the ad or viewing that landing page. And again, that just varies really wildly because there are some really competitive areas and there are some areas where we just have not a lot of competition, and also not a lot of opportunity to reach a large audience.

(04:09):

And then from there we’ll often see anywhere from a 10 to 50% conversion rate from inquiry to applicants. So actually filling out that application. In our program in enrollment marketing, we support the schools in whatever way we can in converting those interest forms to applicants. But it really is on the school to be doing that outreach and calling and following up. And so it does depend. Some schools are absolute rock stars on it and have these systems in place that make it really, really effective, and others struggle with that and maybe don’t have the bandwidth. And then additionally, you have really competitive areas where a lot of families are applying for multiple schools, and so that can make it more challenging to actually convert that family into an enrolled and retained family. That’s just some ballpark numbers that we’ll typically see.

Michael B (05:05):

That range that you mentioned, the 10 to 15% from request for information to applicant, that’s a huge range. Are there things that schools are doing better that drive that? Because obviously if you’re going to be spending the money on driving interest, you should be really caring about that experience when someone does raise their hand and get them to that apply step. What are things that the schools that are in that 50% or higher of that range, so that 40 to 50% range? Are they do anything differently to get someone to convert from interest to applicant? What do you see there?

Ashley M (05:43):

Yeah, a lot of times it comes down to having a dedicated enrollment person. Somebody whose whole job is following up on those leads, chasing them down, reaching out to parents, doing tours, things like that. That is huge. But a lot of small schools … We sometimes see schools where the executive director is the one following up on leads, and they have so many other things on their plate. Or maybe it’s even a teacher or an operations manager who has a lot of other things going on. And so that’s just an issue of bandwidth. If you are a school where you don’t have a dedicated person, then having really strong systems in place that allow for automated email messages and things like that to move those families through the funnel, making it really easy for families to submit their forms online, submit their documents online versus having to come get a packet, having events where people can come and enroll on site, that can all help. But it really just does come down to manpower a lot of times.

Michael B (06:49):

Yeah, it’s such a good insight. I got to go out and visit the team over at [inaudible 00:06:54], which is a client of ours, and Dr. Bolock and her team. And they have invested in someone whose whole job is worrying about and leading enrollment efforts. And certainly I would imagine when you’ve got a person whose sole purpose is to make that experience better, those numbers are going to go, hopefully, in the right direction. So such a good insight there.

(07:16):

I want to ask, you and I had a quick sort of sidebar before we started this question on this idea of applicants to actual enrolled students. It’s going to vary widely, so there’s really not a number we can give there. But I do want to go back to this conversation that you mentioned. It’s that enrollment marketing is not just about obviously driving that interest. It’s also about how you get that kid into your school applied and into your school. Beyond what you’ve mentioned already, are there things when someone has applied, getting them actually into the school, are there schools that are doing things differently that help drive that applicant to actual student?

Ashley M (07:55):

Yeah. Communication is a really big thing. I think with older grades, some student-centric outreach and marketing can help getting the kids themselves excited. We’ve seen that be effective for high schools, and it really is just ongoing communication, and having events and opportunities for them to engage. Because we see a lot of times that the families will apply in the spring, and then oftentimes not hear from the school until the first day of school and then the school just hopes that they attend on the first day. Or sometimes parents don’t even realize when the first day of school is. So just making sure that you have these touchpoints all along the way to keep families in the loop. Email and text messages, and we’ve even seen visits and events and things like that be effective. It just really depends on the school and on the families that you serve.

Michael B (08:58):

Okay. Yeah, great thoughts there as well. Again, I think we’re touching on a theme today that enrollment is way more just about way beyond just driving that interest rate and generating that interest. And it’s about how do you go from that interest into actually getting a kid into your school. That experience really matters as you’re closing that loop from interest.

(09:17):

Okay, I don’t know about you, but I have had all over my social media has been people’s ins and outs lists for 2023. And so we’re going to pick up on this cultural theme and listen to some insights from you on what’s in and what’s out for enrollment marketing, as we head into 2023 and beyond.

Ashley M (09:36):

Yeah. I would say focusing, going back to converting, but retention. Retention is huge. This year, 2022, we really felt the impact of inflation, of movement and high cost of living areas, home values, fuel prices, all of that stuff was felt by our schools. Both in retaining those interested families, and also retaining their current families. And so just really focusing on communicating with your families to understand what’s going on so you’re not surprised so that you have an understanding of how many families you’re going to need. And then just really doing whatever you can to retain your current families, and converting those interest forms. So that’s a big one.

(10:29):

The other thing that I would say is focusing your efforts. Scaling down. We saw a decrease in importance and an effectiveness of some of the mainstay social media platforms this year. And I think that’s going to continue. Facebook and Twitter. And we’re seeing more effectiveness from trying and testing, in small ways, some of the newer options out there like TikTok, more YouTube, Spotify, things like that that are emerging. So I would say focusing on what works, and on a small scale, trying and testing some of these newer things. And what’s out is maybe the importance a little bit of advertising on some of those more old school, at this point, social media networks.

Michael B (11:19):

I love that. Great way to end our first session of the year. We’re going to wrap it up there because we’re going to be about two minutes over by the time we wrap up. But I think our theme of the week, if you will, was all about this idea of experience. Again, not about just driving interest, but how do you go about converting from those requests for information forms into an actual student. And as Ashley mentioned, numerous, numerous times, retention, retention, retention. That’s going to be a theme, especially as we head into somewhat of a murky economic environment, I will say.

(11:54):

So with that being said, I’m going to say a big thanks to Ashley for joining us once again, and to all of you that are joining us live. We appreciate you being here. We will be back at every week for the foreseeable future, answering all things enrollment marketing. Also, we’re going to have a couple of different topics on Thursdays throughout the year, so we’ll let you know as those topics adjust. We have a great webinar coming up at the end of January, which we’re just about to announce around teacher retention. So look for information on that. And we’re going to welcome our experts on teacher retention into our YouTube live series at the end of January. But for now, it’ll be Ashley and I as well as some additional guests we’ve got, we’re starting to get lined up for the year.

(12:38):

So as always, we look forward to seeing you every Thursday, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, right here on YouTube. And if you would be so kind and want to find out, or at least get notified of these lives, you can smash that subscribe button on YouTube and your YouTube app will notify you when we go live. So would love to see you here more often. Bring your questions next week. And as always, Ashley, thanks again for joining us.

Ashley M (13:01):

Thanks Michael.

Michael B (13:02):

We’ll see you next week.