The Language School Content Strategy Guide: How to Build a Content Strategy for Your School?
Do you spend a lot of time producing content for your social media and feel that it gives you none or a low return? Or maybe your sales are low and you think that you might be sending mixed messages and confusing your potential students?
You need to create a content strategy! It will help you to achieve your school’s goals, by being deeply rooted in your marketing strategy.
Did we manage to catch your attention? Keep reading to find out HOW to build a content strategy for your school! 👷♀️👷♂️😉
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
Introduction: The Benefits of Creating a Content Strategy for Your Language School
First things first: what is a content strategy?
A content strategy is a strategic plan for how you create, manage, and deliver your school’s content. It involves heart-of-the-matter discussions about the who, what, where, when, why, and how of content creation.
The main benefit of the content strategy is that it is a roadmap that gives you a clear direction on what to do and when - you will know exactly where you’re heading (sales) and how to get there.
Your entire team will also know the right way to go. No more confusion!
Here are a few other benefits of creating a content strategy:
attracting your ideal students;
leading them at every stage of the sales funnel; and
keeping them engaged even after buying your courses.
To get the most out of your content strategy, it’s important that you choose the right social media platform and the right advertising channel for your school* based on your ideal client avatar. If you haven’t done this preparatory work yet - no worries! Click on the links above and check our other articles that will take you through the whole process 😉
* It is important to mention that your advertising channels and social media platforms are not always exactly the same. So, you can, for example, create ads for YouTube, but weekly upload content for Facebook, or Instagram.
Save up to 4 hours a week on content creation and increase student enrollments!
We’ve created a powerful system for helping language school owners, marketers, and language tutors rapidly speed up their social media content creation process without:
creating a full, professional content strategy
facing creative blocks
feeling the need to copy their competitors
So if you want a crystal clear and predictable roadmap to help you get more students, look no further!
What is the Purpose of Creating a Content Strategy?
Content Strategy is not just about creating content for your social media, blog (yours or other creators), emails, etc. It is about understanding the needs of the audience, mapping out content gaps, and filling them.
It is about executing your marketing strategy, by having a clear purpose in all of your creative decisions.
This means that when you create content, you actually have a sales or marketing goal in mind. You know what you're doing, and why you are doing it, which allows you to experiment without blindfolds on!
A content strategy should be strongly based on your:
business plan;
client avatar; and
branding (including your brand’s voice)!
With a content strategy, you can tell what kind of content you need, how much to produce, at what frequency, whom to target with each piece of content, how to develop it for maximum impact, and how to measure its success.
At this point you are not deciding on what exactly you will post each week – that is your content plan. What you need to decide is WHAT type of content has to come out WHEN in order for you to meet your marketing and sales goals.
Let’s give an example: say your business goals include increasing brand awareness for your school. To achieve this, you might implement a content strategy that focuses on SEO to increase your website's visibility on the search engine results pages (such as Google) and drive traffic to your course pages. (If you got interested in knowing more about SEO for language schools, we have an article about it here 😉).
On the other hand, if your goal is to keep your current students involved in the life of your school and buying next level courses from you, it might be much more effective to think about a strategy that includes posting tips, useful knowledge, entertainment and community building type of content. That’ll keep them thinking about how cool your school is, and how they made the best decision ever by choosing you 🤘
In your content strategy, you should make a decision on where to focus your attention in order to get the best results possible considering your business objectives. You outline a general plan to:
inform the people who will be working on creating the content on what is expected of them,
and ensure that every piece of content serves a business, sales, or marketing goal.
This way everyone will be on the same page and your content will actually make sense from the business point of view! 👌
We’ve created a content strategy to-do list with actionable steps for you to follow in the upcoming two weeks. Created specifically for language schools!
You can access the to-do list library by leaving your email address below:
Create A Framework That Fits Your Needs And Gets Results
Enough with the theory! Ready for the action? 💪
In order to develop your content strategy, you should answer these questions:
1. Who will be reading/ watching/ listening to your content?
Once again: refer to your ideal client avatar.
Quick explanation: in your marketing, you are attracting the kind of people to whom you decide to talk to.
Meaning: if you talk about tips for being an expat mom in Paris, you will not be attractive for female corporate lawyers living in Paris.
However – for those expat moms you’ll be the go-to language school and their first choice when signing up for courses because they’ll know, that at your school they’ll meet people just like them and get language classes designed with their life needs in mind.
So, who is the target audience for your content? Do you have a very specific niche or you are trying to communicate with more than one persona?
Answering those questions will help you understand the content types you should produce and the publishing channels where your potential students “hang out”.
Remember: the goal is to make your perfect students feel like you are speaking directly to them!
2. What problems will you be solving for your students with your content?
Ideally, your services (which means your courses) solve a problem that you know your students have. In general, it is learning a new language, and being able to communicate in a foreign country. However, in the case of expat students, you get a few additional lifestyle difficulties you can address:
getting to know a different city, with places to visit, landmarks, restaurants, cool hidden spots that they don’t know about, and also all the difficulties that living in another city brings – like not knowing how to take the right bus or metro (and you can produce a very handy content for those situations);
getting to know a different culture, people with a different lifestyle, a different way of seeing the world, and communicating. Every culture has its own set of local idiomatic expressions (that not always can be learned in the books – but you can definitely teach them) and problems that your students can avoid by knowing the local habits, do’s and don’ts, traditions, etc.
You can support both the expats who are still figuring out what their main challenges are and your students who are already using your courses to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solutions you're offering and helps you build credibility with your target audience.
Brainstorm and write out all of the topics that might be interesting to your potential or current students. Choose the ones that match your business and/or marketing goals best. Now you have a clearer picture of what you should discuss on your social channels.
3. What is your unique value proposition?
It is very likely that your competitors offer similar courses to yours, which means that your potential students need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different.
Maybe you can offer more years of experience, with great teachers; or, if you are a new company, you might have an innovative teaching method?
Perhaps you have a great physical structure, with a nice environment where people would even like to hang out after the classes? Or your school can be in a cool spot of the city, close to where your students live, work, or go to college. And – if you are an exclusively online school, you can brag about how handy your services can be to them.
It is about what can differentiate you from the crowd. Once you figure out what is your unique value proposition is, make that message very clear in your content!
4. What content formats will you focus on?
To find out what formats to focus on, you once again need to know your potential students and where they are spending their time. Basically, you shouldn’t be producing content as crazy for every platform or focusing your attention on what is trendy, without knowing IF your ideal students are even using the platform of your choice. And HOW they are using it.
For example, they might have LinkedIn accounts, but maybe they prefer to read about language and expat lifestyle related content in their Instagram, or watch YouTube videos.
Luckily, we have a whole article that can help you to choose the right social media platform for your school! 🍀🎉
5. What type of advertising will you focus on?
Similar to the previous question, you need to know where your audience spends time and consequently, how to be effective in choosing the right places to advertise your school.
You also need to consider the advertising price, and that is quite a complex equation, because it doesn’t involve only the price of every platform for promoting content, but the content format itself (considering that it is much harder, expensive and time-consuming to produce a video than a static image, for example).
Once again – no worries – we will guide you through the whole process in this article: How To Choose The Right Advertising Channel For Your Language School.
6. What are your workflows?
In the content creation and in the publication process it is important to have clarity of:
Who is responsible for each creation;
Where it is going to be published; and
When it is going to be published.
It’s a good idea to organize your workflows before your marketing team grows (even if it’s only you right now!). Planning a content editorial calendar and creating SOPs* is a good strategy because you can easily visualize and communicate each collaborator’s tasks and still be in control of the overall process, ensuring that your school’s message didn’t get lost somewhere on the way.
*SOPs - Standard Operating Procedures – chronological step-by-step instructions describing every action taken in the process of creating and publishing a piece of content.
7. What are the content management procedures after publishing content?
Finally, in this last step, you should plan what happens AFTER the content is published.
How should your school interact with users? It takes time, effort, and a dedicated pair of hands to do it, but is really important.
After all, the whole reason for producing content is to connect with people. You can’t just upload your super carefully thought through content, in your very well-chosen platform, with the right format, ads and all, and leave it there to hang. That is just a waste of resources 🤷♀️
You have to answer the comments, check the analytics, analyze the feedback and data, and it is a whole lot of work, but when it is well done - it pays off. (We talk more about the social media management mistakes here, and specifically about the Instagram Insights for Expat Language Schools in here).
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
Conclusion
A content strategy will help your school to identify how to talk to your target audience, define objectives in your content production, and choose the right channels as well as the right tools for its execution. It is not just creating great content, but ensuring it reaches the right people and takes your marketing campaign up a notch.
It'll save you headaches, time, and money. And will help your school to prepare for reliable and cost-effective sources that will ensure sales! From one business owner to another... begin implementing a comprehensive & effective content strategy today! 💪🏃♀️
The Hassle-Free Content Templates For Expat Language Schools
Instead of spending days, weeks, months, or even YEARS searching, clicking, and scrambling to put together all the pieces required for your social media success, you can follow a proven system, roadmap, or path from Point A to Point B.
This is what our Hassle-Free Content Templates For Expat Language Schools provide: the exact formula you need to get where you want to go with little to no overwhelm or information overload.
