How To Create A Marketing Strategy For A Language School, How It Can Help You Strengthen Your Brand, Boost Enrollment, And More
Having a marketing strategy for your language school will help you avoid wasting money on random and ineffective marketing actions. It will also make it easier to control your social media and email marketing campaigns (aiming to achieve your sales goals).
You might think that creating a strategy is a lot of work, that you don’t have time for it right now and that you can just “wing it” for now. However – spending this additional time and energy on planning now will reap the benefits for you in the near future.
Keep reading to find out WHAT exactly is a marketing strategy, and HOW you can create one for your school! 🤓
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Introduction: What Is A Marketing Strategy For A Language School
A marketing strategy is a designed plan for the upcoming 12 months, that will allow you to know:
WHAT offers should be promoted,
WHEN should you focus on pushing them out
and HOW you should frame your proposal in order to achieve your business objectives.
Your objectives can be either reaching your sales goals, or more general marketing objectives that are the most important for your school (those will also lead to more sales, but not directly).
Here are a few examples of good marketing objectives:
monetary goals: selling X amount of courses OR a specific revenue goal;
increase student retention (lifelong customer value);
number of new (non-returning) students;
increase brand awareness;
establish authority as the go-to school for X;
fixing the schools image;
increase sentiment around your school;
build a community of die-hard fans;
create new products;
create new partnerships (what kind? why?);
add new revenue streams;
renovate the school;
raising the prices (final price: X).
A good marketing strategy helps you define clear, realistic, and measurable marketing objectives.
The whole planning process might sound a bit difficult in the beginning but there’s no reason to get overwhelmed and give up. Let’s simplify:
A marketing strategy is a document in which your business plan will meet your buyer persona*.
*In case you haven’t created a buyer persona for your school yet – read this article: How to build your client avatar to improve your sales and marketing strategies (expat language school edition).
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Why Creating A Marketing Strategy For Your School Is Important
The purpose of having a marketing strategy for your school is to help you realize your business goals and focus on the actions required to reach the right students for your school.
Some of the reasons why you should develop a marketing strategy are:
You will save money by making informed decisions and getting the most out of your marketing investments;
You will get better results by following a logical path (you won’t feel like hitting your head against the wall whenever it’s time to create content, buy ads or organize an event);
That’s you without a marketing strategy 🤕
You will save time by making your marketing efforts focused on what you’ve planned instead of scrambling around;
You can measure the effectiveness of singular marketing actions, as well as entire campaigns;
And finally, you will make more money, by improving your sales results!
But please, have in mind that your marketing strategy affects the way you run your entire school, so it should be planned and developed together with your team, if you have one. If you’re a one-person show – ask your teachers about their opinions on the direction your school should take.
When creating your marketing strategy you should take under consideration:
Your school’s services and courses;
The position and role of your services in the market;
The profile of your ideal students (client avatar);
Data-based competitive analysis of your school;
A short description of your sales funnels;
The marketing tactics that you will use (based on the previous items);
We will go back on those points but right now you might be asking yourself: “Marketing strategy and marketing plan? What is the difference?”
The Difference Between A Marketing Strategy And A Marketing Plan For Language Schools
A marketing strategy sets the general direction and goals for your marketing. It is where you define how to reach your sales goals, ensure student retention, expansion, increase brand awareness – whatever your goals are for the upcoming year, or even further than that (like a two-or-three-year plan)!
Having the information from the marketing strategy, you can create a marketing plan, which outlines the specific actions you will take to implement your marketing strategy and measure its effectiveness. It should be divided in such a way that you will know exactly what the marketing goal is, for every month, and how to reach it.
TIP: Don’t be scared that you won’t be able to handle all of that. For schools that don't have big marketing teams, we usually advise combining the marketing strategy and marketing plan into one document. Therefore, your marketing strategy will anyway involve your marketing plan for the next 12 months 🤷♀️😉
We‘ve created a marketing 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:
How To Create A Winning Marketing Plan For Your School In 8 Steps
Here are eight steps to create an effective marketing strategy (&plan) for your language school:
1. Identify your niche:
What are the specific needs of your students?
What are their shared identities?
Which exact group of people do you teach?
Niche marketing is all about choosing a particular group of clients and serving their distinct needs in the best way possible (if you aren’t sure about your niche, check this article).
2. Identify your target audience:
Here, you should ask yourself who are your ideal students. Describe them carefully and precisely. Make a profile of them and try to add as many details as possible.
Study their buying and learning patterns:
What do they want to learn?
How do they learn?
Where do they learn?
Where do they spend their time – online and offline?
Where do they buy?
How do they buy?
There are a lot of important questions and we talk more about them here. Those reflections will help you to clarify and strengthen your communication, attract new ideal students and keep the existing ones involved.
3. Describe your business goals.
Here you should ask yourself:
Where are you heading?
What do you want to achieve in your school in the next 12 months?
It can be selling more courses, reaching a new group of students, expanding your school, or even increasing awareness about your brand. Be very specific about your goals for the next year.
A good tactic for that, is using the “SMART” method, in which you run every single one of your goals through the set of five “tests” – you ask whether the goal you came up with is:
Specific – state clearly what you want to achieve.
Measurable – set tangible metrics to measure your results (it might be a monetary goal, but it might also be a percentage increase or the number of enrollments).
Achievable – set objectives that are within your capacity and budget – no need to shoot for the moon and be disappointed. This is business, not self-improvement!
Relevant – is this goal really getting your school closer to a success? (here’s a secret: more Instagram or Facebook followers are not a relevant goal 😉)
Time-bound – give yourself a set amount of time to achieve this specific goal.
Here’s an example:
Useless goal: We want more course enrolments.
Useful goal: We will increase course enrolments by 30% by May 2022. *
* We know that it is achievable with the team we have right now and it is relevant for our school in the upcoming year.
4. Who is your competition and how does their offer relate to yours?
Similarly, to the student’s profile, you should develop a profile of your competitors.
Please note that we’re looking at your competitors only at this point. Why? Because you need to know whom you’re competing with: if your target audience is corporate professionals, it makes no sense for you to compete with the school that offers courses for stay-at-home moms. Makes sense, right? 😉
Once you’ll decide which schools, tutors, or other teaching facilities are your direct competitors, have a look, write down and analyze:
their courses;
their prices;
their advantages and disadvantages;
their marketing tactics.
Use that knowledge to identify both your competitive advantage, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your own internal processes.
Tip: don’t forget the new global competition –we have an article that goes deeper into that topic – read it here.
5. Describe your offer:
Based on your business goals, client avatar and competitive analysis re-write your offer.
Please note, that we didn’t say – CHANGE your offer. RE-WRITE it:
What is your message & unique selling proposition?
After analyzing the other schools, how do you show your potential students the unique value of your offer?
What makes your school the best fit for your students?
It is about BOTH your value and the way you deliver the message!
Define and describe your sales funnel - a model, separated by stages, representing the journey that a potential student goes through before buying your courses. Add the marketing actions that could be taken at each step (like online advertising, open-door events, intake calls, etc.).
Here’s a simplified version of a sales funnel:
Awareness – they find out that your school exists.
Interest – something about your offer or the way your school presents itself makes them want to find out more.
Consideration – they are considering whether they want to/ can/ should sign up for a language course at this point in time.
Intent – they have decided that they are ready to sign up for the language course now.
Evaluation – they are comparing different offers, making final financial and time decisions.
Purchase – THIS is where you finally see the money.
6. Describe your marketing goals:
Based on your business goals and your client avatar, you should set your marketing goals.
Example:
If you said that you want to sell more courses, then your marketing goals might include increasing your visibility at your existing market, strengthening the bonds with your current students, creating an affiliate program.
On the other hand, if you want to approach new markets (so a completely new group of students), your main focus would be entering that new territory – be it by using the existing platforms (like influencers, blogs, events) or researching this new market and testing new approaches.
These marketing goals could be long-term and might take a few years to successfully achieve. However, they should be clear and measurable and have time frames for achievement. A good marketing strategy will not be changed every year but revised when your strategies have been achieved, or your marketing goals have been met.
7. Choose strategies & channels to support your marketing:
Considering your niche and client avatar, your offer, and the sales funnel, you should think about the best strategies to attract your ideal students.
To make more informed decisions at this stage, check out those articles on how to:
choose the right social media platforms for your language school;
choose the right advertising channel for your language school;
whether blogging makes sense for expat language schools;
the one about the difference between cold, warm and hot sales leads might also be useful at this point.
8. Write out the execution phases:
In this step, you should start by defining your marketing cycles (which are composed of gathering, befriending, and selling – that is something very important to follow, and once more, we have an article about it 😉). So, you can mark the sales periods and define what type of course will be sold at which point of the year.
Then outline the main topics for your social media posts, emails, advertisements, etc.
Don’t forget to add all the important dates – holidays, awareness days, festivals, cultural events, etc. That way you can use them in both your sales and marketing campaigns. They really do make your content creation much easier 😉
Finally, make a more personal touch by adding around two creative marketing actions to your plan. Make sure they match your school’s identity and can help to differentiate you from your competitors!
Here are a few examples of marketing actions: a photo contest, a trip, a special workshop, a museum outing, a webinar, a concert, a guerilla marketing event, a flash mob, influencer campaign, etc.
For every article, we create a marketing 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:
Conclusions
Wow! It wasn’t a short path, only the brave ones arrived here 💪 (unless that you used the smart menu to jump straight to the conclusions… smarty pants! 😒).
But for the ones who read it all, you now know what it takes to develop an effective marketing strategy to strengthen your brand & boost enrollment.
In the beginning it can sound like a lot of work (and it is), but in the long run, it’ll bring you a clear direction, tons of savings, and – priceless – peace of mind 🧘♀️
You will be able to focus on one step at a time, and won’t feel frazzled in your communication ever again. From now on, every single month, you will know exactly what the marketing goal is and how to reach your long-term objectives 🥳
It is time to start working on your own plan. And get started today! 💪
Need some help? Check out how we can take over creating your very own marketing strategy: expatlanguageconsulting.com/marketing-strategy
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