Marketing schools: find new leads and nurture them with a good sales strategy.

Vocational & Career School Marketing

I couldn’t resist this photo. Just too funny, but sadly sometimes typical of vocational training images.

My nature is to be fairly impatient, however, my fuse is even shorter when advertising gets confused for an actual marketing plan. Career schools in particular need to focus on entire marketing plan, not just new marketing channels and quirky PR ideas. As you hear a lot from me in these posts: it’s all about the conversions.

For this post we’ll address just two things: targeting your marketing efforts, and making sure you know how to nurture the leads you get so that your marketing budget isn’t wasted. If you don’t have a good system to convert those leads in your admissions process, then you’re wasting a lot of your marketing dollars.

Targeting your school’s marketing plan:

I’ve seen this time and time again: people get really excited when they try a new advertisement or placement that gets a lot of leads. That’s great, don’t get me wrong, but more leads doesn’t automatically mean more income. Just because a source gets a lot of new inquiries does not mean it will result in a lot students. Processing leads also costs you money (with your admissions staff time, but we’ll actually get to that later in this post).

I’ll present two plans and you choose which you’re prefer:

  1. You spend $10,000 and get 900 leads that convert to 60 students; (or)
  2. You spend $10,000 and get 500 leads that convert to 80 students.

Which do you prefer? Pretty easy, right? The point is: don’t get excited about a lot of leads. Get excited about the quality of the leads. You wouldn’t spend money on, say, a phone company if your calls never connected, so why spend money on sources that generate leads that never “connect” to a student enrollment for your school?

My main point here is don’t be afraid of spending more money on leads if they have a high conversion rate. Sometimes it’s a bit of a shock to dish out $50+ on a lead, but if that advertising channel has a 15-20% conversion rate, (when compared to a $10 lead that has a conversion rate of 1% or less), then it’s worth it because your get more students, which is the whole point.

Nurturing prospective students with a good admissions plan:

Admissions is just as much part of your marketing system as advertising and PR. Marketing is message, targeting and process. Your Admissions team is a vital part of that process.

You should have a contact plan for every inquiry (i.e. what exactly gets done after someone submits an inquiry). A simple example would be:

  1. Inquiry is submitted;
  2. Admissions mails a brochure and sends an introductory email the same day;
  3. Admissions calls to ask if they have questions, would like to your the school, etc.;
  4. Inquiry receives the brochure package;
  5. Follow-up call to discuss the brochure;
  6. Newsletters on a regular schedule w/ interesting news and reminders of start dates, etc.

You can do anything, really. Maybe you only do digital brochures and don’t mail anything (good for you), but the point is that there needs to be a solid plan that is followed and tested. If you’re spending money on leads, you must make sure you’re giving your career school every possible chance to convert them to students. You can’t just get the lead, send a brochure, then hope they’ll attend. Nurture the leads.

Within these two areas (target marketing and sales/admissions) there are a lot of other nuanced opportunities. I’ve already written about some of them here, so please feel free to read more of the related posts below.