K-12 Private School Enrollment Trends: 2022

In 2022, many private schools are continuing to see rising enrollment trends as the country continues its progression to the “new normal” post-COVID.

A CATO Institute survey showed a majority of K-12 private schools experiencing boosts to enrollment starting in 2020 and still continuing through 2022. While good retention efforts have played a major role in the current enrollment successes, it was the overarching narrative and confidence in the ability of private schools to adapt to the COVID crisis that is proving to have the most lasting effect.

How did the COVID pandemic affect private school enrollment?

When many public schools were shutting down and moving to all-virtual classes, private schools were able to adapt and continue to offer in-person education or at the least, a more effective hybrid model than the local public schools. Parents could not avoid the value of being able to prevent their children from losing valuable learning years to hastily implemented virtual schooling or closures and placed a heavier emphasis on more commonly known advantages of K-12 private schools like personalized education through smaller class sizes and meeting the unique needs of every child. So how can you turn the “COVID boom” into a continuous enrollment funnel?

Parents could not avoid the value of being able to prevent their children from losing valuable learning years to hastily implemented virtual schooling or closures and placed a heavier emphasis on more commonly known advantages of K-12 private schools like personalized education through smaller class sizes and meeting the unique needs of every child.

How should you market your private school in 2022?

Here are some tips to market your independent private school for 2022 and 2023:

Set realistic goals for your school’s enrollment growth over the next few years. Creating concrete goals will help you focus on the important things when you create your ideal private school marketing plan. Furthermore, invest more time in “reading the tea leaves” on your current market. What are the migration trends in your area? Where are the biggest opportunities you should be having a digital presence? What type of marketing strategies will best reach those families?

Survey your current families and rediscover what your most significant value propositions are and lean into them. In K-12 school marketing there is no more valuable information than the stories of “why” parents chose to invest their children’s education with your school. Not only is this data great for resource allocation and advancement initiatives but can serve as the framework for your annual campaign’s themes, messaging, and content creation.

Focus on what makes your school unique. Private schools have a lot of freedom to customize their programs and curriculums and separate themselves by their unique value propositions. Digitally branding these distinctive offerings in a way that brings out emotion from the parent is a great first step. Lean into these differences in the later stages of the funnel to differentiate yourself and self-qualify families that fit best with your school culture.

Use a holistic digital marketing approach. Making sure that your school is standing out as an option for the parents of today no matter where they are online is paramount. Schools are continuously seeing conversions come from multiple platforms and sources and telling your school story in a way that gets prospective families to envision themselves as a part of your school community requires a multi-channel approach. Organic content that’s personal and relatable, blogs that are resourceful for prospective parents, high rankings on search engines and digital ads that remind, engage, and create action across all mediums ensures that your school’s story is being told in every way that resonates with your next legacy family.

While grabbing the easy wins meets the goals of today, what is your strategy to meet the goals of tomorrow? Schoolcraft Digital can help you decide how best to market your school with the resources and strategies typically reserved only for large digital firms. Schedule a brief 30-min chat and know all the digital marketing options that are available to schools just like yours.

In 2022, many private schools are continuing to see rising enrollment trends as the country continues its progression to the “new normal” post-COVID.

How did the COVID pandemic affect private school enrollment?

Parents could not avoid the value of being able to prevent their children from losing valuable learning years to hastily implemented virtual schooling or closures and placed a heavier emphasis on more commonly known advantages of K-12 private schools like personalized education through smaller class sizes and meeting the unique needs of every child.

How should you market your private school in 2022?

Here are some tips to market your independent private school for 2022 and 2023:

Set realistic goals for your school’s enrollment growth over the next few years. Creating concrete goals will help you focus on the important things when you create your ideal private school marketing plan. Furthermore, invest more time in “reading the tea leaves” on your current market. What are the migration trends in your area? Where are the biggest opportunities you should be having a digital presence?

Survey your current families and rediscover what your most significant value propositions are and lean into them. In K-12 school marketing there is no more valuable information than the stories of “why” parents chose to invest their children’s education with your school. Not only is this data great for resource allocation and advancement initiatives but can serve as the framework for your annual campaign’s themes, messaging, and content creation.

Focus on what makes your school unique. Private schools have a lot of freedom to customize their programs and curriculums and separate themselves by their unique value propositions. Digitally branding these distinctive offerings in a way that brings out emotion from the parent is a great first step. Lean into these differences in the later stages of the funnel to differentiate yourself and self-qualify families that fit best with your school culture.

Use a holistic digital marketing approach. Making sure that your school is standing out as an option for the parents of today no matter where they are online is paramount. Schools are continuously seeing conversions come from multiple platforms and sources and telling your school story in a way that gets prospective families to envision themselves as a part of your school community requires a multi-channel approach. Organic content that’s personal and relatable, blogs that are resourceful for prospective parents, high rankings on search engines and digital ads that remind, engage, and create action across all mediums ensures that your school’s story is being told in every way that resonates with your next legacy family.

While grabbing the quick wins meets the goals of today, what is your strategy to meet the goals of tomorrow? Schoolcraft Digital can help you decide how best to market your school with the resources and strategies typically reserved only for large digital firms. Schedule a brief 30-min chat and know all the digital marketing options that are available to schools just like yours.

If you use audience targeting tactics in building out your enrollment marketing plans, you should know that major changes are coming to the way advertisers and school marketers are going to be able to reach prospective families.

As your ideal family interacts with the internet, every item viewed, website visited, or video watched has been tracked and stored by third party cookies on your web browser. Google announced in 2020 that they would be eliminating third party cookies as part of their Privacy Sandbox Initiative to build a more protected digital ecosystem. This follows privacy changes made already by Firefox, Microsoft, and Apple IOS. With Google’s Chrome browser now planning to remove third party tracking cookies, your ability to target prospective families with specific demographic or behavioral data will change dramatically.

Luckily, that timeline was pushed to late next year giving school marketers like yourself more time to prepare your marketing strategies accordingly. You are preparing right?

As your ideal family interacts with the internet, every item viewed, website visited, or video watched has been tracked and stored by third party cookies on your web browser.

Don’t Panic! Here are a few things large digital marketing firms are doing to prepare for the cookie-less future.

Understand the value of First-Party Data, how to collect it, and how to use it.

There are great options for building first party digital marketing campaigns. Conversions tend to be higher, ads, emails, and messaging can be more personalized, and if one uses relevant surveys, the results can guide all aspects of the campaign from general messaging down to the platform placement of ads.

Strategize and use Contextual Advertising in paid digital marketing campaigns.

Contextual advertising matches the ad content to the content on a website, video, or blog. This means you can build a general ad for a blog about private school enrollment or get more granular and have an ad promoting your robotics program placed on a cool robotics video on YouTube.

There will be higher ad waste with this strategy and therefore a “buckshot approach” to your school’s programs is not recommended. Hone in on your unique strengths and program offerings (two or three at most) and focus on building content for those specific offerings.

Stay up to date with each platform’s plans for using “cohorts”.

Cohorts are groupings of individuals with similar interests or behavior. Most, if not all, platforms are already using cohorts in some way (think Facebook “interested in basketball” targeting options). Without third party tracking, cohorts will become a more essential piece of audience targeting.

Learn how A.I. tools can help you.

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a necessary resource for digital marketers and if you are managing your school’s digital marketing, there are definitely some A.I. applications that can make your life easier. Neil Patel put together a quick video outlining just 7 A.I. Tools that you can get started with right now. From writing copy to making blog style headshots, there are many options in this space and will undoubtedly continue to grow.

Schoolcraft Digital partners with K-12 private schools to help navigate the ever-changing digital marketing landscape and collaboratively craft and implement holistic digital marketing plans that meet the parents of today no matter where they are online. If you are wondering where to start or how to implement some of these strategies, we are here to help.

Click the button below and schedule a chat to find a solution that works best for your school’s enrollment goals.