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In this weeks Enrollment Funnel Spotlight, we will dive into the Reach Stage of the funnel and how its critical in building your brand.
Dr. Dave Chaffey created the RACE digital marketing framework to describe each stage of the process of attracting new customers. “RACE” stands for Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage, and the RACE model is an excellent tool for independent schools to shape their digital marketing strategy because of its practical, customer-oriented way to reach and engage parents.
Today, we’ll take a look at the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework..
The Reach stage is the top of the enrollment funnel and will focus on building brand awareness and driving traffic to your website through general values-based ads and content that not only captivate prospective families with creative design but relay your schools core mission as well.
This stage also incorporates A LOT of A/B testing of creative, messaging, and audience targeting so building a strong digital plan first is important.
Here are some helpful steps for getting started.
The first step in the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework is market research. Creating customer personas, which are general characterizations of the ideal people you want to reach with your advertising, is crucial when you are determining who you are trying to target.
You can also perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to determine where your school needs help versus where your school is thriving and effective. After you complete your customer personas and SWOT analysis, you should be ready to set your digital marketing goals and begin the campaign set up process.
At this stage, it’s also important to remember the high expectations that parents have for their website experiences in 2022. A study by Finalsite found that customers base 94% of their first impressions of your brand or school on your website. Mobile-first, easy-to-navigate websites are key to creating a positive first impression of your school compared to other competing schools in your area.
Next, you’ll want to define your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing objectives. SMART objectives help digital marketers to decide which information and metrics are important to review when determining the success of a digital marketing campaign; for an independent school during the Reach Stage some common metrics would be click through rate, new user sessions and most importantly, how long those new users spent on your website and how many pages visited.
Updating your landing pages, content, and ads will be an important step to getting good results in this “research” stage for the prospective family. But remember, this stage will have the most testing of messaging, creatives, and audience targeting so starting out you want to try everything you think will work and let the data guide your optimizations into the next stages of the enrollment funnel.
If a potential customer shows interest by interacting with your site, but does not follow through by contacting your independent school, try retargeting them. Using tracking pixels, you can remind customers who have visited your site to re-engage with your school with social media advertisements. Dan Hecht’s retargeting and remarketing guide on Hubspot is an excellent resource for this step.
Once your SMART goals and customer personas are in place, you’re ready to start increasing awareness of your private school. Generating interest in your private school is key to meeting your desired enrollment numbers, so ensure that you have money in your budget for a robust digital marketing campaign.
Use the customer personas created in step one to determine whom you should target. Each platform will have their own audience targeting options but generally you can set household income, age range, and interest parameters in specified geographical locations to help narrow down your ideal families.
Now that the heavy lifting is done with retargeting pixels placed, messaging and creatives built out and audience targets set its time to launch the campaign.
It’s crucial to check the campaign daily to make sure your spending is pacing correctly and there are no “hick-ups” in the ads being served. Once it’s proven to be working as planned, its typically good practice to check results weekly during the Reach stage so you can see which platforms or ads are performing best and make optimizations accordingly.
Utilizing the benefits of real-time data in digital marketing goes a long way in making your media dollars spend as effectively as possible.
While the Reach stage is the one stage most schools are not using in their digital marketing strategies, it is the most important piece of the enrollment funnel. Without it, the campaign simply focuses on conversions rather than the funnel. Get your school out of “random acts of marketing” and build your enrollment funnel the right way, starting with the Reach stage.
In this weeks Enrollment Funnel Spotlight, we will dive into the Reach Stage of the funnel and how its critical in building your brand.
Dr. Dave Chaffey created the RACE digital marketing framework to describe each stage of the process of attracting new customers. “RACE” stands for Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage, and the RACE model is an excellent tool for independent schools to shape their digital marketing strategy because of its practical, customer-oriented way to reach and engage parents.
Today, we’ll take a look at the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework..
The Reach stage is the top of the enrollment funnel and will focus on building brand awareness and driving traffic to your website through general values-based ads and content that not only captivate prospective families with creative design but relay your schools core mission as well.
This stage also incorporates A LOT of A/B testing of creative, messaging, and audience targeting so building a strong digital plan first is important.
Here are some helpful steps for getting started.
The first step in the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework is market research. Creating customer personas, which are general characterizations of the ideal people you want to reach with your advertising, is crucial when you are determining who you are trying to target.
You can also perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to determine where your school needs help versus where your school is thriving and effective. After you complete your customer personas and SWOT analysis, you should be ready to set your digital marketing goals and begin the campaign set up process.
At this stage, it’s also important to remember the high expectations that parents have for their website experiences in 2022. A study by Finalsite found that customers base 94% of their first impressions of your brand or school on your website. Mobile-first, easy-to-navigate websites are key to creating a positive first impression of your school compared to other competing schools in your area.
Next, you’ll want to define your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing objectives. SMART objectives help digital marketers to decide which information and metrics are important to review when determining the success of a digital marketing campaign; for an independent school during the Reach Stage some common metrics would be click through rate, new user sessions and most importantly, how long those new users spent on your website and how many pages visited.
Updating your landing pages, content, and ads will be an important step to getting good results in this “research” stage for the prospective family. But remember, this stage will have the most testing of messaging, creatives, and audience targeting so starting out you want to try everything you think will work and let the data guide your optimizations into the next stages of the enrollment funnel.
If a potential customer shows interest by interacting with your site, but does not follow through by contacting your independent school, try retargeting them. Using tracking pixels, you can remind customers who have visited your site to re-engage with your school with social media advertisements. Dan Hecht’s retargeting and remarketing guide on Hubspot is an excellent resource for this step.
Once your SMART goals and customer personas are in place, you’re ready to start increasing awareness of your private school. Generating interest in your private school is key to meeting your desired enrollment numbers, so ensure that you have money in your budget for a robust digital marketing campaign.
Use the customer personas created in step one to determine whom you should target. Each platform will have their own audience targeting options but generally you can set household income, age range, and interest parameters in specified geographical locations to help narrow down your ideal families.
Now that the heavy lifting is done with retargeting pixels placed, messaging and creatives built out and audience targets set its time to launch the campaign.
It’s crucial to check the campaign daily to make sure your spending is pacing correctly and there are no “hick-ups” in the ads being served. Once it’s proven to be working as planned, its typically good practice to check results weekly during the Reach stage so you can see which platforms or ads are performing best and make optimizations accordingly.
Utilizing the benefits of real-time data in digital marketing goes a long way in making your media dollars spend as effectively as possible.
While the Reach stage is the one stage most schools are not using in their digital marketing strategies, it is the most important piece of the enrollment funnel. Without it, the campaign simply focuses on conversions rather than the funnel. Get your school out of “random acts of marketing” and build your enrollment funnel the right way, starting with the Reach stage.
In this weeks Enrollment Funnel Spotlight, we will dive into the Reach Stage of the funnel and how its critical in building your brand.
Dr. Dave Chaffey created the RACE digital marketing framework to describe each stage of the process of attracting new customers. “RACE” stands for Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage, and the RACE model is an excellent tool for independent schools to shape their digital marketing strategy because of its practical, customer-oriented way to reach and engage parents.
Today, we’ll take a look at the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework..
The Reach stage is the top of the enrollment funnel and will focus on building brand awareness and driving traffic to your website through general values-based ads and content that not only captivate prospective families with creative design but relay your schools core mission as well.
This stage also incorporates A LOT of A/B testing of creative, messaging, and audience targeting so building a strong digital plan first is important.
Here are some helpful steps for getting started.
The first step in the Reach stage of the RACE digital marketing framework is market research. Creating customer personas, which are general characterizations of the ideal people you want to reach with your advertising, is crucial when you are determining who you are trying to target.
You can also perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to determine where your school needs help versus where your school is thriving and effective. After you complete your customer personas and SWOT analysis, you should be ready to set your digital marketing goals and begin the campaign set up process.
At this stage, it’s also important to remember the high expectations that parents have for their website experiences in 2022. A study by Finalsite found that customers base 94% of their first impressions of your brand or school on your website. Mobile-first, easy-to-navigate websites are key to creating a positive first impression of your school compared to other competing schools in your area.
Next, you’ll want to define your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing objectives. SMART objectives help digital marketers to decide which information and metrics are important to review when determining the success of a digital marketing campaign; for an independent school during the Reach Stage some common metrics would be click through rate, new user sessions and most importantly, how long those new users spent on your website and how many pages visited.
Updating your landing pages, content, and ads will be an important step to getting good results in this “research” stage for the prospective family. But remember, this stage will have the most testing of messaging, creatives, and audience targeting so starting out you want to try everything you think will work and let the data guide your optimizations into the next stages of the enrollment funnel.
If a potential customer shows interest by interacting with your site, but does not follow through by contacting your independent school, try retargeting them. Using tracking pixels, you can remind customers who have visited your site to re-engage with your school with social media advertisements. Dan Hecht’s retargeting and remarketing guide on Hubspot is an excellent resource for this step.
Once your SMART goals and customer personas are in place, you’re ready to start increasing awareness of your private school. Generating interest in your private school is key to meeting your desired enrollment numbers, so ensure that you have money in your budget for a robust digital marketing campaign.
Use the customer personas created in step one to determine whom you should target. Each platform will have their own audience targeting options but generally you can set household income, age range, and interest parameters in specified geographical locations to help narrow down your ideal families.
Now that the heavy lifting is done with retargeting pixels placed, messaging and creatives built out and audience targets set its time to launch the campaign.
It’s crucial to check the campaign daily to make sure your spending is pacing correctly and there are no “hick-ups” in the ads being served. Once it’s proven to be working as planned, its typically good practice to check results weekly during the Reach stage so you can see which platforms or ads are performing best and make optimizations accordingly.
Utilizing the benefits of real-time data in digital marketing goes a long way in making your media dollars spend as effectively as possible.
While the Reach stage is the one stage most schools are not using in their digital marketing strategies, it is the most important piece of the enrollment funnel. Without it, the campaign simply focuses on conversions rather than the funnel. Get your school out of “random acts of marketing” and build your enrollment funnel the right way, starting with the Reach stage.
