Inbound Marketing for Schools

If you’ve worked in or around the marketing world in the past 15 years or so, you’re probably familiar with the concept of inbound marketing. It’s a tried-and-true strategy that works for engaging all of your audiences — from Boomers to Gen Z. 

In theory, inbound marketing makes sense. Get the customer to come to you on their own through trust and influence, and then gently nurture them by strategically serving up the right content at the right time.

But in practice, inbound marketing isn’t always so easy — especially for schools that need to fill seats in a highly competitive market. The thought of waiting for families to express interest, and then nurturing them slowly, instead of actively pursuing them can be…well, a little terrifying. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

The good news is, chances are you’re already dabbling in inbound marketing. A blog post here. A social media ad there. Maybe even a shortened inquiry form. (Because we know those dated SIS inquiry forms are a major barrier.)

But now, we want to help you approach inbound marketing strategically, intentionally, and with a data-driven mindset. In this guide, you can expect to learn:

• What inbound marketing is
• How schools can develop personas for their inbound strategy
• How to implement digital tactics from the top of your funnel until long after your families enroll

Jump to:

Inbound marketing for schools: An overview
The inbound marketing flywheel for schools
Step 1: Get the right players involved in your school’s inbound marketing strategy
Step 2: Develop personas for your school’s inbound marketing strategy
Step 3: Inventory your inbound marketing assets
Step 4: Create an inbound marketing strategy for each stage of the flywheel

Inbound marketing for schools: An overview

Inbound marketing for schools focuses on attracting families by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. That last part is important. Inbound marketing is about more than acquisition or student recruitment—it’s also about forming meaningful, long-term relationships with your students and families. 

Personalization and relevance are the name of the game for inbound marketing, which starts with attracting “customers” (read: families and students) with content that adds value and is tailored to their wants and needs. This is different from traditional “outbound” marketing tactics that push marketing messages out to prospective students and their families. 

In the education world, those might look like fairs, broad awareness campaigns, or email blasts and direct mail to purchased prospecting lists. These kinds of tactics can be more expensive than inbound marketing, are harder to measure, and are significantly less targeted. They also aren’t particularly enjoyable for your target audiences—in a world where platforms like Tik Tok recommend content based on your viewing preferences and subscription services like Stitch Fix can curate your wardrobe for you, a generic postcard asking you to visit campus or “apply today” isn’t particularly compelling. That’s where inbound marketing comes in. 

The inbound marketing flywheel for schools

The reason building relationships is such a foundational piece of inbound marketing is that happy families are still your best student recruitment channel. Happy parents leave pleasant online reviews (on sites like Niche), go to bat for you in community Facebook Groups, and tell their friends about the great experience they’re having. 

But, in today’s market, that doesn’t seal the deal like it used to. Hence, the flywheel, a cyclical alternative to the traditional marketing (and admissions) funnel:

1. Attracting new families

Attracting the right people at the right time with valuable content that positions your institution as an authority they want to engage with. 

2. Engaging families

Engaging current and prospective students and families with insights and solutions that respond to their pain points and goals so they are more likely to choose (and continue to choose) your institution. 

3. Delighting families 

Delighting the students and families who have chosen your institution with ongoing support to position them for success. For new students and families, this might include unexpected personal responses and valuable information that they want to share with others.

Rather than ending with enrollment, the flywheel accounts for the impact that happy students and caregivers can have on word of mouth, brand awareness, and ongoing contributions to your enrollment funnel. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s discuss how to implement your school’s inbound marketing strategy.

Step 1: Get the right players involved in your school’s inbound marketing strategy

Marketing & Admissions

For the inbound marketing flywheel to work, the admissions and marketing teams need to work together in lockstep to develop strategies and execute campaigns for the attraction stage. For example, in a school focused on inbound marketing, the marketing team may take the lead on advertising, the website, and social media — they’re all about attraction. Then, the hand-off goes to admissions once a family has engaged. An admissions/enrollment team may also take the lead on engagement depending on the environment and have the most responsibility in the application and enrollment processes for private K-12 institutions and charter schools. 

For public schools and districts without an admissions process or office, you may partner with your superintendent or deputy superintendent in planning for this work. This department will also take the lead on engagement in many instances.

Teachers & Faculty

While every single individual within your institution has the ability to impact a student or family’s experience, teachers/faculty, and advisors are on the front lines. They spend the most time with students and interact the most with parents and caregivers, and as a result, they serve a pivotal role in the customer service and “delight” part of your flywheel. 

Now that we’ve discussed the basics of inbound marketing for schools, it’s time to get into the details of implementing your strategy.

Step 2: Develop personas for your school’s inbound marketing strategy

If inbound marketing is all about getting the right content in front of the right people, we need to start here. If you don’t have them already, you’ll want to develop personas to represent the members of your community that you plan to engage with your inbound marketing tactics. 

Personas can be polarizing because of the risk of bias or stereotyping when they’re created, so it can be helpful to have them developed by a third party. If time and budget aren’t on your side, you can develop them in-house; the key is to ensure that your personas are based on research and recognizable patterns of behavior for your real-life current and prospective families. 

Your school’s personas should fall into a few main audience groups:

Prospective Parents or Guardians

Now we’re getting to the folks on the receiving end of all this marketing and customer service magic. For K-12 schools, they’re the primary decision-makers and will be a key audience for strategies related to every aspect of the flywheel. 

Prospective Students

Students are playing an increasingly important role in the school selection process. In a survey of nearly 2,000 parents, 60% of K-12 parents said their children played a role in choosing the school they enrolled in. That number jumped to 76% for high school students. Developing inbound engagement strategies for both students and parents/caregivers will require a multichannel approach that takes their generational differences into consideration.

Current Students

Current students and their experiences with your institution are the cornerstones of the delight stage of the flywheel. 

Current Parents / Guardians 

While students come first in the delight stage, parents and caregivers are a close second. For institutions that charge tuition, parents and caregivers often provide the financial resources to make a student’s attendance possible, and they are often targeted for additional fundraising. For public schools, while the parents aren’t paying tuition, they are often very invested in their child’s experiences at school, and there is a lot of data to show that they’re willing to exercise the choice to go elsewhere when a school falls short of their expectations.

Alumni

What do happy, engaged students become when they graduate? If you’re looking at the full flywheel you can’t forget your alumni! When students have remarkable experiences with an institution, they develop an affinity that continues well beyond crossing the stage at graduation. And that affinity can lead to alumni returning to your institution to work or volunteer, sending their own children to your institution, additional positive word of mouth, and fundraising opportunities.

Personas can represent all of the non-employee constituency groups that are mentioned above and can include both demographic and psychographic (behavioral) characteristics. 

They should be as close as possible to representing real people in your target audiences so you’ll want to go as far as giving them names and faces—instead of creating a content offer for a “prospective parent” you want to create one for Patricia Parent, a 45-year-old married woman who is a stay-at-home-parent, has two school-aged children, and cares about small classes, diversity, and STEM. Knowing exactly who you’re creating content for makes the process a lot easier.

It is likely that each audience group at your school will have 3-5 personas. If you’re short on time and resources, consider this process:

1. List your audience segments
2. Further segment your audience into smaller buckets. For example, within the audience segment “prospective parents” you would have some smaller buckets, including:

• Full-pay families
• Families with a demonstrated financial need families
• Families with an interest in athletics

3. Once you’ve further segmented your audience, then answer these questions for each:

• What are their goals for their children? How can you help them achieve them?
• What problems can your school solve for them?
• What challenges or objections may they have about your school?
• Where do they spend their time — in person and online?

4. Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have the very first draft of a persona that you can build out even more by adding demographic information and other data.

Step 3: Inventory your inbound marketing assets

When it comes to developing your school’s inbound marketing plan, before you dive in, take stock of what you already have. You’d be surprised how much you’re already doing that falls under the inbound marketing umbrella—it may just be a matter of making it part of a formal strategy. 

Many schools are already using awareness stage tactics like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search and display ads, blogs, organic and paid social media, and online reviews. 

You can check website traffic and engagement from all of these sources to gauge what’s working, what you might want to scrap, and what may simply need to be adjusted as you evaluate these marketing tactics through an inbound marketing lens. 

From there, it’s in the subsequent stages of the flywheel that many schools need the most help so we’ll dig into some digital tactics for each stage next. While the tactical lists aren’t comprehensive, they can give you a place to start no matter where your institution is in adopting inbound marketing.

Step 4: Create an inbound marketing strategy for each stage of the flywheel

Every stage of the inbound marketing flywheel requires its own strategies and tactics, and your target audiences will have different needs and expectations along the way. Each stage feeds the next to keep the flywheel in motion and help you to attract and retain the right students and families for your community and turn them into advocates for your institution. 

As a start, you’ll want to set specific goals and objectives for your inbound marketing plan—don’t try to tackle every audience at once. Aim for SMART (Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals instead of being overly vague. For example, “Increase applications from students of color by 10%” is a better goal than “Increase interest from students of color.” 

Attract 

This stage is all about helping prospective students and families discover you. To get the flywheel spinning, you have to attract students and parents/caregivers to your institution by providing them with valuable resources on the platforms they use. This is where persona development becomes really important. The more detailed your personas, the better equipped you’ll be to develop content that will meet your audience’s needs and deliver it in the places where they’ll see it. 

At this stage, parents are actively researching their options using search engines and platforms like Niche to create lists of institutions they want to get to know better. As a matter of fact, in our 2022 Parent Survey, parents of K-12 students reported their top two sources of discovering schools were Google and Niche.

On a monthly basis:

• K-12 profiles on Niche get about 5.5 million views
• 40,000 Google searches happen for “best schools near me”

If a family already has a specific school in mind based on conversations with friends and family, recommendations from a consultant, etc., they’ll be more likely to do a branded search for a specific school name. 

Digital Tactics for the Attract Stage 

Blogs

A blog presents an opportunity to answer questions about parenting challenges, student life, or the admissions process beyond the informational content on your website. Blogs allow institutions to demonstrate thought leadership on topics that are important to prospective students and families and can also support your SEO efforts. 

Content offers/lead magnets

High-value content offers like downloadable guides, viewbooks, and checklists can address specific questions, concerns, and pain points while giving you the opportunity to collect contact information from prospective students and families. 

It’s important to note that this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Consumers across age groups are savvier than ever and they recognize poor-quality content when they see it so before you start brainstorming ideas, spend some time researching what questions prospective students and parents are asking search engines, the pain points they are seeking to solve in changing or selecting schools, and the content and resources that already exist—if 10 schools in your area are all promoting guides for preparing a child for kindergarten, that doesn’t help anyone. 

Once you’re ready, targeted display and social media ads can drive traffic to landing pages for these offers, where website visitors can access the content after completing a brief (emphasis on brief) form. From there, a prospect can be added to an email comm flow to nurture them through the admissions or enrollment process. We have some great tips for that here.

Display ads

These text-based ads with images or video can encourage prospects early in the flywheel to click through to a landing page and engage with gated content.

Influencer marketing

Parents are often influenced by their peers, while students are influenced by other students, their parents, and extended family members. Start by identifying “micro-influencers” who have relatively large, engaged followings and already have a connection to you. That could be a student-athlete with a large TikTok following or a current parent with a significant presence on Instagram or who’s very active in local Facebook parenting groups or Reddit communities. From there, you can partner on a strategy for increasing brand awareness for your institution in a way that feels authentic to members of your target audiences who might be more encouraged by a third-party endorsement from someone they admire.

Paid and organic search (SEO)

A search engine is the first place a prospective parent goes to research schools, so you’ll want to ensure that your institution’s website is optimized for key search terms. Having a responsive website, keeping your page load times low (ideally, under three seconds), and incorporating title tags and meta descriptions into every page will all help with where you appear on the search engine results page (SERP). Paid search ads can target similar keywords related to your institution to drive website traffic.

Paid and organic social media content

While organic posts (including Stories and Reels) can be used to share photos, videos, student takeovers, and what’s happening around campus, you can use targeted paid social ads to promote some of the content offers mentioned above or content offers that are specific to your social channels.

Remarketing

Even though recent privacy changes have made this a little tougher, remarketing (serving ads to people who have visited or taken action on your website) is still an effective way to stay top of mind among prospective students and parents early in the school research process. Niche offers the ability to supplement remarketing from your website by serving ads to individuals who have visited your Niche Profile.

School search and comparison sites

In addition to your website, do you know what else comes up when people search for schools? School search and comparison sites! And sites like Niche often come up on the SERP before an institution’s website, so having an up-to-date profile is a must.

In addition to remarketing, your Niche Profile also has the ability to bring many of the other tactics above together in one place: Program Spotlights and custom calls-to-action can be used to highlight content offers and you can embed your Instagram account right into the Profile. You’ll also want to make sure you’re incorporating proof points like rankings and testimonials into the copy and creative you use at this stage. 

Engage 

Once the interest is there, the Engagement phase is when you nurture prospective students and families through the admissions or registration process. At this point in time, families have their shortlist of schools in hand and are actively comparing them to one another. They’re re-visiting websites, reading reviews on sites like Niche, watching virtual tours (or visiting campuses), submitting formal inquiries, and engaging with email drip campaigns that have been triggered by content downloads and form completions (more on that below). 

The primary goal for this stage is to interact with families in ways that encourage them to want a long-term relationship with your institution. To achieve this, institutions need to focus on selling solutions to specific education challenges and audience needs, not an endless list of features that don’t differentiate your institution from others. This is also an opportunity to reinforce your brand and demonstrate how your institution is uniquely positioned to serve specific students and families. For institutions with formal admission processes, this stage leads to an application. 

Blogs, organic social media content, content downloads, remarketing, and search and comparison sites still play a role in this stage, in addition to the tactics below. 

Digital Tactics for the Engagement Stage

Chatbots and SMS messaging

At this stage, you’ve got your prospective families “on the hook” but you need them to keep going. Chatbots allow for self-service on your website so parents and guardians can get answers to basic questions without having to send an email, complete a form, or make a phone call. Asking for a phone number on your forms and landing pages can allow you to send texts to prospective parents with updates and reminders for upcoming deadlines and important dates in the admissions/enrollment process. Use UTM parameters to track links shared through SMS and the effectiveness of using this channel.

Digital ambassador programs

Platforms like Peerpal can allow prospective parents/guardians to make online connections with current parents, faculty, and alumni who are willing to address their questions in real time.

Email drip campaigns

The communication doesn’t stop with a form completion or content download. Drip campaigns (aka comm flows and email workflows) are a necessity for nurturing parents/guardians through the admissions/enrollment process. To keep things interesting, try incorporating video or audio to ask questions or address common concerns.

Personalized digital viewbooks

Viewbooks are far from dead, but what if you didn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to print and mail as many of them? A popular tactic in the higher education space is the personalized digital viewbook, and we’re not talking about creating a PDF of your viewbook and posting it online. Instead, after completing a simple form, prospective students and parents are shown personalized content based on their specific interests in needs.

School/campus news stories

Tried and true campus news stories provide a window into what it’s like to be part of your community and should be prominently featured on your website and your social channels. They can also be incorporated into email drip campaigns based on student and parent interests.

Teacher, student, parent, and alumni spotlights

At this stage, families are eager to hear from members of your community. In addition to providing those opportunities with ambassador programs and events, you’ll want to ensure that your website features up-to-date stories and testimonials from members of your community. These spotlights, testimonials, and profiles can also be cross-posted to your social channels and incorporated into your email drip campaigns. 

Webinars and virtual events

Webinars provide another opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership in specific areas that align with your institution’s brand, but you can also use them to provide helpful information on everything from the financial aid process for schools that charge tuition, or the process of getting accommodations for a learning difference. The possibilities for webinar topics are limitless and can be ripe for experimentation. Many schools are continuing to host virtual events for prospective students and families, and these events can be extremely valuable for engaging families that are relocating or otherwise unable to attend events in person.

Enroll 

This is the moment you’ve been waiting for! But… we can’t emphasize enough that the inbound process doesn’t stop with enrollment or registration. Enrollment is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—it’s still important to handle students and parents at this stage with care, respond to their needs, and keep them engaged (and interested) to avoid melt. 

If you’ve worked in admissions for more than a hot second, you know that an enrollment contract or a completed registration doesn’t always mean a student is actually going to show up on the first day of classes. The gap between students who register to attend a school and students who actually show up can be a little harder to track for a public school district, but the approach is the same—after putting in the work involved in recruiting new students, schools across categories need to do all they can to ensure that those students are there, backpacks in hand, on the first day of school. 

Tactics from earlier stages like SMS messaging, organic social media content, and stories about campus happenings and current members of your community will continue to be important at this stage. 

Digital Tactics for the Enrollment Stage

Newsletters

Instead of overloading families with long checklists or a barrage of emails, have a communication plan in place that is specific to newly-enrolled students and families. Newsletters specific to these audiences can provide a steady drumbeat of need-to-know information at a predictable cadence in the window of time between enrollment and the first day of classes.

Parent and student ambassadors

Parent and student ambassadors can really shine at this stage with personalized outreach to answer questions, facilitate introductions, and ease the overall transition into your community. 

Delight 

This is the stage we all really want to get to. It’s also the hardest one to execute because of the cross-departmental collaboration that’s required. Once a new student has joined your community, there needs to be a seamless handoff from admissions to all of the other folks who shape the experience in your school community, whether that’s for four years, 10, or more. 

At this point in time, it’s critical to ensure that there is a connection between the brand promises made in the previous stages and the student and parent experience. Internal marketing also plays a pivotal role here, particularly for K-12 schools where parents and caregivers may not understand all of the positive things that might be happening within a school community beyond their child’s class or grade. 

In this stage, schools are also challenged to think beyond the status quo and consistently look for ways to prove their value to students and families. That work is never done. 

Digital Tactics for the Delight Stage

Interactive learning platforms 

For K-8 schools, platforms like Seesaw and ClassDojo can serve as micro social media communities where parents can get a window into their child’s daily experiences at school. It takes the guesswork out of what’s happening in between report cards and parent conferences and builds trust that you’re delivering on the promises that were made during the admissions or registration processes.

Newsletters

Newsletters play a different role here but can do the double duty of both sharing nuts and bolts information and internal marketing for stories and highlights that parents might miss once their children are enrolled at a school. For alumni, newsletters can help keep them connected to what’s happening at their alma mater, keep them up to date on former classmates, and keep them apprised of alumni events and volunteer opportunities.

Organic social media content

Similar to newsletters, the role of organic social content changes once a prospective student becomes a current student. While your content strategy doesn’t necessarily change, the purpose of your social channels takes on a different purpose for enrolled students and families. Instead of “selling” them on your campus experience, your social channels become part of retaining them by reinforcing why they chose your institution to begin with. For alumni, your social channels can help them remember the (hopefully) good old days and nurture their affinity for your institution.

Personal emails/1:1 communications

This is one of those areas where colleagues outside of marketing, communications, and admissions need to be aligned with you on best practices and protocol—they might also need some training. One-to-one communication with students and parents can often be overlooked but they are critically important. Email responses need to be timely, and messages need to be clear, concise, and kind. Difficult conversations should happen in person or over the phone. 

Portals

Beyond the brass tacks of housing class schedules and checklists, your portal can serve as an extension of your institution’s brand and the experience you provide to students and families. Unfortunately, most schools don’t think about that part when a platform is selected. Is it simple and intuitive to use? Is it mobile-friendly? Can members of your community access information quickly or does it take 10 clicks to access basic content? All of those factors are important and have a subtle impact on the student and parent experience.

Surveys

Regular surveys are helpful for two key reasons: they can help you gather invaluable feedback on all of the things we list in this playbook and they show your community that you care about their feedback in the first place—as long as you make them actionable and communicate clearly about what you plan to do with the feedback once it’s received. Surveys can also help you determine the mix and cadence of alumni communications, get feedback on events, and understand how your alumni want to engage with your institution going forward, whether it’s to network with other alumni or provide financial support. 

Final Thoughts

Once your school is up and running with inbound marketing, another component to keeping your flywheel spinning is ongoing data review and analysis. It’s important to know what’s working, what’s not, and what to tweak, and those answers lie primarily in your data. This post can help you with a few KPIs to get started.