Spreading the Word: Caedmon’s Digital Marketing

How do independent schools attract new families in today’s world? How do they get the word out about themselves when word of mouth is much less of a thing? We’re now in the third decade of the 21st century, and the marketing landscape has undergone enormous change, especially in the last ten years, most of it driven by social media and other applications of the internet. A good map of the terrain will mark off new features such as Instagram and TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and, above all, Google, which is overwhelmingly the most popular of search engines. As Ali Foresi, Caedmon’s Director of Communications, puts it succinctly, “Google is how people go about finding us these days.”

Acknowledging these facts, Caedmon has begun working with Little Foxes, an agency that specializes in the digital marketing of schools and colleges, to advertise itself to parents looking for an independent school for their young children. In a way, this turns out to be a story—one of several—about Caedmon’s strides towards becoming a true 21st century school. It begins with Caedmon’s Chief Financial and Operations Officer, Dave Carty. Mr. Carty, who has served on its board since 2002, has seen the Hoboken-located Stevens Cooperative School make great improvements in its marketing and communications strategy over the years. When he learned, soon after taking up his new position as the school’s CFOO, that Caedmon had a similar interest in strengthening its marketing and communications, he suggested a team-up with Little Foxes, which has been responsible for pushing forward much of the positive change occurring at Stevens. The administrators and Caedmon board members who would be working with them were impressed by what the Little Foxes team had to say when they first met with them, and as a result the group was brought in around August of 2021 to increase the precision and coverage of Caedmon’s digital communications.

The marketing efforts with which Little Foxes is helping Caedmon fall into three main groups. Of these, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best known. For those unfamiliar with the term, SEO refers to practices that maximize the likelihood that one’s website will turn up in a Google search. Typically, these practices involve incorporating highly searched keywords into the website’s meta descriptions—the descriptions of the site’s pages, written in HTML code, which are translated into summaries of a website’s content underneath the website URL on a search engine results page (SERP). The work Little Foxes does in this area is primarily concerned with ensuring that people outside of Caedmon’s parent body can easily come across the school’s recently revamped website if it has content that would be relevant to them. Mrs. Foresi explains that she works directly with an SEO specialist at Little Foxes, Amanda Klotz, changing metadata in the website along lines indicated by Ms. Klotz so as to increase the odds that the website turns up in Google searches pertaining to New York City elementary and pre-K education.

In addition to fine-tuning the website for Google searches, Little Foxes also helps Caedmon with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). SEM, as its name suggests, concerns paid advertising on Google and other search engines—it’s marketing which arranges for ads to turn up on search engine results pages when certain keywords are entered for a search. SMM, on the other hand, is a matter of advertising that appears on social media. So far, Caedmon has done very targeted SMM, confining it to Facebook and Instagram, the platforms currently most popular with the school’s community. In these cases, advertisements for the school appear in the Instagram or Facebook accounts of people who have recently done Google searches for the school or, more generally, for an independent pre-K/elementary school in New York City. Viewers who engage with the ads, becoming followers of Caedmon’s Facebook or Instagram accounts, additionally gain access to the organic content posted there, material which can help them to form a more detailed picture of a Caedmon education. And because this year the school has formed a three-person team dedicated to putting up video and other content on these digital platforms, their potential to inform viewers outside the Caedmon community has increased.

Some digital marketing has also been conducted through other venues, not qualifying as either SEM or SMM. Informational videos about the school uploaded to YouTube are one example. Director of Admissions

Jennifer Tarpley-Kreismer, who has been involved in developing a number of these, has found that they have proved quite popular: “How do we attract folks to Caedmon who may never have heard of us or who heard of us but didn’t quite understand who we were?” she asks. “Our videos have been really key. They have a phenomenal percentage of people who watch them all the way through. That has been great for brand awareness.”

Little Foxes currently holds meetings every month with a Caedmon team comprising Mrs. Tarpley-Kreismer, Mr. Stuart, Mrs. Foresi, Mr. Carty, and Caedmon trustee Garret Leahey, whose job at Google gives him a deep understanding of the information Little Foxes presents. At these meetings, marketing strategies for the coming month are discussed, and there are detailed reviews of the performance data gathered by Little Foxes in regard to Caedmon’s marketing and its organic website traffic. The goal, as always, is constant refinement of communications strategy so that families with Caedmon-age children can be made aware of the school’s existence or better informed about what it has to offer. Reflecting on the work being done, Mr. Carty remarks, “I had heard the line about this school used to be, ‘Caedmon is the best-kept secret.’ And I was talking to Matthew, and we both said, ‘We can’t be the best-kept secret. We have to be so well known that we have people beating a path to our door!’”