MANAGEMENT
MARKETING
Utilising paid social media adverts to drive pupil numbers DAVID CARNE explains how using social media adverts led to record numbers attending his school’s open evening!
T
he autumn term is, traditionally, the season where school leaders will probably be reflecting on the best approach to communicating their marketing messages and securing pupil numbers for another year. Around 18 months ago my own school began asking whether there was a better way to attract parents and students. At around the same time I was completing the first year of an international MBA and happened to be studying marketing strategy and tactics. Our traditional method of marketing had been newspaper advertising and yet, intuitively and based on knowledge of studying how commercial organisations market, we started to explore social media marketing. We already had fairly active social media channels, and were posting our open evenings there, but we decided to explore paid advertising. With little more than the conviction and belief that paid social media marketing would be much more effective, I set about trying to convince the headteacher and governing body to let me ditch the newspaper adverts and move our campaign entirely online. Fortunately, the statistics were on my side. In
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the UK around 85% of the population are active social media users, of which at least 75% of adults aged between 25 and 44 access Facebook at least once a day, on average spending 2.36 hours a day checking all the 4.8 social media platforms they are members of. Figures which dwarf newspaper readers. Having done a little research we decided to focus our marketing on Facebook and Instagram, as these were two of the most popular platforms with our target demographic. Over a four-week period we spent the princely sum of £250 on paid social media advertising, resulting in a 50% increase on our best year’s open evening attendance figures! We had so many people arriving that, at one point, we had queues out of our driveway down the main road! Not only had we saved several thousand pounds; we had experienced significant growth. The risk had paid off. All this is a great story, and it would be easy to stop here with some kind of call to action encouraging readers to embrace social media but in using social media we actually transformed the way we market, and I would like to highlight why I believe our campaign had so much success.