Traditional marketing strategies prioritise the ‘quantity over quality’ philosophy when it comes to generating leads. Under this approach, marketers attempt to collect more leads in order to deliver content to a wider number of prospects, hoping that more prospects will engage with them. This ‘casting a wider net’ strategy can overwhelm marketing efforts since it requires focusing on a larger group of people.
This approach may also dilute marketing initiatives since it requires marketers to design content to suit the common preferences of their leads. This will lead to less efficient school marketing and reduced conversions from leads to actual enrolments. Worse, this approach can backfire; prospects can become annoyed if they receive content that they’re not interested in.
As a school marketer, you need to collect quality leads prospects that have received and responded to your content and CTAs positively. These are the types of leads that your school marketing content should focus on. When you nurture leads that are aware of your school brand, there is a bigger chance that you can convert them into enrolees.
Here’s how to get high quality leads for your school:
1. Build contact forms with the right required fields
Forms make it easy to capture high-quality leads from your website and they work best when placed on a landing page with an offer your prospects can’t resist. You can easily filter out less prioritised prospects by asking them to fill out fields that are essential to your database. Make sure they fill out necessary information such as their full name, email and location.
2. Create your ideal buyer personas
Buyers personas are fictional representations of your ideal prospects. These personas can serve as guides to help you focus your school marketing content towards the right leads. By designing your school marketing strategy with the correct personas in mind, you will get a better understanding of your target audience and have a greater chance of reaching them.
3. Design the right content and CTAs
When you come up with powerful content and call-to-actions, you will be able to convince prospects to enrol in your school, turning them into high quality leads. Your content and call-to-actions must be highly relevant to your target market in order for this to happen, and you can do this by designing them with your ideal personas in mind. You don’t have to target everyone to sign up in your CTAs – you just want to get your ideal prospects. Align your CTAs and content to the topics that you think your personas will be interested in.
4. Keep the buyer’s journey in mind
The buyer’s journey is the process that your prospects go through before making a decision to purchase a product or service. It is divided into three major stages:
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- Awareness: your prospect is aware of a concern and is looking for more information.
- Consideration: your prospect is now weighing all the available options and is looking for the best solution.
- Decision: your prospect has already chosen an option. Understanding these stages can help you decide whether your prospect is ready to engage with you and enrol in your school. If you align with your prospect’s current state, you’ll be able to properly guide them towards becoming the right lead. By developing the forms and CTAs that your prospects are willing to engage with, they are more likely to divulge more information about themselves. When this happens, you get the chance to convert them into higher quality leads.
5. Know how to use lead scoring
Lead scoring is a methodology that determines the worthiness of your leads by scoring and ranking them according to their behaviour, related to their interest in your products or services. If they fulfil a certain set of criteria that can turn them to enrolees, they receive a high lead score, which means that they are high quality leads and must be prioritised. Several inbound marketing platforms have an automated lead scoring system which you can customise by creating a set of criteria of what you expect a lead to have when they’re ready to be engaged. This automated system can reduce the time needed for you to filter the best leads.
Aim for quality leads so that you can have a better chance of getting more enrolments from your school marketing.
