Where Do You Put Marketing Materials For Your School?
One of my new year's resolutions was to exercise more, so I've been walking the treadmill either at the hotels I stay at when I'm on the road, or at the local gym when I'm home. All the treadmills, ellipticals, and cycles face a bank of a dozen televisions that are programmed with 4 different channels. One of them is a music video channel that has a crawl across the bottom of the screen. The crawl provides commercials for local businesses and public service announcement for local events. It's one way the gym has established itself as an involved member of the community.
Looking around the gym, there are some older folks there, so it would make sense that one of the commercials is for a local hearing aid company. There are also a number of young moms there - in fact, so many young moms that the gym has a child care section so the kids can be supervised while mom works out. Realizing that, I would think there are area businesses which target young women with toddlers which could take advantage of the crawl advertising service. One of those could be the local Catholic or Christian school.
A faith-based school has a target audience - women aged 25 to 39 with young children. Most faith-based schools place their marketing materials in churches affiliated with the school, which is a very good place to place them. However, it's not the only place where they should be placed.
Where will your target audience be exposed to messages about your school? The Yellow Pages? Hardly. TV? Not a bad idea since you can identify target audience and your local cable sales representative can suggest placements that will maximize exposure of your school to that audience target, but it's cost-prohibitive for the majority of schools. The Internet? Absolutely! Your school needs not just a Web presence, but a good Web presence - one that's both professional and interactive.
But where are common places that you can take advantage of that won't cost you a significant sum of money? Try placing your marketing brochures and posters in gyms, doctors' offices and nail/hair salons. If you're in an area that's growing, then realtors are also an excellent resource. Even if the area is not growing, but there are still people moving in, this could still be a viable source of potential leads. Supermarkets are also a good location for placements of your marketing materials.
Some Christian schools have told me, "Oh, we only accept children from our affiliated churches." That's great! Are the church congregations are growing? Are they welcoming families with young children? If the answer to both of those questions is "no," now you have identified 3 problems.
© Michael V. Ziemski, SchoolAdvancement, 2011 (Original Publication Date: 20110207)
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