Unsurprisingly, developing a competitive edge can make your school’s recruitment strategy more impactful. However, with so many schools competing for the same prospects in today’s digital education marketing landscape, setting your school apart and attracting prospects can be challenging. That’s where an education marketing agency can make a difference.
The right marketing agency can provide your school with valuable insights that help you achieve your marketing and recruitment goals. These insights can reveal gaps and opportunities for growth, allowing you to capitalize on your efforts and generate even better results. To get these results, you’ll need to collaborate effectively with your new digital marketing partners. Here are some top tips to help your school succeed.
Why Consider Collaborating with an Education Marketing Agency
Working with a higher education marketing agency may seem daunting for some schools, but the collaboration promises many advantages. Access to an experienced and skilled team can help your school elevate its digital marketing strategy. In fact, it can help you reach your marketing goals much faster, all while making them more impactful.
When you collaborate with a marketing agency, especially one focused on education marketing, you’ll have an even bigger pool of individuals dedicated to helping your school grow. These new experts have the necessary skills and industry knowledge to analyze your current efforts and create a plan of action that works.
Through this process, you may discover new ideas, strategies, and tools for your school. This can instantly boost the quality and quantity of your marketing efforts. Having a bigger team with more resources allows you to cultivate a competitive advantage, particularly over schools with only a small internal team and limited tools. It can also introduce your school to new options and opportunities.
You can rely on the agency’s experience and know-how, saving your school valuable time and money. In the short term, an agency can help you get better results faster. In the long term, an agency can share key insights and tricks to help your internal team grow—allowing them to learn and expand their skill set in a way that will benefit your school.
Ready to get started? Here are some of the most important things to remember when working with an education marketing agency.
1. Share Your School’s SMART Goals and KPIs in Advance
When starting a new digital marketing initiative, it’s always best to outline clear SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound objectives that inform your marketing efforts. Having these types of goals gives you an idea of where you’re going and what you’re hoping to accomplish with your marketing so that your school doesn’t waste its time and resources.
You can ask yourself a range of questions when starting with SMART goals. These questions can focus on what you specifically want to accomplish, how your efforts will be tracked, whether or not your efforts are realistic and relevant to your business objectives, as well as when your deadline is due.
By answering these questions, you can outline clear goals that enable a marketing agency to better understand how you want your school to grow. This way, your school and its new partner can be on the same page—aware of what needs to be done and how to do it, ultimately facilitating teamwork.
Example: When McGill University’s School of Continuing Studies worked with HEM, they created a clear set of objectives that enabled our team to develop efficient solutions. The case study introduced below shows how progress can be achieved once the challenges and objectives have been identified:
It should be noted that having established key performance indicators (KPIs) is also important as you collaborate with an education marketing agency. For instance, if you want to increase lead generation for your school, then it’s important to make this clear. This way, an agency can do more than simply increase your reach or boost your website traffic. By being transparent about what you want to track and improve, you’ll be able to avoid misunderstandings and wasted time.
2. Identify Roles and Responsibilities within Your Team at an Early Stage
Many people may be involved in your school’s collaboration with higher education marketing firms, but it’s best to determine this information beforehand. Take the time to decide who will be involved from your school and in what capacity before collaborating with a marketing agency. In doing so, you’ll be able to help each member understand what roles and responsibilities are expected of them to avoid confusion or unanticipated delays.
Breaking down this information and making it accessible across your team can help streamline your collaborative efforts, ensuring everything goes as smoothly as possible as different team members take on the same mission. Here, you want to make sure that the right people are included in your efforts and can step in whenever they are needed.
Providing easy access to communication methods between different members can also help you nurture a productive environment. This can lead to more trust and transparency, enabling your school to get more out of its interactions with a marketing agency.
Example: A clear contact directory, as the one shared below, can make it easy for different team members to effectively collaborate together—allowing each member to identify colleagues and their respective departments as well as their contact information:
Pro Tip: Consider your team’s strengths and compare them with your school’s goals and KPIs. You can then identify team members with skills and expertise that align with your objectives, making them especially valuable in your new collaboration. Similarly, if a team member is responsible for managing certain channels that may be impacted by an agency’s involvement, it may be necessary to ensure they’re looped in. This way, everyone will know how best to fulfill their roles and contribute to the combined efforts.
3. Develop a Clear and Open Line for Communication
Good communication is essential for a successful collaboration between a school and an education marketing agency. This means determining how your team will communicate with the agency early on. Take the time to figure out what the common channels of communication will be and how frequently you’ll be in touch. If you’re holding meetings, then it’s important to know who will be attending and what topics will be covered.
Schools collaborating with a school marketing agency remotely can rely on various applications and platforms designed for effective project management and teamwork. Video conferencing and live chat platforms can be used to help your team establish an instant connection with a new agency.
Having a system where you can leave comments on specific projects and tasks instead of general emails is also a good idea, allowing you to go beyond slow and hard-to-follow email chains. As a result, you’ll be better positioned to stay on top of various moving parts and new developments more effectively.
Remember that honesty is key in every interaction, including those with an education marketing agency. Transparency creates open communication that makes everyone comfortable and confident with new changes, ultimately boosting productivity. Clear communication is the first step to building trust, making it essential for new agency members to make well-informed decisions about your school’s strategy.
Example: Clear communication can make it easy for an education marketing agency to determine your school’s needs and follow through with specific deliverables. The excerpt below shows what an Inbound Package can include for schools. This package is determined through careful consideration of a school’s needs and objectives, typically discussed with a client over a clear and open line of communication:
Interested in working with a marketing agency for schools? Our team of education marketing experts can provide valuable insights and personalized support to help your school achieve its marketing goals. Reach out to our team today to get started!
4. Maintain a Structured Schedule with Regular Check-ins
Establish frequency in your communication plan and set regular check-in meetings to get the most out of your collaboration with higher education marketing agencies. Your strategy and efforts will constantly change as you tailor your marketing efforts to better reflect new insights, including the changing needs and behaviors of your target prospects. By being up to date on these changes, you’ll be able to ensure that new tasks support your new efforts and are not counterproductive to your goals.
Consider the value of establishing a schedule with clear deadlines for what you want to accomplish. Check-in meetings can also be a way for you to receive status reports and updates that put your stakeholders at ease. These initiatives can help you stay on track while also allowing you to address potential obstacles before they become even more obstructive. Daily calls, weekly meetings, and bi-weekly reports are all options that may work well for your school.
Consistent communication through regular check-ins enables schools to be more involved in collaboration with a marketing agency. It can be a tactic for your team to avoid miscommunication or unexpected delays and to discuss upcoming challenges or concerns as they arise so that they may be quickly taken care of. If a marketing agency is helping your team with content production, then being aware of the content development process and deadlines are also important. This way, you can tailor topics and posts before they get released.
Example: The image below shows a brief sample of an existing content calendar. This calendar serves as a schedule that informs both the school and marketing agency when new blog posts will be released and what each one will be addressing:
5. Provide an Education Marketing Agency with Access to Key Files and Tools
A big issue that holds back progress is the inability to access important documents. This could lead to delays or an incomplete strategy, significantly hindering your school’s progress. A digital marketing agency for the education industry needs access to all the necessary files and accounts to properly evaluate your school’s current efforts and take active steps for improvement.
It’s only through this access that they can extract valuable insights that allow them to provide personalized support. These files and accounts can be anything relevant to the collaboration—from business models and target audience information to current strategy documents and Google Analytics accounts. If your collaboration involves content production, this may also mean access to social media accounts and your school’s content management system (CMS).
Example: A system that provides easy file sharing is crucial for a streamlined, collaborative experience with a school marketing agency. The screenshot below shows how a project management platform organizes different files the school shares to make them easy to find and download. The platform also makes it easy for collaborators to upload and quickly share documents:
You’ll want to use technology to your school’s advantage when working with an education marketing agency. You may discover new platforms that can help streamline your efforts, so be on the lookout for what works best for your school. These tools can range from project management platforms, like Teamwork or Slack, to document-sharing tools, like Google Drive or Dropbox. It can even include telecommunication software like Zoom or design platforms like Canva. Such tools can operate as a space for you to push your marketing to the next level, but remember to enable access to external parties whenever it’s called for.
6. Be Open to New Insights and Recommendations
Your school has likely already invested much time and effort into its current marketing strategy. Despite how difficult it may seem at first, making changes at this stage can actually be essential in promoting your school’s growth and elevating your strategy. Here, it’s important to remember that change can be good, and it can be the key to your school’s success.
As you work with an education marketing agency, try to embrace an open mindset—especially since new insights will be coming from experienced experts in the higher education digital marketing industry. New strategies, tools, and other initiatives that may be recommended will be designed to help your school better connect with its target audience and reach its recruitment goals. That is especially true when these new approaches are backed by analytics, resulting in data-driven marketing decisions.
Since you’ll be collaborating with your chosen education marketing agency, you’ll get the chance to pitch in ideas and customize the services you’d like to benefit from. By applying these tips, you’ll be able to improve your teamwork skills and develop new strategies that are in your school’s best interest.
