#30 – Private School Marketing Plan Circle of Success

Attract More Families

Masterclass: How to Build a Private School Marketing Plan that ensures your success and enrollment growth

Length: 1h 37m 4s

In this podcast, I will talk about how to build a marketing system that allows you to get more customers and get more referrals.

The steps are pretty simple. You will need to:

• traffic
• traffic capture
• nurture
• convert
• retain
• and analyze.

Each one leads to the next, and if one step is skipped, there will be problems.

Each step feeds into the next and allows it to grow. None of those can stand alone.

Private School Marketing Plan Circle of Success

How do you traffic? This is how you find potential customers and convince them to come to you. What are you doing to get your potential customers to contact you and get your contact information?

How do you nurture? People do business with people that they know, trust, and like. How are you building that relationship? You need to get people to have a connection with you so that they see you as the education authority. When they have a question, do they come to you? You need to establish this friendship so that when they need help, or they need to enroll their child, they come to you.

How do you convert? You can have all the leads you want, you can have families coming in for tours, but unless people are enrolling and handing over checks to you, then you’ve done nothing. How do you convert a customer so that you get the enrollment and the child is actually in your school?

How do you retain these children and their families? It’s significantly cheaper to keep the students you have than to go out and find new ones because of enrollment costs and the steps you need to take to adjust new students to your school. What are you doing to get people to stay? Also, what are you doing to get referrals and recommendations? Parents that are visiting and happy are thrilled with your school. These are the ones that will both stay enrolled and give you recommendations to their friends, neighbors, and associates.

How do you analyze? Look at what is working and what needs improvement in your processes. If you don’t have numbers, then you can’t improve your system. There’s an old saying: what you measure improves and what you don’t measure doesn’t improve. You need to be looking at your numbers and asking yourself if that’s what you want to do. If not, then you go back into the circle again and adjust. Maybe you are attracting the wrong people, perhaps your enrollments are not the right fit, and maybe because people aren’t happy, you have fewer referrals. That’s how the circle works.

Again, if you are missing any one of these steps, your entire marketing plan falls apart. It is a circle. Your success will only be as good as that weakest link in these six steps. You might have a great system for getting people’s contact information; your staff may be pretty excellent at getting anybody who comes in the door to enroll with you. You may get 100% retention rate and everyone may give you glowing recommendations, but if you aren’t getting anyone to come in, or if you don’t have any leads, that is your weakest link. The rest of the system will be no better than your weakest link.

Read the Full Article

Well, good afternoon. This is Devin Murray with another masterclass from Attract More Families, your source for private and independent school marketing news, ideas and help. Today, we’re going to talk about just kind of an older concept but you’ll see that I use it a lot on the blog. We’re going to talk about the circle of success for marketing in private schools. This is essentially how to build a marketing system that allows you to get more customers and get more referrals. So it’s pretty simple, you have traffic, traffic capture, nurture, convert, retain and analyze but it’s a circle. So each one leads to the next and if any one of them is not there we’ll have some problems.

What you will find is that each one of these does feed into the next and allow it to grow. I will talk quickly about each one here then we’ll go ahead and get into a little bit more depth on each one of them as we move down, as we get further into today’s class. As I said before, each one of these builds on the next. None of them can stand alone. They all have to feed into the next for the system to grow and for you to continue to have the success that you’re looking for out of a marketing plan.

So first you need to … Obviously, you have traffic and this is how do you find potential customers and how do you get them to come to you? You need to capture them which is how do you … What are you doing to get your potential customers to actually contact you and to get your people’s contact information? Nurture. People do business obviously with people that they know, like and trust so how are you building that relationship? How are you getting people to have that friendship, that connection with you that they see you as their education authority and leader and how do they find it when they have a question you are the one they come to? So when they need help, all they need to enroll their child some place, you’re the source that they come to.

How do you convert? Obviously, you can have all the leads you want, you can have … coming in for tours, you can have all the cards filled out but unless people are actually enrolling and turning over checks to you, those application and those tuition checks, then you’ve done nothing. So you need to make sure how do you convert a customer so you actually get the enrollment and their child is actually in your school? How do you retain these children and these families? It’s significantly cheaper obviously to keep the students you have than to go out and find new ones because of enrollment costs, getting them enrolled, starting them off that learning curve that your staff takes to try and educate people about how things are done. So what are you doing to get people to stay and to retain them?

Also as a part of retaining is what are you doing to get people to give you referrals and testimonials because parents that are staying, that are happy, that are thrilled with your school are the ones that will be staying enrolled with you and will be giving you those recommendations and referring their friends and neighbors and associates to you. Finally, the last part of this circle is to analyze. Look at what is working and what can use of improvement in your processes. If you don’t have numbers, you can’t get better. There’s the old the old saying that what you measure improves and what you don’t measure can’t improve. So you need to be looking at it and going, “Hey, how is, how are our numbers working? How is the marketing plan we have? How is that working? Is it doing what we want it to do?” And if not, then we go back into the circle again at the top and we maybe adjust.

Maybe we need to look and start seeing, hey, maybe the people, the leads we start bringing in, the traffic we’re attracting, maybe we’re attracting the wrong kind of people and that’s why we’re getting low conversions to people actually give us their contact information and we get people that are enrolling or people that won’t enroll because we attracted the wrong people. Then because we’ve attracted the wrong people and got the wrong people to enroll, they’re not happy with us because they’re not the right fit for us, therefore, they’re not giving us a referral, therefore, they’re not being retained and we’re not getting those recommendations from them. That’s kind of how that circle works so we can then go back around, “Okay, hey, let’s maybe, maybe we need to look at a different group of people to start attracting and circle back around and then analyze how they’re doing.”

All right. I think I said this before, but I really do want to reiterate it, if you’re missing anyone of these six, your entire marketing plan falls apart. Like I said before, you can be attracting all of your ideal people, you can be getting their contact information but if you’re not getting them to enroll, what’s the point? The entire plan falls apart. All right. It has to all work. If you’re getting people, the right people, you’re getting them to give you their information, you’re getting them to enroll but then every year they’re leaving and you have to get a whole new group of people in, that’s not working. You’re not getting those recommendations. All right. So it all is a circle. It all leads to each one. Your success will only be as good as that weakest link.

You might have a great system for getting people’s contact information and your staff is awesome at getting pretty much everyone that comes in the door to actually enroll with you and you keep people almost 100% of the time they stay with you and everyone that stays with you gives you just massive recommendations and referrals and you can see this when you look at the numbers but you’re not getting anyone to come in and you’re getting no leads in the door. That’s your weakest link then and the rest of the system will be no better than your weakest link.

So just a real quick warning here, just a little warning here that I want to kind of put out there. I’ve done two and three-hour presentations on each one of these six pillars before. You can find some of them on my blog at attractmorefamily.com/blog. You can find them in my book, Your Private School Marketing Plan. They’re out there a lot. So this is not going to cover every single point in depth or we would be here for an entire weekend seminar. Again, I do those too. I come out to schools and associations and I’ll teach all these pillars for the entire weekend. Please know that we’re not going to be able to cover all of those. Yes, you’re going to have questions at the end. I’ll give you an opportunity to find out how to ask some of those questions of me.

My goal here is for you to understand how this circle of success, how these pillars all relate to each other and how you can go ahead and use them in your business to help grow your enrollments and grow your school. So let’s first start off with talking about traffic. This is the first one again. They’re all related. We can start anywhere we wanted to but traffic is the most logical place to start. As a private school, we know that we have to attract potential customers. All the time, you need to be attracting them. You’re not a dentist office or a doctor’s office or even an auto shop that can have clients for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Hopefully your kids are actually graduating and moving on and a, ter four, eight, 12 years, that child has run their course through all of your grades, it is moving on.

So you have to be always filling that bucket. New potential families every single year, every month, every week, everyday. Now, I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m an online tester. I believe in testing online. All the while, I’m a marketer across the board, I do both online and offline marketing. I really like doing online marketing first and that is because I can do it as a test. You can make changes quickly. I can change the headline on my website or on a page talking about grades or an enrollment offer that I’m making. I can make that change in 30 seconds. Or I’m working with a webmaster, I can do it in half a day. I can make changes very quickly versus if I got something that’s in a brochure or in the phone book. I can’t change those. A brochure is going to probably take me a couple of weeks at best to fix and then I’m still stuck with all the brochures that I had that haven’t been changed. Phone book, I can change once a year if I’m lucky.

I can also find that with online testing, I can do what’s known as AB split testing. This is I can run people to any site on the world wide web. It can be an offer page that I’m running, a landing page which we’ll talk about later here or I can even do it to my homepage or even to my entire site in general and I can split the traffic and send them to two totally different looking sites or two different pages or I can just have some very small things changed. I can have the offer changed from one that’s maybe a one month free to a four-week free, which one is going to pull better, by the way, a little hint there, actually four weeks pulls better even though it is technically less than one month, people’s subconscious mind believes that one is less than four. But I can send people to different sites. Now I can split 50-50 traffic. I can split 90% to the site that I have and only 10% to all of my tests. Or I can kind of run them whatever numbers I want.

I also find that the other reason why I love to really start online is because this is where your ideal customers are starting their searches too. Millennials who are now the 18 to 34’s are the ones that have the children. They’re the ones that are making the money. They’re the ones that are looking to enroll in private schools. So this is where they are going to start to search. They wake up in the morning and they live connected to the world wide web. They’re going to start their search online, normally after they’ve narrowed down their selection to a couple or maybe even just one that they’re just going to try vet to make sure that it meets all their criteria. Only then do they go offline and actually pick up the phone and call you or actually come by your school to actually look at it.

Because that’s where they are, I like to be there first too and be working really hard to make sure that my online presence, that everything that I’m doing online is right. Then what I find that I can do is I can then take what’s working great, what’s the offer that’s working great, what’s the headline that’s working great, what’s the benefit that value statement and benefits statement that I can present to parents that I find the one that works online, that I can take that one and take it offline, I can put that into my brochures, my phone book ad onto newspaper ads. That’s what I can do is once I know what’s winning, I can take those from the online world and take those offline because I know how … I know it’s working because I’ve had the ability to test and get actual results from parents.

So what do we need to make all this work? First off, you need a winning website. For some of you, I’m actually going to say this, you actually need a website too. I know most of you have come around and have created a website or have had a parent create a website. If you haven’t, you need to get one and you need to really get a really good one going. This is one of those investments in marketing that is really worth it. Go and actually have someone who knows how to do a website, build a website for you versus having a parent do it on a free blog site or on the free version of [Wicks 00:12:58] or Squarespace. Find one that really works good.

So you need to have that website. You need to make it easy for potential customers to understand what you can do for them. Don’t assume that parents understand what you do. How does a private school differ and what are the benefits of it? Make it easy for them. Help them understand that. Don’t make them dig through all sorts of pages and click two, three pages deep to finally find your value statement. Make sure you put it right there on the front page. You need to make it easy for them to contact you. I would think this would be kind of, it wouldn’t make sense that I have to tell you that, but the number of websites that I see for private schools that have the phone number buried down at the bottom of the page or really small print. It makes it impossible for parents to find out how to contact you.

What is an email to contact you? Where is the form that I can fill out to actually contact you? Make it easy for them. Don’t hide that information because the whole point of your website is to get people to actually contact you. So make it easy on them. You want to have a clearly defined path for your different types of customers or different types of potential customers for that matter. There’s actually a really great article on this elsewhere but it talks about how you’ve got a path for … You’ve got folks that are coming to you that know nothing about private schools and they’re in that information search phase. They’re trying to figure out what does a private school do for me and my child.

So you want to make it easy for them to find those informational resources of how do they find what a private school does, how is it beneficial to them. This is [inaudible 00:14:51] to your blog and those authority articles that you want to be publishing and putting out there. Another group of customers and potential customers that are coming are the ones that want to enroll. So make it easy for them to find how do we enroll, what forms do I need, how do I contact you, what’s the next step, make it easy for them. Make sure you have a section that goes looking to enroll or who wants to know more about our school. These, they know that they want to do a private school and they’re pretty sure that you’re the right answer but make it easy for them. Don’t make them search and hunt and have to guess at what tab on your website has the information of how to enroll.

Then the final group of customers that you really want to have a path for on your website is your current customers, your current families, both parents and students. You want to make it easy for them to get to the portal, to that parent portal so that they can log in and find out what are the grades, what are the activities, what are the home work assignments. You want to make it very easy for them. Don’t make it a challenge. Make sure that it’s very easy to find and not buried at the bottom in some foot, in some bottom of page footer navigation bar that has the parent portal and you just assume that everybody remembers to bookmark that page. Make it easy for them. Every time that you make it more challenging for any one of these groups, you’re going to lose a percentage of them.

You also want to make sure that your website is mobile ready. Now, the number of people that carry the internet around in their pocket with smartphones and tablets is well over 50%. So know that a lot of parents, that’s what they have at home is they have tablet at home or they just use a smartphone or a large smartphone, the line now between smartphones and tablets is actually blurred with smartphones actually almost being bigger than some of the smallest tablets. But you need to make sure that your website is mobile ready. So when someone comes to you from those devices that they can navigate around your website, that they can read it, is it … Is your system just shrinking your current website so that everything is this micro fine print that you have to zoom in and scroll left and right to read or is it redistributing the content and making it so it continues to be a nice, large size that people can read and there’s navigation, easy for people to see and to find, and again to find what they’re looking.

You also want to make sure that to attract traffic, that you’re doing what’s known as search engine optimization. This is really simply the art and the science of helping the search engines such as Google understand what your website is about. That’s really all it is is people go into search engines, people go to Google and they search a pain that they’re having. They need an independent school. They need a private school. They want a parochial school near them so they type that in. Now, Google goes to their databases and tries to match what that search was, what their pain is that they’re looking to solve and your website. The more that you help Google and the other search engines understand what your website is about, the greater the odds are that it’s going to show up very high in those results.

That’s really all that search engine optimization is, is just helping the search engines understand that your school, that your website is a private school that focuses on education and sports and you’re not an auto shop or a pediatric dentist. That’s what you want to help the search engines understand. You do this a lot with keywords and this is just words that searchers would type into Google to solve their pain. This is where a lot of times we find that we have a disconnect, that we want to call ourselves independent schools. But what is a searcher [inaudible 00:19:09], someone that doesn’t know that much about our industry, what are they searching here, are they searching for private school, are they searching for non-public school, are they just searching for a school near them. You want to make sure that you have the words, those keywords that people are typing into the search engines.

You can actually go to Google and use what’s now called their keyword planner tool. Google will actually tell you the words that people are using. Then once you know those words you need to have them on your webpages. You’d be surprised the number of people that when I talk to them during one of my consultations which by the way is absolutely free and I just look at all your marketing plan and kind of help you out and figure out where you are and what could be done and I always just let you go as friends if you don’t want to work with me, that’s great or I’m always happy to work with you all.

But I will find regularly that you all do not have those keywords on your pages. I’ll look at a school’s homepage and nowhere do I see private school or independent school or parochial school or Christian-based school. We have our school names on there but that’s it. So it’s really important that you make sure that you have those keywords on your webpage. Again, that’s how Google understands what your webpage is about, is by having the words that people are searching for on your page. You also need to have your keywords in your metadata which is your title and your description. Again, there’s a nice, long blog article and video on how to do all of that on all the SEO.

But basically, those are some background places that help, again, help the search engines understand what your page is about. If we look at a book as an example, your title would be the title of the book so you’d want to have private school in the title of the book. You don’t want to have a book on dieting that doesn’t have the word diet or lose weight or anything in the title. That wouldn’t work. Then the description would be the back cover of a book which should also have the keywords in there. If you’re a private school, you would think that the back cover of your book would talk about how great of a private school you are.

So you just need to make sure that you have those and then you also need to make sure that you have links to your website, people need to … People need to, people and Google need to be able to find your website. You need to be listed in directories and on websites and with other organizations around you and organizations that you’re connected with. You need to be making sure that you’re linked from your Facebook page, links back to your website. You need to make sure that you have a link from the regional association of independent schools. Make sure that you actually have a good link that actually comes back to your website. Google looks at it as a voting machine. Essentially, the more links you have, the more valuable that website must be and the more importance it has and therefore also the higher it’s going to show it in the search results.

A part of traffic is also having a social media account. This is where people hang out these days. People don’t use the front porch anymore like they used to. People used to socialize in person. They used to hang out on their front porch. They used to meet new people at church or at sporting events or at the grocery store. Or they would just have a neighborhood block parties. People don’t do that as much anymore. People now hang out on social media. Things like Facebook and Instagram. So this is where people are hanging out. Just like when they used to get together after church or the restaurant or at the park, it’s where they start looking for ideas and recommendations and who people think are the best for whatever their pain is. So if you’re not hanging out there, if you’re not making it easy for people to have you as a part of that conversation and to be a part of that conversation, then you’re missing a tremendous number of leads that could be coming to your school.

t’s also a two-way communication. Realize that social media is not just about blasting your message. It’s not about standing there with your bullhorn and screaming, “We’re the best private school in this area if you want your child to go to an Ivy League school.” That’s not what this is about. That’s not what social media is about. Social media is about two-way conversations. Just like you’d never do that with a bullhorn at a cocktail party. No, you … ask people how they’re doing. You provide useful, helpful, information. Then only after you’ve done that, when they start asking you, “Hey, so what do you do?” Then you start telling them what you do and what the benefits are to them.

You also want to make sure that obviously as a part of social media, that you’re actually part of that community and helping. Again, as I said before, it’s kind of like being in a cocktail party, you want to make sure that you are helping people, not just standing there screaming your message. Finally, a great way to get traffic is from social media is Facebook ads and social media ads that you can actually target very specifically the kinds of people that are ideal for you. Facebook gives you over 5,000 different data points that you can match to find your idea customers and then you can show your ad as a part of their private school marketing, as a part of their social media experience, you can be there.

Now, I know everyone’s going to jump up and down real fast and go, “But that’s, but everyone finds that annoying. They get mad.” No, they don’t. If you’re being useful and helpful and are targeting the right people then your ad will not be an annoyance. If you’re just blasting your ad out there, that will be a … That would be a huge annoyance. Just imagine when you look at like a auto shop or a brake places ads. Those ads run a lot of the times. When your brakes are fine, you’ll find those ads annoying but what happens when you pull into the driveway at night and you heard your brakes kind of crunching. You know your pads are gone. The car will be jerking a little bit and you’re about to take a road trip. Now, if that ad showed up right then, that’s … You’re going to be like, “Oh, that’s awesome. That’s exactly what I needed. This is a great store. They’re going to help me solve my problem.” That would no longer be annoying. That’s what you’re also doing with social media ads.

Another great way to get traffic is pay per click advertising. This is Google ad words, Yahoo, Bing has a pay per click section. Then you can also have banner ads. If you have, especially in the larger communities, there’s a lot of blogs and informational forums, you can run ads on just those websites which specially target you ideal customers. Basically, the whole point of a target, of a pay per click ad is you’re targeting your ideal customer when they’re looking for help. If we go back to the analogy I was just using about a car that needs new brakes, if I were to type into Google brake shop near me, an ad showed up from of the local brake shops about what they do and how they can help me and how they can have me in and out in an hour or how they have a loaner car or a car that I can drop mine off and they’ll take me to work, that’s the kind of targeted ad because I have a problem and they’re offering the solution. That’s what a pay per click will allow them to do, is to be there.

You basically just target the search terms that people are looking for there at your website and when they’re looking for help. The other final great thing about PPC or pay per click is that you can really track the results very well. I can track what I paid for someone to click on my ad and I can track them all the way through until they’re actually enrolled. So I can look and go, “Okay, I have to run my ad, cost me X dollars every time someone clicks on it,” we’ll use a dollar for simple math. “I know that every 10 times someone clicks on my ad, one person will fill out a form for me to contact them so that’s cost me $10 for every contact form. I know for every five contact forms I’ll get one enrolled.

So I know that that’s going to cost me what, $50 for every enrollment. That’s very trackable that I can … Is it worth it for me to spend $50 to get an enrollment? Honestly, the answer for that would be a resounding yes. That would be great. But that’s the kind of results we can get with pay per click advertising and because I can track it all the way to enrollment, it is tremend … With traffic, you want to make sure that you can be found on maps. People again are web for search, I need an independent school near me, a private school near me. I need a brake shop near me and Google and the other search engines look at that and Apple being on of them, looks and goes, “Oh, this must mean that they’re looking for a business near them. Let me pull up a map and show them a of what’s around them.

The two biggest of these are obviously Google, the Google+ network which is what it’s called now. Google searches social media business listings and Apple which is actually powered by Yelp. Apple pulls all of its information from Yelp which is why Yelp is so powerful. Again, I have a whole another article on that on the … It’s the Apple, Yelp, Microsoft trio that has tried to compete against Google in search and for money. You can dig that one up if you want to learn about how Yelp and Apple are all tied up there. But people search maps for local businesses. Know that that’s where it is. If you are a local business which you are, as a school, you need to make sure that you’re showing up well on maps because that’s where people are going to start looking or even if they are looking, they’re just typing into a search engine, Google or Apple are going to assume that you’re looking for a local business and they’re going to start providing you with maps.

Because it wouldn’t make sense for me if I live in Denver to be looking for a private school in Boston. Now, if I am, I will continue my search, I’ll actually redefine my search and say, “Hey, I want something actually that’s in Boston that’s not near me.” But generally, I want a private school that’s near me which means I want maps. So how do we go about making sure that we show up well. The first thing is to simply claim your page. This is with Google+ or Yelp, using it to make sure that you actually have claimed your page, that you have control over the content. A lot of the times we find that there’s actually errors the webs, of what the search engines have found about our schools. Because they’ve gone out and they’ve kind of crawled the web and they’ve tried to figure out from running around the web what your webpage is about, what your business is about, what grades you serve, what kind of a private school you are.

They’ve done their best but a lot of times, they will have errors so the first thing you need to do is to make sure that you claim your page. You then need to make sure that it’s complete. This is a part of their algorithm for who shows up at the top of a local search result, a map search result is who has the most complete information. Again, Google particularly loves to show up, loves to provide people with complete and useful information. So if your page is only halfway filled out and you don’t have a full address, all you have is the city that you’re in, you don’t have the grades listed, you don’t have your school year listed then Google is going to look at that and be like, “Hmm, I might not want to show this at the top of my results because this is not going to be helpful and if it’s not helpful, people are going to leave me and they’re going to go to Yelp and then Yelp is going to get the advertising dollar.”

You also want to make sure that across the web, you have consistency in what’s called NAP which is your name, address and phone number. You need to make sure that those are very consistent across the web. So whatever you call your school needs to be consistent and don’t be doing, it with abbreviations unless you’re using abbreviations everywhere on the web. Make sure your address is the same across the web. This is the really big one that I see wrong a lot. Because although the search engines seem very smart, they’re actually very dumb. If you look at the way information is coded, street spelled out, S-T-R-E-E-T, street with a period, S-T-period, or just S-T are all considered different addresses because the way the information is stored and when Google and the other map search engines look, they go, “Ooh, these might be three different schools because when I look at the coding of that address, they look different,” same thing with phone numbers. So just need to make sure that you’re very consistent across the web.

Your reviews, you need to make sure that you’re getting those online reviews. Make sure that you’re getting Google+ reviews, that people are giving four, five stars on Google. Same thing on Yelp. You want to be getting those reviews because this is a part of what shows up on Google maps and Yelp. Really, it goes into their algorithm which is simply that Google and Yelp say a real business is going to get reviews and they base a lot of this off of what would happen at a restaurant and a restaurant never get no reviews. If a restaurant is never getting a review, even a bad review, no one ever says this restaurant miserable, don’t ever eat there or and they’re getting no reviews that go, “Hey, this is a great restaurant, you should always eat there.” If there’s none of those, they have to wonder, the search engines have to think and they’ve programmed this in to go, “Maybe that school or maybe that restaurant doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s just a bad listing that we found and they’ve gone out of business.”

Unless you’re getting those reviews and consistently getting reviews, it doesn’t have to be one everyday but every month, every week, regularly, you need to be getting reviews. You actually need to make sure that you’re getting reviews on other review sites, so not just Google and Yelp but private school reviews and all of the other local review sites for schools and businesses in your area, you want to make sure that you’re just consistently getting reviews. So again, as I said, you want to make sure you’re getting the review sites, Google+, private school reviews. This is also very powerful because people now as social media has grown, they trust the opinions of strangers who appear to be like them. So people look at review sites and go, “Ooh, this person looks like me. They sound like me therefore I will trust their review even though they’re a complete stranger.”

You also need to get these reviews that stick. So it has to do with length. No one’s going to Yelp and Google don’t care all that much about a review that goes, “Oh, this is the greatest private school in the area, boom.” That doesn’t help anyone. That doesn’t provide useful information that are going to tend to negate that review. They want the longer ones, a paragraph or two that explain why your school is the best, how did you help, give me a story. They want people to be able to relate to that review. They also are looking for people that are active users. Yelp doesn’t want someone that has never left a review before to leave one review for your school and then never leave another review after that. That’s not what they’re looking for. That’s not what they think and that just doesn’t make sense. So those tend to be dropped out also. You want the longer ones from people that are actually active Yelp users or active Google+ users. Make sure that that you’re getting the reviews from people that actually …

All right, we’ve also got offline. As I said, to start with, I’m a huge online first tester but then I do believe in using offline results and I believe in taking what I learn and what I’ve tested online and take it offline. A phone book ad is one of the ones, I believe the right ad will help make you stand out from all the other school resources out and it’s not just about, “Here’s our school, call us and enroll with us.” It’s about providing a useful information. Phone book ads are about here’s a prerecorded message on the 10 warning signs to look for in a private school or how to find the right private school for your needs. That’s the kind of great information that’s great in a phone book ad.

Obviously print ads are great, newspapers, flyers, local magazines are all great places for you to run ads especially during those enrollment seasons when they’re coming up. Direct mail is probably by far my favorite resource for getting people offline because I can, just like with online, with direct mail, I can target very specifically my ideal customers. I can say, “I want this letter delivered to people within 15 miles off my school who are two income families that one of them is in private practice of some kind, doctor, lawyer, high level C suite personnel and are making mid six plus figures.” I can narrow down my list to that. I can provide a message that speaks just to them. Those are my idea clients. I know exactly who they are.

I can also find with direct mail, one of my great secrets to use, what I call 3D mailings which are something … It’s got a little bit of bulk in it. A lot of times, I’ll use a compass. I’ll use a pencil, something that stands out that makes it so that so the envelope doesn’t lay flat because this then means that that piece has to go on top of the letter pile where it will be read immediately. You can’t put a wobbly envelope at the bottom of a stack of mail because then the entire stack’s going to fall over.

Another great offline source is networking, especially for private schools. This is about being where your ideal clients are and being a respected authority in those circles so that you can get to know your ideal clients and attract them to you and then talk about what should you be doing. So this can be making sure that your at those business functions, the rotaries, the business community meetings, making sure that you’re at those so that you can network and get to know the parents and the kids of people who are like your ideal families. Networking is tremendously powerful.

Okay, so now we’ve got traffic. Now we need to get the capture the people. Why do we need to capture content information? Because too many other people leave your website or don’t ever call you back. People say, “Oh yeah, I will call you about this,” or “I’ll return that.” One say, “I’ll remember who you are,” even if they need your service. The problem is they forget. They forget what school they looked at, “What was that website that have all that great information and I really thought our child would fit in perfectly with? Oh, is it, is it Ace Academy or is it Pope Academy? I forget which one it was,” and then they have to start the whole search over or they just give up on the search and move on.

Or if you’re at a networking event, people meet you and they think that they’ll remember what school it is but then if you don’t stay top of mind, they will lose your information and they will forget who you are. You need to make sure that you’re capturing a prospect’s contact information so that you can can stay in contact with them, so that you can make sure that you’re in control of that contact information. Also to make sure that you can step out and be in contact with them when it is time for enrollment season to come around. We all think and assume that parents will remember that, “Oh, it’s April, May, June, I need to make sure that I enroll in school for next year.” We want to think that but they’ve also got 20 million other things they’re worrying about everyday and they forget and then it’s easier for them just to a fault to continue down the same path.

But if I can reach out to them and say top of mind and go, “Hey, by the way, not being a pest but just remind you that if you do want to have a better education for your child or a better whatever your benefit is for your child, now is the time to start thinking about this, why don’t you give us a call and come by a tour or we’re doing a special event.” If you have not capture people’s contact information from when you met them over Christmas, then how are you going to remind them? You want to make sure that you can do that. Really, the best way to capture people is to give them what’s known as an irresistible free offer or an IFO. You will hear me call it that a lot. Basically, an IFO is people … It’s something that has greater value, greater perceived value than their privacy.

All right. People are not going to give up their phone number, their email address unless you give them something that has a little bit greater value than their privacy. I will say that in today’s day and age, people are a little bit less leery of providing their email address and tend to provide it a little bit quicker and their contact information a little bit quicker because they could scan it and screen it which is you have to provide them of something that has a perceived value that is greater than their privacy. It’s really about having a greater perceived value. It doesn’t have to be an actual value. So it doesn’t have to be a coupon for $300 off of tuition to have a perceived value. It just has to be perceived as something that is valuable to them. It might cost you absolutely nothing or only a penny or two to provide say a report or a checklist on how to review the different private schools in your area to find the one that’s right for your child.

To write that up, and even if you print it and you send it to them, it’s going to cost you what, 50 cents, a dollar, that’s high perceived value but the actual cost to you is little or nothing and a lot of times you can actually provide them a PDF download of that which means it’s essentially free for you to provide that download. I just want to kind of note on this that the higher the quality of content that you’re looking for, the higher the value or the higher the perceived value of IFO needs to be. So if you’re looking for those high income, mid six figure, seven figure earners, then you need to have an irresistible free offer that has significantly more value.

This might mean when you, yeah, you might need to step out and maybe actually print up a book or a booklet or what looks like a book. You’ll see that I do this a lot with a lot of my free report. I actually have them bound so they look like reports. I do this with clients. But actually, for those really high income earners, if we want those really high quality, I might … We might have to pay a couple of dollars by printing up an actual book or a booklet but that’s okay, but that’s how you get those people then pay the much higher values. So some ideas on IFOs, I think I’ve talked about before, reports in white papers, depending on who your market is. They’re both the same. Reports are generally a little bit more colorful. White papers are generally a little bit more report-esque.

Checklists, people love checklists because they’re simple and everyone’s overwhelmed. What really does matter, what are the top 10 things that matter when looking in a school? People have heard a hundred different things to look for, they don’t know which ones are the most important. So by having a checklist, you can really help them. People also want insider secrets. What are the top 10 insider secrets to finding a private school? Because you are an insider, because you’re there, you know what to look for. So why not provide those insider secrets. Or what does the principal of Ace Academy look for when he was looking to enroll his children in a private school? Those are the kinds of things that … That’s that insider secret that people really want.

Another part of capturing, I think I hinted at this before is what’s known as a landing page. These are actually pages that are dedicated pages to gathering people’s contact information. This can be a part of your website so it can be aceacademy.com/freereport or it can be a standalone site. It can be something like leadpages.net or Unbounds is another powerful one that I use with a lot of people. Which then it doesn’t require you to update your website if you use a standalone, you have to do no updating to your website and most of these now actually have an integration with WordPress so that we can essentially add pages without actually going to our webmaster if we want to do it on our website.

Landing pages work great for paid traffic or offline ads. These are a great way to help track how an ad is doing or how paid traffic is doing. If I’m paying to have someone come to my website, I want their contact information so I can put that free report that I promised in the ad behind an opt-in form on a landing page. It’s also great for offline ads. So if I run an ad in the newspaper about discover the 10 signs to look for in a great private school in Los Angeles then I can take them to a landing page and I can have go to aceacademy.com/freereportla and I can have LA1 and LA2 and so I can test what the different ads are working with but I can send them to a landing page where I get that information and then I can take them to my website or to the free report download page. But I know that that’s what they’re looking for so why not just provide it for them?

Another way to grab people’s information or to capture people’s information is an opt-in form. This is basically you grab people contact information again in exchange for some kind of irresistible free offer. …you find is on the right hand side bar of a webpage or across the entire paid website near the top of the page. If you look at like my website, you’ll find it on the right hand side. You’ll also find other pages where I have both on the right hand side and across the top right below the content headline. This is just a great way to get people’s information because people are going to come to my website and I never know first off what page they’re going to come to to start with.

Only 60% of traffic that comes to your website actually lands on your homepage which means that 60% is which is over half, but it does means that over 40% starting its interaction with you and your school on a page that is not your homepage. A lot the times, you’ll actually find and actually they go to the teacher’s page or about the teacher page and we just find that that’s the page that out of happenstance, you ended up getting all of the right words on there, those keywords that the search engines were looking for so that’s one of the first pages that shows up on the search of those, people end up there. If you have a blog or authority section of your website, we’ll also find a lot of that stuff is where stuff will end up at.

So you need to make sure that you have it on every single page, this opt-in form needs to be on every page of your website. Another reason for this is because you don’t always know what page someone’s going to finally feel comfortable providing you with their privacy, their contact information, that private data on them. When they hit your homepage, they’re going to look and be like, “Oh, this school is salesy, I’m not quite sure that I really want to be providing them for this free report yet. I’m not sure that they’re the right one.” But then they get in and they read about your programs maybe a little bit, they read one or two of your authority articles, and then all of a … Then they switch and go, “Oh yes, this is actually the school that I do want that free report now.”

Now, if you’d only had that report offered on your homepage, they would have to remember where it was and then have to navigate all the way back to that and the odds of them doing that are … So you need to make sure that you’re capturing your parents, these prospective parents, their contact information so that you can go back and reach them when you want to reach them.

All right, so that brings us to nurture. This is the next part of our circle of success and I think we’ve all heard before that people do business with people that they know, like and trust. When someone first reaches out to you and they first have contact with your school, they know nothing about you. So you need to build that relationship and nurture the prospect until they get to know you, till they get to like you and they have trust with you. Again, you are going to be responsible for probably one of their most prized possessions, their child, and you’re going to be responsible for helping that child reach their full potential that that parent hopes that they can have.

That’s a tremendous bar that you have to be above. They really have to know you and know what you stand for and they have to believe in that, they have to like what you stand for and like how you’re going to do it and they have to trust that you’re going to do that and that you’re going to keep the child’s best interest in mind at all times. It’s been said, if you’re reading any kind of sales books, it takes seven touches with a company before someone will do business with you. I mean, phone calls, ads, website visits, brochures, seven times. That’s really an old number. I think it’s really low. I think it has gone up now especially with social media. People interact a lot more and we cross paths with information so much more than we used to. But I think it takes more than seven touches.

I had one client not too long ago who told me that they had one person who enrolled, it took 72 touches with their company before the person finally enrolled. That might seem like a lot and it is but had they stopped at the first touch or two, they mailed them a brochure and then that’s where they stopped the conversation, they never continued to nurture that relationship along, they would have lost that enrollment. Now, this nurturing, those 72 touches were all sorts of different things. It was emails that they sent out with both offers and with authority educational information. It was blog articles that they wrote. It was things they sent direct mail. It was even some phone calls that they made to actually invite the parents to open house night but it took 72 touches so that does not … That’s really not, that’s high, but not uncommon.

The other thing which I kind of hinted at there too was that you don’t need to build all these touches and do them yourselves. You can actually automate nurturing campaigns. You can do this with what is known as auto responders which actually it sends emails automatically. You can also use virtual assistants which are outsourced people that can do things for fractions of what we pay people in a school to do and a lot of them are US based. I don’t want you to think that I’m talking about outsourcing this to someone in India or the Philippines. A lot of these are people that they want to work from home and they might work for four, five different companies but because they can stay busy, they’re able to actually charge you less because especially the loading, when you add hourly costs and insurance and all of those other things and then the contract for virtual assistant can help you with.

But you can also integrate this to include offline stuff. So I can use my auto responders. I actually can tie in with a system that sends cards. So on the child’s birthday, on the parent’s birthdays, for Christmas, for Thanksgiving, I can have cards sent out essentially automatically but they look like they come from and they look like they have my signature. I love to send brownies. Brownies are just so great especially when I know that someone’s either going to come in for a tour in the next day or two or has just done a tour to stay that top of mind. So I found brownies are great. Everyone loves brownies. Even if they don’t want to eat them, they can share them with other people in their office or around their neighborhood.

3D mail as I’ve talked about before, 3D mail is a great way to nurture those relationships. By being helpful and useful and not just having your mail be boring and a brochure mailed to somebody. By using 3D that maybe has a compass and goes, “Oh, we just want to make sure that you hadn’t lost your way to our open house next week.” It’s fun. It makes life entertaining. It’s something to talk about. All right. So what do we do with all of these contacts that we have? The first thing you need to do is you need to have goals, you need to stand out from everybody else. I’ve talked about this before. You cannot sound like every other school in your area. If you’re using the exact same words about we try and build the children up so they can be thinkers and leaders in their future and in their communities. That’s blah, blah, blah and it sounds like what everybody else has said.

You need to stand out. You need to have personality. You need to stand for something different. Be something different and show that personality. It’s okay to have personality. You also want to make sure that you let them know that you understand their needs and what they want. The more that you understand your customer and your ideal customer and what wants and pains and desires they have, the more that you understand, the more that they’re going to learn to know, like and trust you, because if they know that you understand them, they’re going to become to like you and if they know that you have taken the time to understand their pain, they’re going to trust you that much more.

You also want to make sure too that your marketing is nurturing, that you’re building rapport and goodwill. This is really where it’s powerful to be having those articles, those educational articles and helpful information and not just about your school. It’s about what’s happening in the community, both your geographic community and the education community. Help parents learn build goodwill by making them feel like better people at the end of the week of working with you. You also want to make sure that you stay top of mind because you never know when that parent is going to finally come to the point where they make that change and go, “Yes, it’s now time to enroll in a private school.”

Yes, we all think that it’s right at the enrollment season but that’s not true. A lot of them may make that jump because their child came home and is complaining about the teacher and isn’t learning and the teacher doesn’t care. Maybe they are moving or the parent got a promotion and realizes that they need something more or one of their coworkers enrolled their child last year and they’re of hearing about how great their child is doing and having nothing to say about what their child is doing. So you never know when someone’s going to want to make that change so you need to make sure that you stay top of mind so that they, so whenever they make that jump, whenever they make that time to change, you are the school that’s in front of them and they go, “Yes, boom, I’ve connected with them. That is now who my private school is.”

Even if they have to wait six months before they can enroll. If they know that they’re going to enroll with you and you are their private school, you just want to make sure obviously that your nurturing campaign is converting leads into customers. It’s not just about building that relationship and being warm and fuzzy and helpful, you also do want to make sure that you’re being the leader and showing them how to enroll and why to enroll and getting them to actually take that step. So the program that I like to do is for the first 30 days, I like to have it very structured and I do this with the auto responders that actually is all programmed in. So I’m making sure that I’m building rapport, that I’m building that goodwill, that I’m providing that sales and that it’s templated.

I’m making sure that this sequence going into this beginning is very sequenced and is templated. It’s I know on day one I send this email, on day two, I send this email, on day three, I send this package to them. It’s very templated out so that I’m making sure that I’m building rapport, building that goodwill with them helping them know how to make the transition from a prospect into a actual enrollment. Then after that first 30 days, I’ve now built that relationship….been able to find that I’ve built that rapport. I know that they know, like and trust me. Now, after that 30 days, it’s really about staying top of mind and not allowing that relationship to wither away.

We’ve all seen that happen. We built, we get to know a business, we love them and then we never hear anything from them and we just kind of drift off. By staying top of mind and just keeping that relationship going is what I want to be doing after that first 30 days. So I do this by doing a newsletter and I like this to be a weekly and no less than every other week. If you’re only sending it out once a month, people have forgotten who you are by then. You have to kind of rebuild that relationship. I love to have this article, this newsletter be 40% entertainment, something fun, entertaining and enlightening. I want 40% information so that’s what’s happening at our school, what’s happening in the industry. Then 30% sales, I want 30% of the information in that newsletter to be, “Hey, come enroll with us,” or “Come purchase this from us,” or “Take this action.”

Yes, that is more than 100%, I know that, because a certain amount of the information of those three parts are going to overlap. Obviously, if I’m talking about information and entertainment, let’s say I’m doing an open house, it’s going to be an open house and and a community get together. We’re going to have the parents coming in, showing kind of what’s happening. We’re going to have some of the sports teams doing some scrimmages. We’re going to have a bounce house. We’re going to be doing a barbecue and at the same time, I’m also going to be talking to perspective parents about why to enroll with us. So there I’m doing an article that entertaining, it’s going be informative because I’m going to be educating them and I’m doing sales all in one piece of information.

You also want to make sure that as a part of this nurturing campaign, you’re doing what’s called reason why sales opportunities. So whenever there’s a reason why you want to do something, again, I had a great article on why do you use the word because. As long as you have the word because, you have a reason why you’re marketing to someone. This is a great time then to reach out to someone and go, “Hey, why don’t you enroll?” Because you have a reason. When you have that reason, people want to enroll with you and they will understand why you’re putting a sales message in front of them.

Now, most of us only use the only reason why, the only because that we have, that’s because it’s enrollment season. But look at some other reasons that you can have stuff out there. Went on the celebration of Dewey’s birthday. Look at the news when it comes out. Has the president or one of the local leaders said something or done something that would maybe be a reason why. Did the school districts around just get their yearly ratings and reviews? Was there a scandal at one of the schools around you that can give you a reason why you’re reaching out? “Hey, we’re reaching out with you because as you saw in the LA Times last week, the LA school