Social media is a key element of marketing for any organisation but within education it has become an essential part of the mix which can help to take schools to new heights if managed well.
However, to effectively utilise the benefits social media can bring, having a strategy is your secret component to elevate your social media content. Having recently gone through the review steps of our own social media marketing strategy, we want to share the information we’ve learnt from the experience.
In this blog, we are going to take you through how we developed and refreshed our marketing strategy to best reflect who we are as an organisation.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing suggest 6 steps (2022) to plan a social media campaign, many of which also apply when creating an over-arching strategy for an organisation. We’ve applied these six steps to our process, and then adapted our method to ensure the best results.
Here are the 6 steps…
To help guide you and your school to – consider, plan out, implement and record-review your own social media strategy. Enjoy the experience of the outcomes you can achieve.
1. Setting objectives
So, getting started, our first task was to establish our overall objectives for the strategy plan. These overall objectives could then be broken down into more specific goals, which would ensure that we could tailor our approach to be as effective as possible.
Upon reviewing our previous content, we found that we needed to realign our objectives as a support company and the wider brand, to link our social media activity with our broader marketing channel activity. To achieve this, we formed our three main objectives, of which we are sharing a simplified version:
- Expertise: To be up-to-date and as proficient as we can be with our marketing advice and methods. We want to create space for educated conversations with our schools and wider connections, to demonstrate our expertise by engaging and interacting.
- Knowledge: To hold the knowledge to support schools with marketing and communication best practice. In terms of social media, to effectively measure and monitor our performance, using tech tools such as advanced analytics.
- Passion: We are passionate about what we do and want to help all schools to be the best they can be. Our priority with this area is to optimise our content to appeal more to our target audience, to increase our following and grow our community.
For your own strategy, consider what the business goals your school has, such as increasing the numbers of pupils, celebrating exam results or school success wider & further, or it could be the additional extra-curricular you offer. Carefully think about what your aims are and how they can link into the strategy, so that your approach is connected and uniform across the organisation. Seek to stand out through your own core values and unique principles that need to continually reverberate through the school.
2. Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience, and also knowing how you want to present your school to your audience, is vital. This sounds obvious, as we may believe we already know this, but is a crucial step.
This knowledge gives you the ability to tailor your content to attract certain local demographics and sectors.
For example, our target audience are schools, school trusts, associations, heads, teachers and others involved in the education sector. This focus on the education sector is due to our expertise in marketing and education, enabling us to put education at the heart of everything we do.
If you and your team are unsure of where to start, considering questions such as the following could help:
* Consider your target audience and their specific needs?
* What is the geographic spread of the audience (20-30 mins travel)?
* Do you have different customer segments that you wish to target and if so, will you use different social media channels or campaigns to reach them?
* For each segment targeted, what do you know about them (their demographics, behaviours, attitudes, value, or business demographics)?
3. Develop Insights to Create Content Ideas
Once you have identified your ideal target audience, considering what makes your audience tick will help you to then create great, engaging content ideas. These insights could include understanding how and why your audience behaves in certain ways, or what type of content they prefer. Some users click to ‘like’ interesting posts, or share all relevant content, whereas others are more reserved, and only interact online with top quality (or funny…) content.
Once you have an idea of their behaviour, you can even delve deeper into this, with questions such as:
- Why are your target audience behaving as they are?
- What are the barriers that are stopping them behaving as you want them to (emotional and rational barriers)?
- Is it different for each of your target groups, I.e. what range of content do you need to appeal to them all?
4. Develop Social Strategy
Now, you have created your objectives, you have identified your target audience, you know exactly what type of behaviour they exhibit, and why, and what content they like.
At this point you can begin to consider your social strategy. This is your initial game plan and will vary greatly depending on your objectives. For instance, if you are trying to attract pupils to your school, you may focus an element of your marketing to promote your school as the best fit, locally or nationally, for academic achievements. This could bring in and focus on the achievements of pupils, the alumni and even the teachers. Consider all the related content themes you might like to talk (post) to your audience about.
To optimise your social media strategy, you could consider the questions below:
- Which stage of the customer engagement journey are you focusing on? (Consider the marketing journey within our digital journey blog, with steps: See > Think > Do > Care).
- Which social media channels will you use as a result and how will time and content be split between them?
- Will it be different for each target group
- Will you be engaging with existing followers I.e., pupil parents, using paid ads or reaching new followers?
5. Execute the Campaign
You are all prepped and ready to begin executing your social media campaign! You can now formulate your posts, create graphics that engage your target audience and represent your school brand. All you have to do is plan your content and begin posting.
Questions to be asking…
Throughout the process, considering various questions such as the ones listed which will help you to stay focused and continually evaluate your content.
Do bear in mind that as well as regular content posts, Facebook and Instagram offer stories and live video streams which are a popular option and well worth incorporating into your mix.
- What content will you use to overcome the barriers and engage for each channel?
- What will the split be between live or pre-prepared content?
- How will you deal with comments and questions?
- What industry content can you include to help elevate the school on the national stage?
- How will you consistently post the content across all of your channels?
6. Measuring success
You have now executed your social media campaign, but how successful was it? Do you want to measure your success in terms of engagement, revenue or brand perception, as examples? Which analytical tools will you use to do it?
We love Edu focused ContentCal, which provides all the scheduling capabilities with schools in mind. The tool offers an Engage feature (bringing all comments into one place) and offers an Advanced analytical tool, which can not only track your social channels but your website activity and paid ads too.
When measuring your success, you may want to consider any key dates, milestones or events that need to be planned for, e.g., Open days, main school events, holidays…
Another key consideration is your budget. Don’t forget to set out details of the total budget available for social media, and what this needs to cover, in your social media strategy. This ensures you stay in control of your finances, and utilise boosts and paid ads appropriately.
Good luck!
We hope you found these 6 steps helpful for creating your own social media marketing strategy. Having a strategy is vital to ensure you produce online content that effectively represents your values and objectives, and it keeps you on track with budgetary requirements and time-sensitive tasks.
Commit your social media strategy (plan) to paper, and use our template of questions to help guide you. For a copy in Word Contact us.
The next steps.
Feel free to either…
Request a demo of the Edu focus scheduling to analytics tool, please do drop us a line – we would be happy for you to road test if for your school. Request demo.
Or you can FOLLOW US via our (revitalised!) social media, or via our website (bottom left for our social channels).
Read about us and our unique school focused team – Marketing Advisers for Schools.