Finance and Marketing: Joined at the Hip
Your school’s identity is meaningless if your school isn’t sustainable.
Your product is useless if it is not what people really desire or if you can’t prove its value.
If you can’t identify and place your ideal customers by looking at present data and future trends, you’re handicapping your school.
But it all goes south if you can’t align the marketing mix, demonstrably grounded in an objective determination of value, with your school’s long-term financial policy or pricing, grounded in data.
“We believe that the primary approach to marketing is one that places equal emphasis on internal and external market research to authentically understand value, and aligns it with sound financial strategy and right-sizing, as needed.”
Price and value rule the roost in your marketing mix.
Once you have solved the value/price equation, the technology and the methods of communication will naturally follow. While important, paid search and social media may not be the best place to start, especially in the never-ending frenzy of trying to keep up with the urgent needs of technology rather than the important work of identity and price.
To that point, we are astounded by the lightning-fast transformations taking place in digital marketing and social media. According to a nationally acknowledged school influencer in all things inbound and digital:
“Our School brings in about half of its web traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but garners only a 5% return from paid search and 2% from social media.”
Is Social Media Worth The Investment?
Can these lower-yielding channels possibly be worth the investment they require? Is this where you are putting most of your valuable time? Is keeping up with and adjusting to the thousands of algorithmic changes affecting paid search and social media your primary time sink?
The emails we receive from consultants tilling the digital landscape these days give the impression we’re lurching from one challenge to the next, caused in part by the ever-changing algorithms of Google and Facebook and how to “game the system.” There is nothing wrong with using paid search and social media—go to where you think the people you want to attract are! Paid search and social media may serve other purposes well, but it seems these alone won’t get many new families into your doors.
“Technology is the tail, not the dog.”
Market Research, Price, and Brand Development First
Taken together, market research, price, and brand identity is the dog that wags the tail of technology, search, and social media. These three forces drive all the meaningful conversations at your school to all your various constituents, current and future. It’s about objectively knowing your unique value as identified by those you serve AND those you seek to serve. Where’s the proof?
Can you show evidence that others outside your school— qualified leads, those in the admission process, community influencers, education professionals, feeder and matriculating school leaders—get who you really are and want to be affiliated with you? Independent schools need to be inspirational causes as well as educational institutions if they are to stand out in today’s competitive environment.
Bring Back the 4 P’s Plus 2
However, in the 20+ years since marketing has glacially inched its way into the mainstream of most school leadership conversations, we seem to have set aside the importance that price and sustainability play within the marketing mix of product, promotion, place, and price (and I would add people and purpose to that marketing mix as well!)
Price, Product, Promotion, Place, People, Purpose
What’s Your Return On Your Marketing Investment?
According to Thom Greenlaw, Connor Associates’ Strategic Partner for Finance and Operations, “We are often approached by clients to assist them with a marketing strategy in order to alleviate a serious revenue gap in their operations. Instead, we want to look at the full picture, beginning with a complete financial analysis and benchmarking study. Often, requests to develop a strategy to grow enrollment at a school through marketing efforts leads instead to an understanding that ‘bigger is not always better’ in the case of school enrollment. Right-sizing, the concept of developing a curated enrollment strategy that searches for the best mission-appropriate students, paired with an expense base to support those students, is a better approach.“
Connor adds, “The intersection of value and finance is more advantageous than either alone. Many schools have backed themselves into a corner with tuition discounting or an outdated and scattershot approach to determining tuition.”
“No margin...no mission.”
So, yes! Connor Associates can connect you to the best digital media consultants in the business. Several are our Strategic Partners. But we recommend you not start there.
First Things First
Your most important work is aligning your identity (brand) and tangible, demonstrable value with financial reality.
So if your goal is effective messaging that will draw families to your school, do this important foundational work first. Align value and brand with a sound financial plan. Marketers and CFO’s need to be partners now more than ever.
Connor Associates stakes its value on its experience with providing comprehensive services, including ensuring proof of ROI through Image Audits (reputational asset and risk management), Alumni and Alumni Parent Surveys, Enrollment Feasibility Studies which identify qualified appropriate prospects at rooftop level, Five-year enrollment Forecasts, Location Studies, Business Office Evaluations and Plans, Strategic Marketing Plans based on research, and onsite training and coaching to get everyone in your school and your trustees supporting enrollment, retention, and philanthropy.
Our newest offering, administrative search, is a very creative, fast, and effective approach to finding, training, and keeping the best people on your leadership team--and it’s surprisingly different and a better value than you may get from job boards or other search firms. Find out more here.