Student recruitment - don't leave it too late.

Are you and your school panicking about application numbers and the intake for September 2021? Are you desperately trying to get those last minute applications in, and rushing to get out ill thought out promotional material and deadline reminders?

Well don’t worry, you’re not alone. Schools don’t think like brands. And nor should they. But they could learn a lot from them, in the way that they schedule and plan for a sales or recruitment push.

It is important, however, to realise that unless you change the way that you are doing things, you’ll be in the same position next year too. And the year after that. The definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Don’t do that. Change it up. Adapt to the current climate, and start to prepare NOW for next year - believe me, it takes a long time and a lot of preparation to get it right. But that’s where digital marketing and advertising companies can help. Companies like ours, that specialise in helping schools improve their first choice applications.

Marketing and advertising a school isn’t something that can be done over-night. That’s the most important lesson here, so I’ll say it again… Marketing and advertising a school isn’t something that can be done over-night.

It takes time and it takes a solid strategy. It requires planning and it requires constant attention and ‘tweaking’. More often than not, it takes someone with experience in recruitment (and sales), advertising, and marketing, to help a school to get it right. I don’t want to sound too harsh here, but for a school to survive, it needs students. Without them, there is no school. So, besides the education and welfare of the pupils, a school’s efforts to recruit should be a very high priority.

We’re working with schools around the UK, helping them to promote themselves digitally. We use digital marketing, social media, and content creation to get a school’s best bits in front of the people that matter - their community. We do this on an ongoing basis, so that whilst other schools and colleges are losing their heads right about now because they’re struggling for numbers, our customers are happily dealing with bumper applications and often the ‘good-problem-to-have’ - being over subscribed.

It’s around February that schools realise that they should have been taking their digital marketing and social media a lot more seriously. It’s in the panic and desperation of staring at an un-met target, that they turn to social media and advertising to …‘please…do something!’ At this point, unless you’ve been building a community with your digital presence, nurturing and developing the trust from your community, and firmly planting yourself on the tip of someone’s tongue when they ask themselves ‘where should I go to school?’ or ‘where should I send my son and daughter to school?’ - unless you’ve spent the last months and years doing that…well, you’re relying on word of mouth (and we all know about good news/bad news and how fast it spreads), and a poster on your front gate.

So, if you need help in this time of ‘last pushing’, or if you want to start pro-actively putting into action a bespoke strategy for your school’s 2021/22 applications, then get in touch. We’d love to hear from you and show you how we can help.

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Company Ten helps schools all across the United Kingdom do digital marketing better. From video production and photography to social media management and training, and a lot of things in-between - we are specialists in helping schools use ‘digital’ to their advantage. We’re not just flogging our services either, we actually want to help! So that’s why we offer free monthly training in digital marketing - to help you and your school improve and do better. We want you to be able to utilise everything that the world of digital marketing in education has to offer.