Now that it’s a new year, it’s time to update your marketing for school admissions. The goal of this guide is to touch on the moving population and the power of what it can mean to your schools and organizations. Capturing the attention of these families as they’re making these decisions for school is essential for boosting enrollment.
Today, you probably have your current enrollment, the students that are growing through the years with you and your organization. These are the people that will stay with you until they actually leave or graduate from your program. You also potentially have some competing schools nearby.
Of course, they have their current enrollment as well. It’s very difficult from a marketing or growth perspective to try to capture someone else’s student and make them yours, right?
It’s very expensive to try to accomplish that, so there’s this really unique segment in the population which we’re all familiar with, we just don’t think about it often. It’s people moving in and around our schools. The idea would be that these are nobody’s students at the point in time they’re moving.
If you can capture them quickly, and if they fit the profile of your enrollment, and let’s just say you invite them to meet you and they become your student, well you’ve done that, you’ve captured them before the competing schools have.
If you do a great job of that, you can always have a great funnel of new students coming into your school. In other words, the new moving population creates this ultimate opportunity of capturing a student that really hasn’t found their school quite yet.
That’s the power of new mover marketing! If you think about the moving population as a whole on average across the United States, there’s about 15% of the US population moving each year. It has gone down over the past several years, which means that the value of this high-value pool is actually shrinking, meaning it’s more and more important to you.
It’s essential to find ways to capture potential students. Of course when you capture somebody who’s moving into your community around your school, they have a very high propensity to stay with you. Of course, they have to meet your criteria.
Once you get them into your school and do a great job of getting to know them, then you have a great probability of them staying with you for the next 5-6 years. Why? This is the average time a family will live in their home.
The mover cycle is the cycle a family will go through when they make the decision to move. Once we make that decision, we start setting out a timeline. We’re going to go through that move process and at some point we’re gonna step foot in our new home after we do that.
As the consumer moves through the arc, the question becomes: When do we start putting our message in front of that family? When do they start making decisions about school? I think all of us can think about that talking to people as they move in. After they move is the key time for us is education professionals to be finding people in putting our brand in front of them.
There are different tactics that fit throughout the cycle in about what times they fall. You’ll need to think about this in terms of your school and when people typically make decisions for your particular programs. When it comes to moving in, we’re going to talk about two different ways to capture and talk to people who are in the moving process.
There’s no perfect answer. Not everybody makes the same decision for a school for their child two weeks before they move, eight weeks before their move, 30 days after they move. It’s happening all through that spectrum of the arc. It’s really important to be thinking about ways to put your brand out there in front of this moving population as they’re going through the move phase.
These marketing for school admissions tips were discussed by Welcomemat CEO, Brian Mattingly, in our recent webinar: Tips and Tactics to Help Grow Your School Enrollment. To learn more strategic ways to keep that flow of students coming into your school, watch the replay here.
