Hello, everyone. Welcome to a crash course in independent school marketing. My name is Kraig Doremus. I am the associate director of Marketing and Communications at Swift School in Roseville, Georgia, and I am very excited to be here with you to present this course. A little bit about me before we get started. As I said, I work at Swift School in Roswell, Georgia, and I'd like to take a moment to tell you a little bit about what's different about Swift. Swift School serve students in first through eighth grade who have dyslexia or related language based learning differences. When you think of an independent private school, you probably think recruit, retain, recruit, retain, recruit, retain. So in our case that we keep you all the way from first to eighth grade. What makes Swift different is we remediate. We work to fill these kids toolboxes with the tools they need to succeed, to provide that successful remediation and allow students to matriculate back into a mainstream public or private school. The average day for a Swift School student is three years. I joined Swift in December of 2021 after a six year career in collegiate and professional athletics. I specialize in website management, social media publications, doing all our marketing and communications, emails and letters, etc. admissions letters. I report to our Director of Enrollment Management and heavily support our admissions team. To put it simply, I am blessed to be in a wonderful spot that I am in. So what are we going to talk about today? First, we're going to discuss branding. There's a misconception that a brand is a logo and a tagline. Honestly, it's much more than that. And I'm going to give a brief overview. Social Media How to effectively market your School using some social media platforms. Your website as an inquiry magnet. I'll be honest, this is something I struggled with when I first came out of the college athletics world, but it's going to be my favorite section of this webinar Admissions and Marketing. As I said, I report to our director of Enrollment management. We have a fantastic admissions team at Swift School and I'll talk about keys to a successful partnership and working together. Email Marketing. Yes, email still exists. How do we get good open rates and click through rates? And what have I done to transform our emails at Swift? There's five sections we're going to cover, but if you're interested in discussing something that's not on this webinar, feel free to reach out. I'll provide my contact information at the end and we can discuss it. Let's get started. Branding what it is and what it is not. Branding is creating a strong perception of your school or company. Quite frankly, it's what people say about you when you're not in the room. There are different elements of branding and yes, your logo and your tagline and your colors are all parts of branding. But I'm going to talk about some different ones for the purpose of this section. The brand experience, like I just said, how do they feel about your brand? What did they say about you? Values? What are the cornerstones of your brand? Do you value nurturing excellence? Academic rigor? What makes your school unique? I talked about Swift and how what makes us unique is our history of successful remediation, and that the average day went a step before a student is successfully remediated is just three years. One of the ways that, you know you have a good brand perception is based on your reviews. This comes from a former Swift School parent. And yes, I could just read you the quote, but I want to dive in a little bit further. He said, Our experience at Swift School was simply top notch. That tells you right there how they feel in that first sentence. The teachers, head of school and administrative staff are as good as they come. It tells you three different types of people in the school and what it feels. Our daughter spent first in fifth grade at Swift and they equipped her with the tools to grow, learn and enjoy school at the fullest. So when we talk about Portrait of a Graduate in a moment, you're most likely see something content about those three things. We will forever be grateful for the kindness feeling of family and education. She received. And this is the biggest part. Word of mouth. A referral, a positive referral. If you have a child with dyslexia. Swift School shouldn't just be one of your choices, he said. It should be your first choice. Brand personality is something I kind of just discussed. Are you competitive or are you nurturing? Are you working to retain students or are you remediating students? There's many examples. Think of Harley-Davidson. Tough, rugged. At this point, I encourage you to take out a pen and just a scratch piece of paper. Write down five brands that you interact with every day. It could be Walmart, Kroger, Publix, Amazon. What are the brand personality of those companies? See if you can define it and then check and see if they have something that defines their brand personality. How close were you to your niche? Who do you serve? Are you a special education school? Are you a magnet school? Are you faith based? Or are you simply an independent private school with no religious affiliation feel? Yes. We're talking about it twice. What do parents and students feel? What do they believe about your school? And how do they feel when they enroll their child? What do they feel they should get out of it? So that leads us to the portrait of a graduate. Portrait of a graduate. This is a set of five outcome statements of what students will be like when they leave your school. This is what schools we want our students to leverage strengths in our testimonials. I often write, I see that students have a lack of confidence. They lacked hope before they came to Swift School. So we want them to leverage their strength, reach their full potential, get that confidence back, become the beautiful, bright person that they are. Advocate relentlessly. Students with learning differences need to advocate that they may not learn in a certain way. They may need a test question read out loud or need a graphic organizer. Need to use a calculator. That's okay. Advocate for what they need and don't be afraid to do so. We want them to embrace responsibility to be good citizens in the world and in the school. Be positive contributors to Swift School and the world around them. And finally, and this is something I love. I don't take it lightly when that aha moment happens, when the light bulb comes on. We want them to celebrate success, to feel empowered, to feel prepared when they've received that remediation, and to be ready to thrive not only at Swift School, but when they matriculate into a mainstream public school or their new private school. I assume independent school management has meant a lot to me and to SWIFT as a consultant and certainly Penny as a mentor to me. She said What's most important to parents is what their child is going to be like when they leave your school. A way to explain that and to be clear about what set you apart from other schools in your market is to develop a set of 3 to 5 statements. But I just showed you the portrait of a graduate of what outcomes parents and students can expect when they enroll in your school. And if you're looking to develop a portrait of a graduate, I'll do a shameless plug for ICM. Penny and her team are great at helping you really dive in to analyze your school and what those outcomes statement should be. Social Media Best practices and how to effectively market your school. There are four social media categories that I really focus in on at SWIFT, and I'll give you a brief overview of each one. Campus life is anything that happens on your campus. Events. For us, it might be a Swift Institute event, which is where professionals, community members, parents, grandparents come together to learn about the learning difference that is dyslexia. Alumni Visits. We have a lot of alumni that come back and see former teachers and do testimonials and just want to come back and be around Swift because they've had such a positive experience. It could be Homecoming athletics, a construction project, a special visitor. Academics is just like it sounds classroom instruction. For us, the Orton Gillingham approach is a big one. Games in the classroom that are helping students learn field trips. For example, the Chattahoochee Nature Center is a popular one in Georgia, the Atlanta Braves stadium. You'll actually see a photo of that later. Testimonials. Leveraging Success Stories for your student population and how alumni and their families were transformed at your school should be huge and should be a social media category. It's more than just a shout out saying, Hey, congratulations to alumni X on this achievement. Yes, that's important. But do these full blown testimonials. They're important for getting the word of mouth out about your school and maintaining a positive community image. And they're heartwarming for us. They're emotional stories, and you see how we truly help these alumni be transformed and succeed. Then there's that other category. Yes, it's a catch all category. Thought leadership, holiday graphics, promotion of maybe a non capped off campus event that a teacher speaking out or an administrator is speaking at that you want to get people to sign up for to help spread the word about your school through a different avenue. I'm going to talk about our Facebook and Instagram. And yes, we use Twitter and we've also revitalized a LinkedIn account that has done extremely well. But I want to focus in on just these two platforms for the purpose of this webinar, the Facebook and Instagram. As I mentioned, Facebook, I'm focusing based on the demographic on information, sign ups and purchases. It's professional in tone. I'll give you an example in a moment. Instagram is on campus life and happenings all throughout your campus, whether it's academics, events, etc. and it's a bit more fun and relaxed. For example, this past week I put up a poster of our construction. We're undergoing and on Facebook I said, The construction crew is hard at work. We'd like to thank them for all their work in transforming our campus. We can't wait to show you the finished project in August. For now, enjoy these snapshots of the campus transformation that you have seen on Instagram. I was a lot more fun and relaxed. The photos were actually taken from the roof, so I simply said ten out of ten, letting the admin take construction photos from the roof. Yes, the point across on both on Facebook I'm displaying that informational professional approach saying, Hey, check out these construction photos. Can't wait to show you what it looks like in August when we finish extension Instagram, you get the same idea we're going to show it off in August. You're looking at the construction photos. You know, a new piece of information. It's from the roof, but it's more fun and relaxed. Here are some different examples. I talk about success stories. Ronen Melina Salis is a commercial diver. He has arguably, in my opinion, the coolest career of any swim school alumni. He does salvage work underwater, burning and recovery work, and still uses the templates that swim school gave him 10 to 12 years ago. To this day, to do his diving work and fill out his reports. He told Lindsay two men on good day Atlanta as much. And it was a hit for us having someone appear on Atlanta's premiere morning show that promoted Swift School. So leverage those social media posts and your alumni stories and pitch them to media when appropriate. This is an example of something that would fall in the other category. During February, we did Black History Month spotlights Daymond John. You might have heard of him on Shark Tank is an entrepreneur who has dyslexia. In October, one of our theme days was dressed like a famous dyslexic day. Now, bottom in the right hand corner, you see a student. He was in fourth grade at the time dressed as Daymond John. Well, we put up a quote from Daymond John celebrating Kim in Black History Month and his dyslexia, and also included the picture of the student who dressed as Daymond. We tagged and about a week later his team replied, and it was our best social media post to date. So always tag somebody. If you're referring to somebody and just be authentic, have fun and enjoy it, but also be sure to get information across it and spotlight someone as I did in that post. These are just different Instagram examples. Down bottom I mentioned you'd see a picture of some students at the Atlanta Braves stadium. Our fifth grade group took a tour when they were doing a baseball unit at the end of the year. Up top is something I do during the summer. I do faculty and staff spotlights. Sure, parents will know someone is their child's teacher and know what they're like in the classroom. But I like to give someone a behind the scenes look at that student, at that teacher or staff member, rather. What are they like outside of the classroom? What's on their bucket list? What are their hobbies? What are they? What are three people they want to meet for dinner and why? I'll give you that different look that lets you really get to know them as a person outside of just in the classroom, in the instructional approach. I'm a numbers guy at heart. I always have been a fun fact at me. I mentioned I worked at Talladega Superspeedway. I learned to count using NASCAR driver numbers. If you know anything about late 1992 NASCAR, you would know that Dale Earnhardt plus Rusty Wallace equaled Terry Labonte 56,530 was our Facebook reach, a 35.5% increase in the first year that I took it over. Our Instagram reach was 4142. I revitalized a previously dormant Instagram approach account, rather, and had a 112% increase in reach. What's important, though, is profile visits. You want people to engage with your content, but you also want them visiting your profile. Clicking that link in your bio, whether it leads them to a call to action, to your website home page with a pop up and engaging with your school. We had a total increase in profile visits across both platforms of 74%. This is my favorite section in the webinar. Your website as an inquiry machine. Admittedly, it was something I knew next to nothing about when I made the transition to independent school marketing. Your website should draw visitors in and keep them there. It's easy to get views, but it's much more than that. You want to have a call to action, give them something to do and we'll talk about some different options that Swift School has enacted to be able to capture people's information and get those leads to begin the admissions process. This is our website on mobile. We went through a redesign in July of 2022 and we launched Very important that you have a website that is optimized for mobile with how things are moving these days. Time is key. When someone gets on your homepage, you have 6 seconds to draw them in. You should answer who you are. In this case, you see our tagline Success with Dyslexia starts here. That shows you that we serve students with dyslexia and related language based learning differences. Below that you see in the subhead The Switch effect Empower students in first to eighth grade in a transformative, immersive and positive environment. First to eighth grade tells you who we serve and what our environment is about. Dunbar. You see the green, orange and pink buttons. Those are call to actions. We have inquire now about us and donate. You want to have those sticky buttons there. And the beautiful part is they stay with you on mobile and they're on the right side on a desktop to get to get families, rather prospective families, most importantly, to engage with your content. You want them to inquire, appeal to their emotions. They know that when their child has been diagnosed with dyslexia, that they need us. But why should they pick us rather than somebody else? We have to make that abundantly clear and we don't want a high bounce rate. We don't want to lose them. Get them to fill out that inquiry form and begin the process of determining where Swift School can help them. Lori Jackson from Final Site said One of the great things about Swift School is that the website homepage is admission focused. The top of it is for the family who is looking to solve their students needs. It's truly admission driven. And to the left there you can see the screenshot of our admission process. What I love about having an admission driven website and admission focused website, as Lori said, is that it really tells the prospective family, here is who we are. Here's what we do and here is how we can help you. Let's start the process. We have different inquiry options today in 2023. Nobody wants to feel like they're talking to a robot, to a chat bot. So we signed a partnership with Pier Pal to do our parent ambassador program. You can see three examples on this slide. So if the Smith family is a prospective family and they have a sixth grader who is in middle division and is interested in touch football, they can reach out to Michael Lytle. They say he teaches middle division and he's also the head coach of soccer, basketball and touch football. They can say, Hey, my son Johnny is interested in touch football. Can you tell me about the athletic program? He would say, Sure, I'm the head coach of these teams to no cut policy. This is how long our practices are and this is where we play our games. We compete in these conferences. Everybody will play. So Johnny can expect ample playing time, etc. Not only does the Smith family get the information they need, but Johnny has made a connection with a teacher. He would have, and the Smith family has also made a connection with somebody at. So they're not coming in, not knowing anyone. And they got their question answered from someone who actually works at the school and is immersed in it. As I said, we serve students with dyslexia and related language based learning differences. When parents begin to suspect that their students might have dyslexia, they often feel confused and don't know where to turn on the home page of our website. We have a dropdown that the Dyslexia questionnaire, and it's a way for us to capture your information. Parents will fill it out. And yes, you say preschool, kindergarten to first grade in second grade. Those aren't necessarily all the graves we serve. We don't serve preschool in kindergarten, but it's when parents might begin to have questions. They answer a series of yes or no questions, and based on their answers, it'll say your child could have dyslexia. Consider being evaluated by a professional to download the full report they put in their name and email, and we get their contact information just like we do with people when they open a conversation with an ambassador. So it allows us to take that information, have a lead, a qualified lead in that case, and begin the admission process. There are some other inquiry options. We have our Inquire Now button, and it's a little bit more detailed than your typical 4 to 6 form pop up that we would use. It allows us to capture their information and schedule a tour. It goes right to the name Campbell, one of our admission employees, and I'll talk more about our team later. We have our admissions process pop up during admissions season. We host coffee and chat sessions for prospective families. It's a 4 to 6 pill form that lets them sign up for the coffee. Also captures their information. We get who they are, what school they're currently at, what grade their child is entering. If they have a dyslexia diagnosis in which they'd like to sign up for quick to fill out 90 seconds or less. We get everything they need and they get their spot reserved. Our admission center is a more detailed page. It does contain links to inquire. It also has our connected Ambassador link and allows people to know who we are and read those heartwarming success stories. And within each success story is an inquire Now button or a button to our admissions process or to connect with an ambassador. It's not just read a story and exit. There's always a call to action, admissions and marketing. This is a fun one, especially because I report to our Director of Enrollment Management. This is our team. Angela is our director of Enrollment Management and Marketing. She is my boss. I mentioned to me a moment ago, she's our enrollment management associate. She handles all the increase and schedules, the tours. Dora is our admissions associate. She's been a fantastic addition to the team. She handles a lot of tours, inquiries, and also does some outplacement duties. And then there's me, the associate director of marketing and Communication. Marketing to the prospective family is important because the admission department wants to bring in new families, and so we truly need to help them as marketers with their number one objective. Enroll new students. I wish I could tell you I did something earth shattering and crazy. But here's what we do. We do Google ads and SEO. Over time, you want to decrease your emphasis on Google ads and get prospective families to find you organically print advertisements. When I first came to Swift, there were several thousand dollars allocated to print advertisements. It's very difficult to measure return on investment in a print ad compared to digitally. When you can say, okay, Family X went to our landing page, they filled it out and they enrolled and then they paid full tuition. Bang. That right there shows you that based off your tuition, you got your full investment, you got your digital ad budget paid for. Hopefully sometimes over word of mouth and relationship. This is huge for Swift School with current families, alumni and also psychologists and psychiatrists who are seeing these students with dyslexia recommending swift. So we do a lot to make sure that our reputation is positive through word of mouth on great schools, on niche, all those different sites that you'll see if you're not having people in the community say positive things about you. It might be time to figure out why and determine how you can change that. And I'd be happy to talk more about that. If anyone needs assistance. Coffee and chat events. We have these during second semester during the height of our admissions season. They come in, they hear from our admissions team, from the head of school, from each of the division directors. Then they get a tour. Testimonials. Testimonials. Again, I've talked at length about these from alumni, from parents for even from current families who have had just an incredible, swift experience. And finally, the different partnerships I mentioned Pierpaolo talked about that mentioned niche after different partnerships you're wanting to discuss. Certainly book a time on my calendar and I'll be happy to meet with you, but this is kind of our overall approach of how we market to the prospective family and are able to continually enroll new students year after year, even though we're losing students who are successfully remediated, ready to fly and go into a new private school or into public school. This is something that I mentioned at the Enrollment Management conference. Listen, before you talk, you might not be able to implement five things at once, but to strengthen your relationship with admissions, listen to what they need and find ways to implement it. At the end of the day, although I work in marketing, in my work in admissions, even though we all have different roles, we're working together for the good of the institution. Creating a yearlong calendar is something that has helped my boss, Angelo and I stay on track. In January and August, it's the start of the school year. In September, I'm focusing heavily on supporting our advancement with publications and having a professional shoot. I'm publishing our digital annual report and also attending a professional development conference in November. The final touches go on our annual magazine, and in December it hits newsstands, which is just a fancy word for homes. What's that? Someone tell me they read the magazine and see anything about how to do in admissions to sign up or inquire about Swift. I said, Well, there there is a page on that. But your magazine is a sales piece. It should sell the school. And the whole point of the magazine is selling the school so that people want to begin the admissions process. It's not just page after page of here's how you go about the admission process. We let the stories lead up to that and have a page of how prospective family can acquire sell your school through that magazine. In January, I finalized the summer materials for our robust summer program and support our admissions team with their coffee and chat and whatever needs they have. Same thing in February. I'm supporting our admissions team with our coffee and chats, also getting re enrollment letters, new family letters out, swag out to new families and returning families. March again is admissions season April and may become heavy on campus events. I never knew how busy May could be. I think I felt like a classroom teacher in May when I was having all these different tasks and I was truly trying to help our lower and middle division with promotion ceremonies with end of the year certificates, with different on campus events and partnerships with graduation. So May in a school year is a busy month, and when I joined in 2021 22, I certainly figure that out. June and July are summer. The pace is a little bit slower. I do some summer camp preparation, make sure I'm present for our summer camps and also pick two major projects. Maybe not something that's been assigned to me, but something that needs to refresh like a new book. And I knock out those two projects and also prep for back to school, the face versus the voice. This is something I first heard when I worked at Talladega Superspeedway. Admissions is the first group that interacts with a prospective family. They're the ones that schedules the tour that tells them all about the school, that lets them meet with the division directors or an athletic director. They guide the family through the entire enrollment process. Marketing communications staff is the voice. I'm the one responsible for crafting the messaging, the tone, whether it comes from admissions or head of school, social media, print ad, or a digital ad. I'm responsible for the branding and the promotion of the school marketing, the post enrollment time once somebody enrolls. You can't just do nothing about it. We send them a personalized letter written from the head of school. It's hand signed with the note written at the bottom. Can't wait to see Johnny in third grade next year. We send them a new family box with a t shirt, a magnet, stickers, pens, pencils, notebooks, personalized notes from our admissions team, really, to get them excited about Swift School. Our Family Fest is the biggest event of the year. We had over 400 people and for a school of 180. That's a pretty darn good turnout. It allows new families to connect with current families and to allow incoming students to develop friendships with current students. So there's a face with a name when there's a new family start, and also there's a dedicated new family resource page that allows for parents coming in to Swift to have any questions answered if they can't find that question. There's a who do I contact sheet so that any anxiety is decreased and they can get their questions answered. Finally and briefly, going to touch on email marketing. Yes, we all still get emails. How do we increase open and click rates? And what are they? Open rate is simply the number of times your email has been open based off the list it was sent to click rate. It's just like it sounds clicking a hyperlinked URL that was an email. And how do I track both personally? I use a spreadsheet. I have name of the email, how many people it was sent to the open rate and the click through rate so that I know since I started our open rate is well above the national average. Again, I mentioned I was a numbers guy. Here are just some numbers. The average open rate, the educational industry, according to campaign monitor, is 28.5%. The click through rate is 4.4%. Swift Schools is well above both of those are 81%. Open rate is incredibly high and I have helped to transform that with a number of different ways. What are my keys? Yes, merge tags. Personalize your emails. You can put it in the body or in the greeting. I got a text one time after one of our weekly newsletters went out and said, Hey, why does this guitar report, our weekly newsletter that goes to all faculty, staff, parents and even the board say, Dear John. Well, I put in the merge tag to make it more personal subject line optimization. You want to keep it to 40 characters, six words and helpful words, not to click on this and they do a great job of ranking your subject line. You want to have words in there like Last chance, Save now. Register now to discount today only things like that. And they really helped me transform the way I write subjects so that their catchy students want to open them and parents want to open them as well. Keep it short and sweet. People aren't going to read a long email during COVID. I read an email about when a school was going to go virtual and then when they were going to return to school. I should get that information in the first paragraph. Instead, I got it in the seventh paragraph. If you have a call to action, don't write a four paragraph email and put your call to action at the bottom. Keep them engaged. Write a paragraph. Put your call to action. Because most likely if they're compelled emails written the way it is, they're going to click right there. If you put it at the bottom, it will get lost. Thank you very much for taking time to watch my webinar. These are different ways you can connect. I'd be more than happy to talk independent school marketing. I'll be happy to expand on anything that was covered in this webinar. If there's something I didn't discuss that you wanted to discuss, please reach out and I'll be happy to connect and help in any way I can. Thanks again for watching and have a great day.

independent school marketing

Swift School

dyslexia

branding

social media marketing

user-friendly website