Whether you’ve just started a language school or want to increase admissions to an existing one, effective marketing strategies are paramount for achieving success.
To outsmart your competitors, your marketing strategies have to show and tell potential customers why your language school is the best choice for them.
However, to develop an effective language school marketing strategy, you’ll need to invest time and money—both valuable resources you can’t afford to waste.
If you don’t know where to begin, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we outline everything you need to know about marketing language schools. This includes:
- 📚 Why a marketing plan is so important for your teaching business.
- 📚 Some of the results you can enjoy from a successful marketing strategy.
- 📚 10 actionable tips to help you get started.
Firstly, What Is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy outlines a business's plan for reaching potential consumers and converting them into customers.
It should also contain your language school’s value proposition.
This refers to the unique value that your language school promises to deliver to prospective students or parents should they choose to enroll in your courses.
A marketing strategy should also outline:
- 📝 Your language school’s marketing goals.
- 📝 A timeline of when key tasks should be completed and goals must be met.
- 📝 Which metrics you will use to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
Why Is Language School Marketing Essential for My Business?
A marketing strategy is essential for setting the direction of your school’s marketing-related activities and also for your business as a whole.
A marketing strategy helps you to:
- ✅ Stay connected to your current or former students and parents.
- ✅ Reach more potential students or customers.
- ✅ Develop the best products or services for your customer base.
- ✅ Determine how you will inform your target market about products or services.
Without a defined strategy, you won't know who your language school’s customers are, how to reach them, or what you want your marketing channels to achieve.
If you don’t believe us, take a look at the numbers. Having a defined marketing strategy makes you 313% more likely to be successful than those who don't.
9 Tips for Marketing Your Language School
Now that you have a better idea of what a marketing strategy is and how it can benefit your school, let’s take a look at some tips to get you started.
1. Determine Your Marketing Goals
Before you can begin marketing your language school, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
One way to do this is to brainstorm ideas and marketing goals with your colleagues and to present this information in a table or graph.
Some of these goals may include:
- 📈 Increasing student enrollments.
- 👀 Boosting your language school’s brand awareness.
- 🗣 Improving communication with parents.
Once you know what your marketing goals are, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about which channels you will use to achieve them.
This will also allow you to create marketing content that is best suited to the channels you use and that will keep your target audience engaged.
2. Prioritize Your Marketing Goals
Once you’ve identified your language school’s marketing goals, you need to prioritize them.
Too many new businesses try to do too much too quickly. Not only does this get expensive, but it’s also difficult to maintain multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously.
You may decide that the most important goal is to redesign your website.
Once you’ve got this right, you could move on to improving your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to drive traffic to your school’s website.
By prioritizing your marketing goals, you’ll ensure that you complete each task, stay on track with the timelines you’ve set, and use your resources more efficiently.
3. Choose the Right Marketing Channels
Marketing channels are the avenues and methods you use to reach potential customers. Some common examples include:
- Direct mail
- Online banner ads
- Newsletters
- Telemarketing or telephone sales
- Direct sales teams or sales reps
Many businesses focus on inbound marketing channels when they first get started.
These are marketing efforts that focus on attracting leads and customers via online content like blogs, social media campaigns, and SEO.
Inbound marketing tries to make it easier for customers—who are already actively looking for goods or services via the internet—to find what a company offers.
Whether your language school is well-established or just starting out, inbound marketing has proven to be 10x more effective than outbound for increasing:
- 📈 Website traffic
- 📈 Sales
- 📈 Lead generation
- 📈 Customer loyalty
No matter which marketing channels you choose, you must always ensure that they align with your marketing goals.
Most importantly, the marketing channels you use must be relevant to the students or families you hope to attract to your language courses.
4. Make Sure Your Website Is up to Scratch
When you start marketing your teaching business, a good place to start is creating or redesigning your school’s existing website.
It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of your website. That’s 0.05 seconds. Although quality content matters, first impressions are 94% design-related.
Studies of user behavior have found that visual appeal and website navigation have the biggest influence on people’s first impressions of your brand.
The good news is that you don’t need a web developer to create a website for your language school anymore.
For a fraction of the cost, you can make a perfectly good website using sites such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, BigCommerce, and Webnode.
Here are some of the basic things your website should contain:
- 💻 Calls to action: Prompt users to “Sign up” or “Try it for free” to increase conversions.
- 💻 Up-to-date contact information: Make it easy for potential clients to reach you.
- 💻 Social proof: Testimonials help build trust.
- 💻 Easy navigation: Give visitors a clear path to the pages they need.
- 💻 A user-friendly application or inquiry form: Make forms easy to find and complete.
Remember, Your Website Must Be Mobile-Friendly
In 2021, approximately 54.4% of global web traffic came from people using their phones.
This means it’s essential for language schools to ensure that their websites are optimized and accessible for mobile phones.
If a potential customer visits your website on their phone and it isn’t easy for them to navigate, you risk losing an enrollment or lead for your business.
5. Focus On Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
By increasing the amount of traffic to your website, SEO is a great way to improve your language school’s visibility online.
As part of a marketing strategy, SEO will consider:
- 💭 How search engines work
- 💭 Popular terms or keywords that are typed into search engines
- 💭 Which search engines your target audience prefers
With a carefully planned SEO strategy, your language school’s website will have a better chance of ranking higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
The higher you rank on the SERP, the more likely it is that people will find your website when they search for specific keywords.
Not only does this mean more people will visit your website, but it also increases the chances of a potential customer finding your language course.
Keyword Analysis
Certain words have the power to control your rankings online. Keywords are single words or phrases that people frequently use to find what they are looking for.
To find keywords to improve your website’s ranking in the SERPs, you first need to research which ones are relevant to your language school.
After you’ve found keywords that match what your target audience is searching for, you’ll need to strategically place them into your website’s content.
Content Creation
Website content creation helps communicate with potential customers and gives you an opportunity to add keywords so your pages can rank.
Some content you can create includes:
- Blogs
- Webpage text
- Infographics
- Videos
- Newsletters
Once your content is taken care of, you can use cost-effective SEO tools like Keyword Hero, MozCast, or Google Keyword Planner to find relevant terms to add to your copy.
There are also paid tools like Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, Clearscope, and Frase that can suggest keyword usage and track performance.
6. Create Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a great way to reach multiple potential customers at once and provide valuable content and relevant offers to subscribers.
Research shows that 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted via email.
You can use email marketing in your language school to:
- Welcome new students or families
- Follow up with leads who enquired on the website
- Promote school events
- Stay in contact with parents regarding payments, deadlines, and exam dates
One of the best ways to manage your email campaigns is with a school management app like Teach ‘n Go.
Not only do we provide professional-looking email templates, but we also make it easier than ever to send multiple emails to teachers, parents, and students.
To learn more about our group messaging features, visit our website.
7. Build a Social Media Presence
Many teaching businesses believe that there isn’t a place for them on social media.
Think about the fact that there are currently over 4.2 billion active social media users across the world.
If your language school doesn’t focus on building a social media presence, it will miss out on a fast and cost-effective way to reach a massive audience.
Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.
Including social networking elements in a marketing campaign has proven to:
- 💪 Help businesses build better relationships with their customers
- 😎 Improve brand awareness
- 🔎 Reach new potential customers
Building an online presence goes beyond merely creating social media accounts. You’ll also need to create personalized content for your target audience.
Before you begin, research which platforms your audience uses most so you can meet them where they are.
Websites like Later and Hootsuite can help you track analytics, schedule posts, and plan future content.
8. Invest in Social Media Ads
With the right research and strategic targeting, language schools can generate more inquiries using paid social media advertising.
Common platforms that offer ads include:
Ads on most platforms run on an auction model. You can set a maximum daily budget or bid for a target result.
Depending on your campaign goal, you may pay using:
- 👀 Cost-per-click (CPC)
- 👀 Cost per conversion
- 👀 Cost per 1000 impressions
- 👀 Cost per video view
9. Constantly Measure and Improve
To know which campaigns have been successful and what needs improvement, you need to track and analyze results.
Google Analytics helps identify trends in website engagement and where traffic comes from (organic, paid, direct, social, or email).
It’s also essential to know your conversion rate—how many users take an action such as filling in a form or purchasing a course.
By tracking what’s working, you can improve what isn’t and invest in more profitable channels.
Start Marketing Your Language School Today
Now that you know what it takes to execute an excellent marketing strategy, you can spend less time worrying about it and more time doing what you do best: teaching.
With the tips above, you’ll be on your way to increasing student enrollment and standing out from competitors.
Although successful marketing takes time and effort, it will be worth it as your language school grows.
At Teach ‘n Go, we offer school management software designed to streamline day-to-day operations of language schools worldwide.
