Getting set up for digital marketing for trade schools

Introduction

If you're in the trade school business, digital marketing is imperative for promoting your programs; your prospective students are always online and you need to be able to reach them! It's one of the fastest-growing areas in the industry. If you are an educator looking for ways to improve your trade school's brand awareness, it's essential that you understand what digital marketing is—and how it can help you grow your business. So, let's dive into this topic. 

‍

Different types of digital marketing that can help trade school

Social Media Marketing 

Your students are frequently on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Setting up pages on each of these allows you to build a strong brand image for your school, can help attract more students, and give you an edge over competitors who aren't using social media effectively.

Here’s one of our partnered school’s Facebook accounts:

With social media, you can:

• Share your contact information
• Share information about your upcoming classes 
• Post documentation of past or current classes. Many schools post pictures of graduating classes; that shows to future students that you've successfully worked with many students
• Respond to student messages. A considerable number of students use social media to inquire about classes.

Some tips:

• It can feel like you need a Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok page all at the same time so you can engage students. However, it's better to start with just one so you can get the hang of things. Too many times we see schools who have given up on some of their pages because they find it overwhelming to manage several platforms at once while also running their school
• It's better to have 1 post a week than 5 posts in a week and then none for the rest of the month. Consistency is better than volume!

Email Marketing

As much as this method is a tale as old as time, this is still one of the most effective ways to reach a wide range of potential students. 

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing in which schools use email to send promotional messages, advertisements, and other marketing content to students or potential students. You can use it to increase revenue, drive leads, promote classes, improve customer relations and loyalty, or build brand awareness. 

Pay-per-click, or PPC

According to HubSpot, one of the best customer relationship management (CRM) tools, “Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of advertising that allows you to pay a fee to have your website on the search engine result page (SERP) when someone types in specific keywords or phrases to the search engine. The SERP will display the ads you create to direct visitors to your site, and the fee you pay is based on whether people click your ad.”

Here's an example:

See how the top two websites have the word “Ad” on the left side? That’s because they're using Google Adwords to promote their school. 

The goal is that when potential students search about courses your school offers, your website is on the top. PPC is one way to achieve this. Google Adwords is one of the best PPC tools, but it can be costly. You have to be careful as this doesn’t necessarily mean that students will sign up right away; it should be used to complement other inbound marketing strategies such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

It is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in a search engine’s organic (unpaid) results.

Search engines use complex algorithms to determine which websites appear at the top of the results page, and SEO is a way to manipulate these algorithms. Many factors can affect your ranking, including the keywords you use, how often users click on your link, and how many other websites link to yours.

High rankings on Google searches ensure new students find you first when searching for programs like yours online. The better you rank, the better chance people will click through from search results pages which means more interested prospects coming through those doors each day. 

Conclusion

We can easily conclude that digital marketing is a great way to promote your trade school. It can help you reach a larger audience than traditional print and television ads, which means you'll be able to attract more potential students even at a lower cost. But this requires a lot of time and effort to research how which one would be the best marketing strategy for your school. 

Here’s a great tool that can aid you in generating more traffic to your website and increasing student enrollment without the hassle of doing it yourself.

‍