Marketing Leadership for Healthy Enrollment
Whether your enrollment is up, down, or flat, marketing plays a key role in the long-term health of your school. But knowing where to invest can be challenging. There are lots of possibilities for investing your limited time and budget; how do you know what to focus on? And how do you know if your marketing investment is working?
It’s not uncommon for school marketing teams to struggle with these questions. Knowing where and how to invest your limited resources can be challenging. At North Star Marketing, we provide marketing leadership that helps schools prioritize and implement marketing initiatives that move the needle on enrollment health.
How we can help
Marketing Leadership
We’ll push you to focus on priorities, not just projects.
Proven Process
We aren’t practicing on your school. Our solutions are proven and effective.
Measurable Results
Our teams will align around the goals and metrics that matter.
Strategic Connections
Your team will have more opportunities to tell your story to a qualified audience.
Our Methodology
Stick around for just a little while and you’re sure to hear us talk about Age-and-Stage™ strategies, aligning messaging to the Family Journey, and establishing priorities before projects. But what does all of that mean? And why is this methodology so important for your next marketing campaign or website refresh with North Star?
The Family Journey
As families navigate education options, they move through a deliberate series of steps. They start with the “Awareness” phase, in which they identify which schools they want to explore. In the “Consideration” phase, they narrow their options and do their homework. In the “Decision” phase, they decide where to apply and enroll. They then move into the “Evaluation” phase, in which they determine if they’ve made the right decision. They share their experience, whether positive or negative, in the “Advocacy” phase. We call this process The Family Journey.
Unlike traditional marketing funnels that are organized from top to bottom, we orient the Family Journey from the bottom up. There is nothing “gravity fed” about this process; it requires effort from the family and the school to make progress together up this path.
When you engage with North Star Marketing, our team of school marketing experts will help you align your strategies to the Family Journey. When combined with Age-and-Stage ™ thinking, it’s a powerful model that will revolutionize how your team approaches enrollment marketing.
Age-and-Stage™
Preschool. Kindergarten. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. While your school might not have all of these academic divisions or might use different terminology for specific segments, you understand their implications for teaching and programming. But have you thought about how they impact your marketing strategy?
These Age-and-Stage™ divisions influence how parents search for and evaluate private school options. After all, the parent of a first grader is going to be looking for something different than the parent of a ninth grader. And while this might seem like a simple concept, implementing Age-and-Stage™ strategies across your channels can feel overwhelming for teams who are already stretched thin by time and resources.
When you engage with North Star, we’ll help you establish priorities before projects so you’re focusing your resources in the areas that will produce the best results. Using our healthy enrollment assessment, you’ll learn how to address short-term gaps and deploy long-term promotional strategies to achieve your enrollment goals for each Age-and-Stage™.
