This is a guest post by Madison Carr.

 

It’s one of the hot topics of our time: school choice. As states continue to pass legislation that expands a family’s education options, schools are facing more competition than ever before.

When competition increases, marketing efforts can stall out, and you might feel like you’re spinning your wheels. But before you hang your head in despair or try the newest viral trend to try and drum up some attention, you should first dig down to your roots: your brand.

If you harness the power of your brand, you’ll see two results: better perception and increased trust. And when it comes to upping your enrollment numbers, you need both of these things.

Let’s first lay a foundation for what we’ll get into. What is a brand? A brand is the feeling or promise people associate with your school. That might feel like a hard-to-grasp concept. A brand is not a tangible thing, so it can be challenging to see it accurately.

Your brand truly exists in the minds of your market. The summation of what your families, students, and community think about you is your brand. 

By no means does this mean you should cross your fingers and hope people think good things about your school! A brand strategy is a plan of action for how you can inform and shape the way people think about your school. Your brand identity is the visual language of your school that also informs people how they should think about you. In a landscape of heavy competition, this is a valuable way that you can start to stand apart from others.

Healthy Are The Roots

Before we even think about your school’s colors or mascot or photography, we need to begin with your strategy. When you see a beautiful tree with lush green leaves, without even having to check, you can be sure that its roots have spread far and are healthy. Alternatively, a tree that is sparse, with its leaves looking withered and droopy, undoubtedly has unhealthy roots that are failing to do their part.

A school that has trouble with its perception, enrollment, advertising efforts, etc. is like a tree with unhealthy roots. Before we can address each ailing branch, we need to look at its roots: the brand strategy.

Instead of jumping right to what a brand strategy is, let’s first look at what it is not.

A brand strategy is NOT your mission statement.

Don’t throw away your mission statement! It is part of a brand strategy. But it is not the all-in-all. Your mission statement should be a concise paragraph that describes your intended goal for the students in your school. This is helpful as a general direction-setting statement. It is a broad filter for identifying who would thrive within your school. But it is not a comprehensive strategy for your intended brand. It does not give directive action for your team, just a general target at which to aim.

A brand strategy is NOT your sales pitch.

You most likely have a script that you use when talking to prospective families and giving school tours. The content of your pitch (the numbers you highlight, the programs you brag on) is important. You should know the selling points of your school! But too often, the way in which a school talks about itself is not the best approach. You need to be sure that the points you’re emphasizing address the things prospective families are concerned about. You want to make sure they’re reinforcing your ideal perception. Those are the things covered in a brand strategy, so you can be confident your sales pitch is an effective part of your branding efforts.

A brand strategy is NOT your slogan.

Everyone loves a snappy slogan! And having one for your school can be a powerful part of your marketing and branding efforts. But a one-sentence blurb repeated over and over is not a comprehensive strategy. Because it is often synonymous with a school’s name, you may be tempted to put your slogan up on a wall and call it your brand. Instead, let your slogan be a starting point for evaluating your brand strategy. Are the words people say with frequency the words you want to be associated with? Does it capture the ideal spirit of your school?

What Makes A Healthy Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is the comprehensive plan that explains how you want to be perceived. The typical manifestation of your brand strategy is a lengthy document, outlining the research, ideas, and parameters of your plan and your goal. It has two key parts.

First is the target. You need to allow yourself and your decision-makers to dream a bit. What is it exactly that defines your school? Where do you see your school heading? When you work with a brand strategist, this is facilitated through workshops with decision-makers that uncover the vision and goal for how your school wants to be perceived. Oftentimes, it’s revealed that the dream is not the reality, and that leads to the second part.

Secondly, you have the action. It’s the engine that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. This is often called brand alignment. Once you know your goal, you can then evaluate all the branches of the tree and assess whether or not they are aligned with the goal.

Here’s an example of what that might look like. In your dreaming, target-setting stage, you realize that you want to be known as the “personal preparatory” academy. This is confirmed by concluding that the other schools in your market present as more premier and rigid, and you realize the spirit of your school is rooted in warmth and friendliness. So with your goal in mind, you start to look at the reality of how your school presents itself.

You might realize all the language on your website is very professional and stiff. It says the right information, but the tone is more like the other schools you don’t want to be like. This would be one of your plans of action! You’d need to define your brand voice, i.e. the tone in which your school speaks about itself. The right balance would need to be found because as a preparatory school, you can’t sound childish and frivolous, but you do want to sound approachable and friendly. So this would be an area in which you start to align reality to your dream.

Another area could be your visual identity. You realize that all your visual assets, from your logo to your colors to your marketing materials, feel better suited for an elite Ivy League school than a personal preparatory academy. At a glance, people would be more quick to assume you’re a boarding school than a place where students are given the freedom to discover their passions. This could be another branch of the tree that needs nurturing. You’d go through a rebranding process to align your visual identity to the target perception you’re aiming for.

What is the result of a healthy brand strategy?

Building a brand strategy for your school does not happen overnight! When you work with a strategist, there will be a few workshops and many hours of strategic thinking. And then, with your strategy in hand, you still have to work through the task of implementing the plan. So you might be wondering if all that effort is worth it in the end.

No matter the specific circumstances of your school, there are two universal values that come from a good brand strategy.

You can expect better perception in the end. In part, this comes from taking the time to understand how people currently view your school and then addressing the views that you don’t want. But it also comes from your team having clarity on what the internal perception should be. It’s common to have a room full of decision-makers who all have a different vision for the school in their heads. This is particularly relevant where there’s been a change of leadership. It then becomes very frustrating for the faculty and staff to not have clarity on how the school is presenting itself. They’ll hear from one person that the goal is to be personable and accessible. They’ll hear from another that the goal is to be prestigious and elite. 

A brand strategy helps first align the decision-makers. It then becomes a digestible plan of action that everyone on the team can buy into, resulting in unity from the top down.

The second value you can expect is an increase in trust. Prospective families are looking for security in their decision. Inconsistent branding and messaging undercuts that security, leading to more hesitancy. To put it simply, they respond best to a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of school. Consistency and unified presentation lead to a smoother sales funnel and a more confident buyer. You’ll find your marketing efforts have a higher rate of return when they are built on a solid brand strategy.

When is the time right?

There are many ways to determine whether or not it’s time to invest in your branding, but the first question to ask is quite simple. Do you have a strategy for your brand? If there is not a well-thought-out, comprehensive strategy behind your brand, you’ve found your starting point at the root of the tree. If you feel like you are lost in a sea of schools, then brand strategy can help shed light on the ways in which you can stand apart. If your marketing efforts are feeling stagnant, you should go back to the foundation and evaluate your brand. And if you want to improve the perception of your school and increase the trust from your community, start building a healthy brand strategy that your whole team can help reinforce.

 

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Author Bio

Madison Carr is the owner of Creative Chameleon Studio, a design agency helping schools with brand strategy and designs. She’s always had a passion for making things look better and work better. It’s a knack she funneled first into design and then into brand strategy. Over hundreds of hours and numerous projects, Madison has been elbow-deep in strategic thinking for many brands, small and large. Equipped with years of experience, she guides schools through brand strategy workshops, identity development, and collateral design.

WEBSITE: https://www.creativechameleonstudio.com/
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madisoncarr/