Marketing is crucial to the success of your school, whether it’s vision and values refinement, school marketing strategy development or parent research.

The benefits of having a solid marketing budget in place to back your marketing activities and strategy are significant, particularly if you’re serious about attracting and retaining families and boosting revenue for your school. 

So how can you convince your bursar to protect your marketing budget, particularly during such turbulent times?

Follow our top 3 tips that’s how… 

Tip 1 – Lead with benefits

First and foremost, your school marketing efforts drive positive and profitable outcomes for your school, such as:

• Attracting and retaining families
• Positively influencing your school’s reputation
• Giving your school that all-important competitive edge
• Boosting revenue (magic words for your bursar)

During any conversations, focus on the benefits and provide tangible outcomes.

Tip 2 – Focus on your goals

When it comes to budget, there’s often a mentality of ‘use it when we need it’ that can lead to expensive ad-hoc decisions.

Highlight to your bursar the importance of maintaining a steady marketing budget. Having a defined budget in place means you’ll be able to forward plan, make informed decisions and spend wisely, allocating your budget to exactly the right areas – no ad-hoc spending or knee-jerk decisions required. 

Tip 3 – Let the results speak for themselves

No matter which aspect of your marketing efforts you want to justify, it’s essential to link spending with hard facts.

Transparency goes a long way here – how have your marketing efforts positively impacted the school? What are the results you’ve driven? Go granular. 

Whether it’s increased visitor numbers for open days, an uptick in enrolments, greater engagement on social media, or more traffic to your school website, data is your friend. Use it to evidence the impact you and your marketing budget are having on your school.

They can’t argue with the cold, hard facts.

There you have it. Now go make your case to keep your school marketing budget.

You can do it!

Wondering where’s best to spend your budget?

We can help. The Stickman Consultancy support UK and international school leaders, bursars and marketing & admissions folks to boost revenue with strategic, simple and savvy pupil recruitment and retention services.  

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