Today, too many schools are under pressure to compete for pupils. With more and more schools opening and expanding daily, there is a need to market your school if you truly aspire for a significant growth. Here are some simple ideas for promoting your school business for free in your local area to attract the right people.

1. Your School’s website is the First Contact

Whether you’re targeting local or global students, it is important to have an attractive and easy-to-navigate website. If you are unsure about the information to publish on your website, kindly read this article: “Tips to Grow your School’s Revenue”

2. Make blogging a high priority

Integrating a blog to your website and constantly updating it with interesting articles will help increase your website’s visibility in search engines (like Google). Understand the interests of your target audience (in this case, parents) and create content around these areas of interests, say, topics on Learning Styles. While creating these blog contents be sure to use relevant keywords and phrases in your blog posts. This will help increase your websites Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Click here for information on how to improve your SEO.

There are many free blogging platforms available on the internet to choose from. I would recommend Word Press as it has a highly interactive graphical user interface.

3. List your business on local directories

Getting parents to find out where you are is crucial, and one of the ways businesses can be found online is by adding them to top online business directories. Search for business directories in your country and list your school. With that, your target audience can easily locate your business while researching online. Before you do this make sure you have a very informative and interactive website. If your website looks tacky and uncoordinated, visitors will leave even faster than they came. Click Here to list your school/business.

4. Be Active on Social Media

There are over 1 billion people in social networks like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. You can create a Facebook Page for your school and boost your posts. Posts on your page can be boosted for as little as $5 with a reach of thousands of Facebook users. You can even create promos and quizzes to keep the page alive. Join and participate in groups and advertise your business for free. It’s important to know who your target audience is, as this is one of the most popular ways to get noticed.

5.  YouTube Videos

There are over 1 billion unique users who visit YouTube each month. It is definitely a good platform to advertise your school for free while entertaining and informing YouTube users. One way is to make videos of school events like end-of-year parties, inter-house sports competition, spelling contests, etc. Upload these contents on YouTube and remember to include your schools details in the video description.

6.  Be Technology Friendly

Parents of today are very busy people, juggling a lot of activities all at once. A busy parent may not have the time to visit the child’s school to speak with the teacher or school administrator concerning some issues with their child’s participation in academic work. However, if school owners adopt a school information system, like Nortify, that has a messaging platform, then parents, teachers and the whole school community can easily collaborate and decide on issues.

Have you used other tips that worked for you? Kindly share in the comments section.

Saint Okpogode