15 School Marketing Tactics in 30 Minutes or Less

Is there a time when a strategy shouldn’t be innovative? Yes: when you’re a busy principal charged with running a school marketing program in your spare time.

School Marketing Toolkit

To help schools in Westminster Public Schools recruit students, Springboard Communications was asked to create a toolkit that would provide easy marketing ideas for busy school leaders. A component of that school marketing toolkit was a list of tried-and-true marketing tactics they could complete in 30 minutes or less.

School Marketing 101

Are these marketing 101 tactics groundbreaking? No, and that’s exactly the point! These activities are meant to be easily understood by school staff who hold master’s degrees in education, not MBAs. And all can be easily implemented quickly, on a shoestring budget.

Check out 15 easy school marketing ideas below, and read the entire school marketing toolkit.

School Marketing Tactics

• Visit a school in your feeder pattern or a local preschool or daycare. Great times to visit include lunch time, pep rallies or assemblies, field days, holiday events, performances and sporting events.
• Email a feedback survey to your existing parents. Keep the survey brief to help ensure they’ll complete it.
• Call a family to share a highlight about their child, and ask them what you can do to make their child’s experience at school better.
• Attend a neighborhood association meeting and share recent school highlights.
• Invite families from your feeder pattern or local preschools and daycares to attend an event at  your school.
• Identify a local event where your teachers and students can volunteer. Be sure the volunteers wear school-branded t-shirts!
• Create a list of your “key communicators” — staff and parents who have a high degree of influence over others. Plan to send them a monthly update sharing school highlights.
• Walk your building and grounds, trying to imagine you’re seeing them for the first time. Create and prioritize a list of potential improvements.
• Call the school leaders in your feeder pattern or local preschools and daycares and ask for feedback about your school. Be sure to also share recent school highlights.
• Take copies of your school newsletter or brochure and drop them off at schools in your feeder pattern or local preschools and daycares.
• Post an announcement or upload a new photo to your school’s website.
• Post an update to your school’s Facebook page. Be sure to include an image!
• Make a list of community events in your school’s neighborhood, and prioritize those at which your school should have a presence — through volunteering, tabling and/or sponsorship.
• Collaborate with your teachers to create a calendar for displaying student work. Charge teachers to rotate displays on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis, depending upon your building size.
• Write a brief story about a school highlight and ask schools in your feeder pattern to include it in their newsletters.