Marketing in schools: a risky business

Laura Skinner, Head of Marketing at Sancton Wood School

Marketing is ultimately putting your work out into the world and waiting to see how it is received. Success is highly visible, but so too, are the failures. There isn’t a magical equation that paves a way to success in such a creative field with only parts that can be quantified. We use our knowledge, expertise and instinct to allocate budgets to the right channels and create campaigns we hope will land with our target audiences. We take risks.

Big Thinking

I’ll take a leap and suggest that most people, to varying degrees of frequency, have dealt with an inner dialogue; “Did I say too much? Should I have spoken up more? What if nobody supports the idea? What if it fails?” Strong support systems help to navigate this. The best working relationships I have had are those based on trust and mutual respect. It sounds obvious, but when you feel valued, you have the confidence to think big and have a safe space in which to play with bold ideas. They’ll get challenged, reined in and even rejected, but they will exist, and they can go on to develop into exciting initiatives, pieces of work and campaigns. This allows us to push forward to try new things. It could mean finding the channel that engages with a previously unreached audience, the new use of language that makes an impact with a message or even a different brand strategy that opens new opportunities.

Find your people. With the support of your trusted sounding board you can evaluate, what is the risk:reward ratio? How great is the impact of the risk? How likely is it to happen? Is the risk monetary or reputational? We can’t be afraid to test, to learn and improve. Apple and countless other examples were born from big thinking, taking risks and pushing boundaries — and they went on to make a buck or two.

Change

We know that businesses that aren’t conscious of change, and ready to adapt and evolve to stay relevant when needed, find themselves in troubled waters. Every business, every school, needs to consider the balance of continuing to do what they are doing versus the need for change. Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept draws from the idea that the hedgehog knows ‘one big thing’: they can curl up in a ball to protect themselves. It shows that if you have an understanding of what you can be the best at and execute it supremely well, consistently over a long period of time, then you can succeed. Many of our schools find themselves in this place: market leaders, working with the best in the business, delivering the very best results. It would be right for them to stay as they are, but it would be risky to not continuously evaluate this stance. Just ask HMV or Blockbuster. Marketing offers tools to examine risks and plot a path around them. A SWOT analysis allows us to contemplate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and consideration of the PEST analysis’ political, economic, social and technological factors ensures we are prepared for the impact they could have.

Daring to be Different

As marketeers it is our job to set our schools apart from the crowd. We promote points of difference, to allow us to stand out from our competitors. Many of our schools operate in highly academically focused markets, but they are so much more than that. It’s the ‘how they get there’ that makes them different. Independent schooling has come a long way from a monopoly on stiff collars and straight lines and the breadth of approaches to academic excellence in our own organisation shows that. With Generation Z now having families, how will changing social values affect impetus put solely on academics? The pace and extent to which we can talk about other factors that contribute to the success of a student will differ greatly from market to market.

One way of differentiating is to adopt a disruptive positioning strategy, firmly setting yourself apart from your competitors. My own school, Sancton Wood, is in Cambridge, a city synonymous with the highest academic achievement. It is flanked by traditional, heritage schools with longstanding reputations for achieving top grades. There is undoubtedly a market for this, their waiting lists show that, and yet Sancton Wood is ‘unashamedly pastoral’. A risky strategy?

Of course, this means we have to double down on proving this doesn’t mean that we aren’t academic, we are, but with the ethos that a happy child is a learning child. Part of our marketing strategy is to bring parents on our journey to show that a well-rounded child (one that is happy, fulfilled, socially conscious and has a love of learning that stretches beyond the silent recall of the examination process) is a picture of success as much as one with good grades.

There is a market for this, we’ve found it, we’ve grown it and what once was a very small school that a mother set up in 1976 as a safe and nurturing space for her multicultural family, now operates across three sites with nearly 400 students, taking 7th place in ‘The Sunday Times Parent Power’ list as proof that you can be both pastoral and academic.

Reputation

Schools cater to many people, all with different desires, expectations and pressure points. We make a very good attempt at it, but it would be unrealistic to expect that every single person could be 100% satisfied all the time. For all of our marketing efforts, word of mouth is still a significant source for many schools, and we have to do what we can to nurture it.

New technology has allowed negative opinion to spread at a faster rate than ever before, whether it be in the form of a disgruntled class WhatsApp group message that pushes a wider group off course, an unfavourable social media post or negative review. The more places you put yourself to be seen, the more vulnerable you are to this type of exposure. There is much to be gained, but strategies need to be in place to mitigate risks.

Our websites, social platforms, school newspapers and newsletters help to give us space and opportunity to tell the stories of all the wonderful things our schools do and support a strong and positive reputation.

There’s a lot of pressure on schools to have an exacting moral compass, and rightly so, we are playing a responsible role in the development of the next generation. This has to ring true in all of our messages, shared far and wide. We steer clear of political, even sporting favour, but there are issues that we will never shy away from.

I recently wrote an editorial piece, ‘Why schools should tackle Andrew Tate head on’. There are much more comfortable things to write about, but it was an important opportunity to show how it could be used as a relevant example to openly discuss (with boundaries) misogyny, gender-based violence, racism and homophobia. It encourages students to develop a critical lens and for us to understand why so many had been influenced by him.

Process and Data

A serious new risk to schools is cybercrime which is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and as marketeers we have access to many different forms of digital communication. Imagine the havoc that could be caused if somebody, pretending to be us, were able to mail our mailing lists, update our websites or post on our social media?

Data is precious to a marketeer, and we have to be careful with it. The story of an unfortunate intern bounces around my head every time I press send on a mass email. The simple mis-click of a button from what might have said ‘sales lead’ to ‘sales force’ meant that he sent sales tactics and pricing strategies to the customers instead of the sales team. It didn’t go down well. I hear he did eventually come out from under his desk.

We must have checking and approval strategies and access to the latest data and security training to ensure we minimise risks and keep all of our stakeholders safe.

There are risks in everything we do. Without taking them, we stay still and in an ever increasingly fast-paced and changing world, it’s not a safe place for organisations to be. With the right people, boundaries and considered strategies, creativity and flair can reign and schools can thrive with the support of marketing. n