How to Advertise School Events

by Mara Roberts | Oct 2, 2020 | Blog Posts, Marketing for Schools, Open Events, strategy and branding | 0 comments

Schools have no shortage of events during the year, whether it be open events to drive enrolments or parent events, such as a school musical. Every event is a reflection on your school and both current parents and prospective parents will draw certain conclusions about your school based on your event’s success. The first part of a strong event is a great promotion. In this article, we will cover how to advertise school events so that each one packs a punch and is well attended.

How to advertise school events?

We’ve found that the sweet spot for open event promotions is 4-6 weeks prior to the date. If you provide too much time in advance, people may register but forget to attend or lose interest. If not enough notice is provided, they may not have enough time to plan their attendance.

I am also a huge fan of encouraging event registrations so that you can plan for the numbers well in advance and gauge how your school’s promotional efforts are doing as you go, making adjustments in the weeks leading up to the event. The registration form should be as short as possible and include fields, such as the attendee’s full name, phone number and email address so that you can send reminder emails and SMSes before the event.

Your registration page should be dedicated to one event at a time. If you have several open events a year, I would promote one at a time. Having too many date options leads to people postponing their decision.

We’ve drawn an example landing page for an open event that includes just enough for people to make a decision about your event and register their place. The page title should match the exact title in your advertising, and we like to use the same image for the header as what is used in your promotions so that people make the connection that they have landed at the right place.

Other details to include on the registration page are:

• What attendees can expect to experience at the event
• A short registration form
• A little about your College, if this is a promotional event such as an open morning
• Testimonials about your College or previous event attendees.

You will also want to create a unique thank you page so that you can track the success of your various digital promotions.

Event registrations should go straight into an enrolments database (check out SchoolCampaign) and registrants should get a confirmation email immediately after registration, as well as a reminder email and SMS before the event.

Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au