The bad news is that the school year has sneaked by again. How time flies!

The good news is that it’s not too late to make an impact on your fall enrollment.

It’s only the middle of March, and while it’s likely true that the ideal time to launch your marketing efforts was a month ago, your marketing window is still wide open!

If you need help, or don’t have time, call Go Montessori…call your sister-in-law…call your parent committee…call someone, but do it soon! Then make a short list of priorities along with a timeline and estimated costs. The schools that utilize their budget in the most economical way will likely look at direct mail postcards, cleaning up their website, and having new brochures printed.

When done properly, these three projects will work together and help to boost your enrollment. First, send out a professionally designed and graphically appealing postcard to only local families with children in the home that match the ages of the children you enroll at the school. Once they receive your postcard, they typically will first visit your website, and then call for a tour or more information. After the school tour, you’ll send them home with your new brochure!

Of course there can be many more steps that mix into this short-form marketing plan, but these three items are among the basics that have the greatest impact.

If you need help, we’re here when you’re ready!

If Internet users are able to find your website easily when they use common search terms on Google, this means that your website has good SEO. If your site doesn’t appear toward the top of searches, then you may need help with your SEO. But that doesn’t mean that you should hire that SEO company that has been soliciting your business with non-stop emails and automated phone calls.

A large number of businesses in the SEO Industry are not well respected, and are known for using scare tactics, forceful sales techniques, and in the end, aren’t 100% sure about what they’re doing. Google and other search engines do not disclose how their algorithms and search results work, therefore an external company can never (honestly) guarantee results.

Many SEO companies talk about keywords, meta-data, and reciprocal links and will often use complicated language to confuse potential clients, as they make promises that they know they can’t keep. Many of these companies, without your knowledge, will use tactics that are all but banned by the major search engines, and will include link buying, cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, and seeding your site for spammers.

Search Engine Optimization is easy when you understand the basics and know what you’re doing. In a recent Forbes article posted online, Ken Krogue wrote: “The bottom line is that all external SEO efforts are counterfeit other than one: Writing, designing, recording, or videoing real and relevant content that benefits those who search.”

What this means is that, rather than paying a company to improve your search results, your first step should be examining your website content. Google and other search engines “read” your website, and then deliver your site to users who are searching for content that matches the content on your site. If you offer a Montessori program for children aged 2-5 in Springfield, the first paragraph on your homepage should spell this out. Rather, many schools write something like this instead:

“Welcome! Our wonderful school has a unique pre-primary program that is the perfect choice for families and children in our community.”

This is a nice sentence, but Google won’t be able to decipher what it is that you offer, and therefore your search results will suffer. Rather than the above sentence, it should be re-written to read something like this:

“ABC Montessori School is a private school located in Springfield, OH offering a unique and diverse Montessori preschool program for children 2 through 5 years old.”

Within this one sentence, you’ve mentioned the school name, the word “Montessori”, the city and state, and the words “private school”, “preschool”, “academic” as well as the ages of children. This sentence is SEO gold.

The other half of this equation is the coding (programming) of your website. Your code should be clean, modern and semantic, while avoiding the use of tables and antiquated HTML. This may not mean anything to you, as it’s on the technical side, but you should ask your website developer about this area.

Finally, many website development companies charge additional fees to perform SEO on your website. But we think this is akin to selling you a car without a steering wheel! At Go Montessori, we work on your SEO while we’re building your website and you never pay an extra penny for it. If we manage your website once it’s built, we also monitor search results through website traffic reports and continually work to improve those results.

As always, give us a call for a free, no-hassle, no-obligation consultation regarding your SEO and how it can be improved.

Are you, or do you have a friend, who is opening a new school and needs a website? From today until June 1, 2013, new schools can receive a 50% discount on our Semi-Custom website development.

What are Semi-Custom websites? Read about them here: http://www.gomontessori.com/services/semi-custom-websites/

This offer is only available to new schools, or those schools without a current website.

This new mobile site is a much friendlier version of our desktop website built for smaller screens such as those on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows based mobile phones. They are tremendously quick to load, easy to navigate, and built for readability.

If you are considering a mobile website for your school, please call us so we can tell you more about this service, or fill out our contact form for more information. Most sites can be converted to mobile in just a few days, and impact your budget far less than you might think!

We would like to thank the Montessori community for embracing our company and helping us reach this milestone. Over the past 10 years, we have worked with Montessori schools in just about every state in the country, as well as schools on four continents! In total, we have worked and consulted with well over 350 Montessori schools of all shapes and sizes. A big thank you to our wonderful and amazing staff and vendors who have been instrumental in our success!

We’re looking forward to seeing what the next ten years brings!

What’s the best time for marketing?
There is no doubt that the majority of Montessori schools would be best served by marketing their schools to coincide with the timing of their counter-part local school district re-enrollment period.

Most school districts throughout the country send home re-enrollment packets sometime after the start of the New Year, and usually before the end of March. Your first step in determining the timing of your marketing is to call the school district and ask when those packets will be sent home.

If the date is February 1, for example, you might consider starting your big push for marketing a few weeks before that. This way, you’re marketing is still fresh in the minds of families who are beginning to think about enrollment for the fall. If you wait too long, that family may make up their minds before they ever see your marketing. Even though they could easily reverse their decision, sending those forms back in creates a psychological barrier to even considering another option.

Know your audience
Parents usually fall into three categories when it comes to school enrollment: 1) parents who look for enrollment options during the school district re-enrollment period, as mentioned above; 2) parents who are new to enrolling their children in school, and 3) parents who are seeking a mid-year enrollment as their child is coming of a certain age criteria will usually begin thinking about this during the challenging marketing months of November and December. The largest group is the first group, and therefore, if you’re only going to spend money once a year on marketing, this is the best group to try to reach from January through March or April.

There are two other small groups to consider, or at least be aware of. The first are parents who wait until a week or so before school starts (the real procrastinators) to make any decisions. The other is a group of parents who tends to plan a year out. Meaning, in the fall of 2013, they will be thinking about school in the fall of 2014. These tend to be parents who live in areas where many affluent schools have long wait lists.

Position your school
There is nearly an unlimited number of ways that you can market your school through advertising and public relations, both on and offline. However, in our experience, nothing recruits new families as well as sending a postcard mailer to targeted households in your community. This process is simpler and less expensive than it sounds and Go Montessori can help you with any or all of the tasks involved.

Before you begin getting the attention of families in your community, make sure that your website is up-to-date, easy to navigate, and contains the type of information that parents are looking for as they research schools for their children. This will be the first place that parents look for information as they do their research. NOTHING is more important in your overall marketing effort, as keeping your website professional and with good content.

Finally, provide your front-line staff with customer service training in terms of handling new phone calls, email inquiries and walk-ins. First impressions are incredibly important to new families searching for a place where their children are going to spend a great deal of time. Be sure that the person answering the phone has a bullet list of the school highlights at their ready, and/or have email templates written in advance as a way to respond to email and website inquiries. A person on the phone that sounds frazzled, unorganized, or even rude, can cost the school tens of thousands of dollars over the lifetime enrollment of a new student, and erase all of your marketing efforts in a matter of seconds.

To summarize, January through April is likely the best time that you can market your school to families in your area if you’re on a limited budget. If you put marketing off until summer, you are likely hurting your enrollment potential. Having spent the last 10 years helping over 350 schools with marketing, we have found that nothing works better than direct mail combined with a clean and easy to navigate website. Put these things in place if you haven’t already, and call Go Montessori if you need any help!