How to Build a Marketing Plan That Doesn’t Overwhelm Your Small Team

You often hear that having a marketing plan is key for success. It’s true, and it comes up in nearly all of our conversations with schools. The other thing we often mention, though, is that it’s vital to build the right marketing plan for your school.

Many independent schools don’t have robust marketing departments. Oftentimes, they have one person—sometimes two—juggling email newsletters, social media, website updates, and so much more.

Building a comprehensive marketing strategy is often a large task that a small team never completes. But even more than that, building a large, comprehensive marketing plan for a small team can be counterproductive and even unhelpful.

The truth is: the best plan is the one you’ll actually use.

Think About Scale and What’s Realistic

A 50-page marketing strategy may be exactly right for your school. Perhaps it’s not.

Whatever you create—or ask a group like 38 House to create—should be practical, helpful, and realistic. 

For some schools, we develop a “marketing outline” rather than a marketing plan. A marketing outline is a lightweight structured road map that guides marketing efforts. It’s designed for smaller teams with fewer resources. In every case, we study a school’s needs and develop the right plan for them.

Regardless of whether you’re developing a marketing plan or marketing outline, there are some key pillars that must be included.

Five Pillars of Marketing Outline or Marketing Plan

1. Core Messaging and Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

What does your school do better than anyone else in your area? You have to be able to define your USP. Building from that core USP, what language do you want to use to communicate and discuss your values, mission, and what sets you apart? Once you’ve identified and clearly defined those items, you need to tailor the messages to specific audiences.

2. Define Your Audiences

Who are you trying to reach? Maybe it’s prospective families with children of a certain age. Maybe it’s targeting your existing constituents to increase fundraising efforts. As part of your plan, you should define 3-5 key target audiences, including messaging strategies that will connect with them.

3. Reach Your Audiences

Once you’ve defined your target audiences, you’ll determine how to reach them. Be specific here. If you’re targeting prospective students, which social media platform will you use? What type of content? Content length? All of these details will inform your content strategy.

Word of warning: Schools are often additive and they too rarely stop initiatives that aren’t working. For instance, it’s not uncommon for us to see a school that hasn’t posted to one of their social media accounts in months. It’s better to do fewer things, and do them well. Don’t overcommit on this stage of the plan—you risk setting yourself up for failure.

4. Content Strategy

You don’t need to fill a spreadsheet and create a massive content calendar. Instead, create a content roadmap that includes seasonal themes, important points in the year (admission season, events, big fundraising points, etc.), and also define the topics you want to cover in order to engage your target audiences. Over time, you should revisit this roadmap and compare your published content against it. Have you been posting too much about athletics? Not enough academic content? Review and adjust!

Also, ensure that your content lives at least nine lives. Focus on getting more mileage from what you’re already producing.

5. Set Goals

Set a handful of specific goals. Clear targets help you measure success and make adjustments. These goals are key for determining what’s working, what’s not working, allocating resources, and more. Read more about the importance of goal setting in our article linked here.

Your marketing outline may be as simple as creating those five main pillars. The beauty is that once those five pillars are created, updating and revising the plan in future years is a relatively simple task. You’ll never start from square one again. If you ever want to expand your outline into more of a robust plan, you can add sections for paid marketing campaigns, a comprehensive content calendar, and more.

It can be helpful to have an outside eye come to your school and help develop your marketing plan or marketing outline. If you’d like to explore that possibility, or simply just brainstorm about independent school marketing, send us an email at info@38house.com.