Five vital metrics for marketing to schools

When marketing to schools, you'll find yourself presented with all manner of marketing metrics. The size of your email list, the number of clicks on your social media channels, impressions of your adverts, and so many more. 

How do you separate the vanity metrics from those that reveal the success of your digital marketing efforts? 

The first step is to identify those vanity metrics and stop looking at them. Your Facebook likes, Twitter followers and GIF interactions are not the most important numbers for you to focus on. 

Instead, you should be looking at three key metrics and the conversion rates between them. 

Metric One: website visitors

Your website is a vital part of your marketing machine. It's where you capture leads and is the platform for all of your inbound marketing efforts. The more visitors that you have, the more opportunities you have to engage them and capture their details. 

No matter how many visitors you are getting to your site, you can always find more. Social media marketing, search engine optimisation and partnerships with other websites are some of the most effective ways of increasing visitors. You can even augment this with paid solutions such as Google AdWords or social advertising. 

Getting people on your website is the attract stage of the inbound methodology. 

Metric Two: number of leads

How many leads does your website generate? Getting teachers to your website is important but, once they're there, you need to convert them into leads. 

The most effective way to do this is to create something that schools wil find genuinely useful and offer it up in exchange for some basic contact details.

Could you create a free scheme of work? A checklist for delivering a great assembly? A guide to improving the admissions process? Put these resources behind a landing page or lead flow and you will soon find that your website visitors are turning into leads. 

This process is the convert stage of the inbound methodology. 

Metric Three: number of customers

This is where your schools marketing strategy starts to generate income for your business. Once you have acquired your leads, you are in a position to market to them more preceisely. 

With their email address and some analysis of the pages they've viewed, you will be able to design fine-tuned marketing campaigns that resonate with different types of school customer - classroom teachers, NQTs, middle leaders, school business managers, head teachers and more. 

You have a range of tools available to you when trying to gain more customers. Three of the most effective are: 

• email marketing 
• custom audiences for Facebook Adverts
• marketing automation/lead nurturing

Turning leads into customers is the close stage of the inbound methodology. 

Metrics Four & Five: conversion rates

Your visits, leads and customers are your main metrics to focus on. Increase the number of visitors and your leads and customers will increase accordingly. This is because the final two marketing metrics are your conversion rates. Specifically - visits into leads, and leads into customers. 

Once you have determined your conversion rates, you now have three ways to improve your inbound marketing efforts: 

• increase the number of visits to your website
• improve your conversion of visits into leads
• improve your conversion of leads into customers

Fine tuning your website with a focus on lead generation will improve your visit:lead conversion rate. Better targeted email marketing, automation and sales processes will improve the lead:customer rate. 

What defines great conversion rates? The honest answer is that it depends on your specific business and niche. At ESM, we recommend aiming for an initial target of: 

• visitors to leads at 2%
• leads to customers at 4%

Don't be satisfied when you reach these conversion rates - keep improving and optimising your marketing efforts to gain more customers without having to drive more traffic. 

You should also keep in mind that different pages of your site will convert at different rates. A well optimised landing page, for example, should convert visitors to leads at approximately 20%. 

Discover even more marketing metrics when selling to schools

We've put together a free ebook that looks at marketing metrics focused on business growth. Download your 9-page document to learn about LTV, CAC and more.