Essential Checklist: How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit for Schools

Over the past decade, enrollment marketing has evolved and weathered many challenges when effectively marketing international schools and attracting students. With the exponential growth in the number of schools coupled with the decrease in expat family mobility, investing in a robust digital marketing strategy is no longer optional—it's a necessity. A comprehensive digital marketing audit is a powerful tool that can give your school a competitive edge.

Not only will a digital marketing audit empower you as a school marketing, communication or admissions professional to make data-driven decisions when creating your marketing strategy, but it will also help you create and communicate that analysis to your leadership team (your Head of School, your board, and other senior leadership). 

By offering pragmatic insights into the competitive landscape, you will be informed and inspired to create momentum with a digital marketing strategy that communicates your school’s unique DNA (culture) as well as ensure you have a competitive advantage in your region.

1. Executive Summary: Overview and Key Findings

The executive summary serves as an introduction to the audit, providing an overview of its purpose, scope, and goals. It sets the stage for what follows and ensures all stakeholders understand the objectives of the audit. Additionally, the executive summary should highlight the key findings and recommendations derived from the analysis. This section provides a snapshot of the audit's outcomes and paves the way for more in-depth insights to follow.

2. School Profile: Know Yourself

Before delving into your competitors' strategies, it's crucial to have a solid understanding of your school's unique identity, your culture, and your brand’s DNA. This section outlines background information about your school, including its history, values, and mission. Define your target audience and customer segments, understanding the specific demographics and interests of your prospective students and parents. Moreover, articulate your school's unique selling proposition (USP)—what sets you apart from other schools? What makes your school different? Understanding your own strengths and values is the foundation upon which your marketing strategy will be built.

3. Competitor Analysis: Know Your Rivals

A thorough competitor analysis is at the heart of any effective digital marketing audit. Identify your main competitors and explore their online presence, including their websites, organic position in a Google search, social media profiles, and advertising campaigns. 

Conduct in-depth competitive research by specifically paying attention to their strategies, tactics, messaging, and overall online positioning. By understanding what your competitors are doing well and where they might be falling short, you can adapt your own marketing efforts and identify unique opportunities for differentiation.

4. Website Analysis: The Digital Face of Your School’s Culture and Brand

Your school's website is the cornerstone of your digital presence. Assess its design, user experience, and functionality to ensure it aligns with your branding and meets the needs of your target audience. Evaluate its mobile-friendliness; over 54%* of all global website traffic comes from mobile phones*. That percentage jumps to 65%** for Asia.

Analyze the quality and relevance of your website's content, ensuring it effectively communicates your school's values, courses, and achievements. Your website is the primary touchpoint for potential students and parents, so making a positive first impression is crucial.

In fact, the 2022 Private School MarCom Survey Report by InspirED School Marketers, respondents indicated that the school’s website was the most effective digital marketing effort. 

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Boosting Your School Website’s Visibility

SEO is essential for ensuring your school website is discoverable in search engine results. With Google’s algorithms becoming increasingly sophisticated and the worldwide disruption of the AI revolution, SEO is much more complex than it was just a few years ago. It’s all about content, which we’ll discuss more in a later section.

Your digital market audit must include an evaluation of your organic search visibility and rankings to gain an understanding of how well your school is positioned against its competitors for relevant, high-value short and long-tail keywords. Assess on-page SEO factors like meta tags, keyword usage, and critical errors such as images that are too big or missing alt text, http to https linking errors, and redirect or 404-page errors.

Next, take a look at off-page factors like backlinks and online mentions. Improving your SEO ensures your school ranks higher in search results, increasing the likelihood of attracting organic traffic.

6. Paid Advertising: Reaching the Right Audience

Paid advertising, such as Google Ads, Bing or Baidu ads and social media ads, can significantly boost your school's visibility and reach. Analyze the performance of your paid advertising campaigns, including targeting, messaging, creatives, spend, and engagement rate. Compare your ad performance with that of your competitors to identify areas of improvement and fine-tune your advertising strategy. Effective paid advertising allows you to connect with your target audience at the right time and place, increasing the chances of conversion.

7. Social Media Presence: Engaging Your Community

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging with your current community as well as offering glimpses into student life and school culture for prospective students, parents, and faculty.

Evaluate your school's social media profiles across various platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Assess your social media content strategy, engagement metrics, and follower growth. Understanding how well your school connects with its community can enhance your social media efforts and build a strong online presence.

8. Content Marketing: Showcasing Your School’s Unique Culture

Content marketing serves many purposes, including storytelling to demonstrate your culture and school experience and for SEO purposes to improve your website’s ranking in search.

Whether it’s thought-leadership content that will bolster your school’s authority and reputation amongst peers and the education industry globally, or it highlights the unique experiences and exceptional learning opportunities for students, content marketing is critical to the success of your digital marketing strategy.

Your audit must include an analysis of your content marketing efforts, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. Assess your content's quality, relevance, and engagement metrics to understand its impact. Content marketing establishes your school as a thought leader in the industry, enhancing your credibility and attracting students seeking reliable educational institutions.

9. Email Marketing: Nurturing Relationships

Often schools think of email marketing as their weekly parent newsletter. While that is an essential component of your MarCom plan, it is vital to expand your definition of email marketing to include nurturing relationships with prospective students, parents, and alumni. 

Analyze your email marketing campaigns, including content, design, and deliverability. Assess the engagement metrics of your emails to gauge their effectiveness. Email marketing effectively keeps your audience informed and engaged, fostering a sense of community and loyalty.

10. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Improving Conversions

Conversion rate optimization is all about improving the user experience and optimizing your website's performance to increase conversions. Analyze your website's conversion funnels and key performance indicators (KPIs). Evaluate the effectiveness of your landing pages, calls-to-action, and other conversion optimization techniques. By optimizing your conversion process, you can increase the number of inquiries and applications from potential students.

11. Analytics and Reporting: Measuring Success

Without thorough data tracking and analytics evaluation, no digital marketing audit is complete. Assess the company's data tracking setup and the analysis of key metrics and performance indicators. Ensure that your school has access to actionable insights and reporting tools to monitor progress and performance. You may want to consider a digital marketing dashboard to aggregate your analytics into one tool that allows you to monitor performance in real time and create reports for key stakeholders.

Regularly measuring and analyzing data is crucial for refining your marketing strategies and ensuring continuous improvement.

12. Recommendations and Action Plan: Opportunities to Differentiate

After analyzing the data and gathering insights, it's time to put it all together into actionable recommendations and outline the opportunities your school has to differentiate itself from competitors. Summarize the main findings from the audit, highlighting the most significant opportunities for improvement. Provide a clear and detailed action plan with timelines and responsibilities, outlining steps your school can take to enhance its digital marketing efforts. The action plan serves as a roadmap for creating momentum and achieving enrollment and other marketing goals.

A competitive digital marketing audit is a powerful tool for schools seeking to strengthen their online presence and outperform their competitors. By understanding your school's strengths and weaknesses, evaluating your competitors, and implementing actionable recommendations, you can gain a competitive advantage in the digital landscape and fuel the momentum needed to attract students and thrive in the competitive education market. 

Ready to gain a competitive edge? Contact us today to schedule a consultation and discover how our competitive digital marketing audit can empower your school's success. Together, we'll fuel the momentum needed for your school to shine in the digital era.

*Source: HubSpot 2022
**Source: Statista 2022