You need to be thinking ahead. You need to have direction. You need to identify your priorities. You need to demonstrate what you do to leadership. You need clarity. You need to be strategic. You need to take what’s in your head and document it. You need to say no and focus on what really matters.

You need a marketing plan.

Strategic School Marketing Framework

The ultimate school marketing toolbox filled with actionable, insightful and strategic templates to help you optimise the parent journey at your school and create a robus marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals.

Does this sound like you?

“I don’t have a marketing plan.”

I’m not sure I need one, but some tools to help me in my role would be great.

“Busy is an understatement.”

Honestly, who has the time to write a marketing plan on top of everything else?

“Strategy isn’t really my thing.”

I’m implementing tactics but I’ve never had to write an actual strategy.

Sound familiar?

Then the Strategic School Marketing Framework was designed with you in mind.

“After more than a decade of working in school marketing roles, I wanted to create something that would help me to be more organised and more strategic in my work. I created the Strategic School Marketing Framework to make my life easier - I hope it makes your life easier too.”

-Bianca Coleborn

Discover the tools in your toolkit…

  • Parent Experience Map

    Review the journey families take, from when they first start considering which school to send their children through to graduation and beyond.

  • Parent Avatar

    Understand your target market better with the Parent Avatar. You will gain a deeper understanding of the drivers of your ideal families.

  • Student Avatar

    We know parents are giving their child a real say in where they go to school. In this tool we identify what it is that our students love about our school.

  • SWOT Analysis

    The classic tool that has been around since the 1960s for a reason - it works. Take a moment to identify your school’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

  • Situational Analysis

    Identify where your school sits in this moment. Identify the assets and challenges as well as your enquiry and enrolment trends to help plan for the future.

  • Competitor Analysis

    Forget about writing pages of guff about your competitors. Use this simple and effective school competitor analysis to gain a quick and easy insight to your competition.

  • Attract

    Build out your advertising and promotions plan for the year. You’ll determine your objectives for each term, map out the spend, the media to purchase and evaluation.

  • Interact

    Review and enhance your website to ensure your prospective families are having a positive user experience when they start gathering information about your school.

  • Engage

    Optimise your social media, email marketing, Open Days and school tours with this tool. You’ll be developing a plan to move leads through your pipeline more efficiently.

  • Enrol

    Review your enrolment pipeline and understand where you can enhance it so you aren’t losing the leads you’ve worked so hard to get to a competitor.

  • Commence

    Ensure new starts have all the information they need so they feel informed and confident when they start at your school. No more lost lambs on the first day of school!

  • Connect

    Create a plan to help new families connect with the right people and technology when they start. You will be helping them to know they’ve made the right decision.

  • Communication

    Determine how to communicate more effectively with your community. When parents are disengaged, poor communication is often the problem.

  • Community

    Understand your school’s community better so that you can find ways to enhance it. Make your community so strong, families will never want to leave it!

  • Convenience

    What is your school doing that makes life more difficult for families? Don’t make it easy for them to walk away. People are busy - make life easier and you’ll have fans for life.

  • Endear

    Identify the nice touches that set your school apart from the rest. By doing so, you’ll be creating raving fans of your school who will tell the world about how wonderful it is.

  • Promote

    Identify the promoters at your school and then develop a plan to collect testimonials and Googe Reviews to provide social proof about the quality of your school.

  • Publicity

    Your PR Plan on a page! Identify potential story ideas for the year ahead and map them out so you have the time and space to generate maximum media coverage.

  • Strategic Priorities

    Condense the work you’ve done on previous worksheets into a one page plan identifying your key strategic priorities for each of the four phases in the parent journey.

  • Year Planner

    Map out your action plan for the each term based on the work you’ve done in the phase worksheets. This will become the elusive ‘marketing plan on a page’.

  • Goal Setting

    Take some time to identify up to five BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals) for the year ahead. This worksheet will help you to keep on track and celebrate the wins.

  • Evaluate

    Every great marketer takes the opportunity to evaluate the outcomes of their work. Use this simple but effective worksheet to evaluate your success and plan for the future.

  • PowerPoint Template

    Once you’ve done the hard yards, it’s time to present to your Leadership Team and/or College Council. Use this PowerPoint template to help you nail your presentation.

  • Word Document Template

    The framework was designed to avoid writing long winded Word documents, but if you simply must submit your plan in this format, there’s a template to help you.

How to use the framework to suit your needs:

Option 1

Complete the relevant templates to form your school’s marketing plan. Focus on 3-4 to begin with and go from there.

Option 2

Use the framework to map the customer journey at your school and identify ways to optimise the parent experience.

TESTIMONIAL

“Our recent strategic planning process resulted in my being tasked with updating our Marketing Plan. Although I had a number of options, I wanted to do it myself as I wanted to change up the format and have a lot of personal input to the content, but I needed a starting point and a method for building it.

Thank goodness for Bianca and her Strategic School Marketing Framework, which has given me an immediate push in the right direction. The Framework clearly identifies and explains the phases of the parent journey and then takes you through a consideration of the stages within these, including very useful templates.

Other than enabling me to get to grips very quickly with my task, the Framework has also given me some quick wins to improve our systems and processes and identified some other matters for further consideration. Combined with Bianca’s excellent personal support, for which I am very grateful, you have the perfect package to support the development of not just your marketing plan, but your entire marketing function. Highly recommended.”

Wayne Burman, Business Manager
Living Waters Lutheran College, WA

  • Save time and money

    An actionable plan will help you to prioritise and spend your time and money more strategically.

  • Say no more often

    It will be so much easier to say no to those random (ridiculous) requests that come our way .

  • It will actually get read

    The short and succinct style of presenting your plan means people will actually read it.

  • Showcase your strategic skills

    Like to have a seat at the Leadership table? Being able to demonstrate your strategic abilities will help.

  • Set, hit and exceed your KPIs

    If you want to be truly successful in your role, having an actionable plan is the way to do it.

  • Collaborate and learn

    It can get lonely in schools sometimes - you’ll have someone to learn from and bounce ideas off.

The Strategic School Marketing Framework:

Has done-for you templates that are intuitive, quick and easy to complete.

Will save you time by helping you to set priorities and stick to them.

Offers support every step of the way with video tutorials and guidance.

Lifetime access to the product and all future updates.

AUD$1,979 incl GST.

Listed price is for use by one school only per product. Educational sectors seeking to purchase the framework for a network of schools should complete the Contact form for a confidential discussion regarding group pricing.

A little hack to save your precious marketing budget…

Yes, you could absolutely allocate the cost of the Strategic School Marketing Framework to your marketing budget, but we all know that our budgets are never what we want them to be…

My tip is to advocate for this expense coming out of your school’s PD budget - there are more than 20 tutorial videos and you’ll be learning from an experienced industry expert, after all.

If you want more tips like this from someone who knows how to play the game, then sign up now for the framework!

Like to know more?

If you’re interested but have some questions, please complete the form and I’ll arrange a Zoom meeting to discuss the framework with you further and demonstrate how it works. Please include any specific questions that you’d like to discuss in the Message field.