9 Actionable Tips for Effective Language School Marketing

Whether you’ve just started a language school or want to increase admissions to an existing one, effective marketing strategies are paramount for achieving success. 

To outsmart your competitors, your marketing strategies have to show and tell potential customers why your language school is the best choice for them.

However, to develop an effective language school marketing strategy, you’ll need to invest time and money—both valuable resources you can’t afford to waste.

If you don’t know where to begin, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we outline everything you need to know about marketing language schools. This includes: 

📚 Why a marketing plan is so important for your teaching business.

📚 Some of the results you can enjoy from a successful marketing strategy. 

📚 10 actionable tips to help you get started.

Firstly, What Is a Marketing Strategy? 

A marketing strategy outlines a business's plan for reaching potential consumers and converting them into customers. 

It should also contain your language school’s value proposition. 

This refers to the unique value that your language school promises to deliver to prospective students or parents should they choose to enroll in your courses. 

A marketing strategy should also outline: 

📝 Your language school’s marketing goals.

📝 A timeline of when key tasks should be completed and goals must be met.

📝 Which metrics you will use to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

Why Is Language School Marketing Essential for My Business? 

A marketing strategy is essential for setting the direction of your school’s marketing-related activities and also for your business as a whole.

A marketing strategy helps you to:  

✅ Stay connected to your current or former students and parents. 

✅ Reach more potential students or customers.

✅ Develop the best products or services for your customer base. 

✅ Determine how you will inform your target market about products or services.

Without a defined strategy, you won't know who your language school’s customers are, how to reach them, or what you want your marketing channels to achieve. 

If you don’t believe us, take a look at the numbers. Having a defined marketing strategy makes you 313% more likely to be successful than those who don't.

9 Tips for Marketing Your Language School 

Now that you have a better idea of what a marketing strategy is and how it can benefit your school, let’s take a look at some tips to get you started. 

1. Determine Your Marketing Goals

Before you can begin marketing your language school, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. 

One way to do this is to brainstorm ideas and marketing goals with your colleagues and to present this information in a table or graph.

Some of these goals may include:

📈 Increasing student enrollments. 

👀 Boosting your language school’s brand awareness. 

🗣 Improving communication with parents.

Once you know what your marketing goals are, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about which channels you will use to achieve them. 

This will also allow you to create marketing content that is best suited to the channels you use and that will keep your target audience engaged.

2. Prioritize Your Marketing Goals 

Once you’ve identified your language school’s marketing goals, you need to prioritize them. 

Too many new businesses try to do too much too quickly. Not only does this get expensive, but it’s also difficult to maintain multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously. 

You may decide that the most important goal is to redesign your website. 

Once you’ve got this right, you could move on to improving your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to drive traffic to your school’s website. 

By prioritizing your marketing goals, you’ll ensure that you complete each task, stay on track with the timelines you’ve set, and use your resources more efficiently. 

3. Choose the Right Marketing Channels 

Marketing channels are the avenues and methods you use to reach potential customers. Some of the most common examples include:

• Direct mail.

• Online banner ads.

• Newsletters.

• Telemarketing or telephone sales.

• Direct sales teams or sales reps.

Many businesses focus on inbound marketing channels when they first get started. 

These are marketing efforts that focus on attracting leads and customers via online content like blogs, social media campaigns, and SEO. 

Inbound marketing tries to make it easier for customers—who are already actively looking for goods or services via the internet—to find what a company offers.

Whether your language school is well-established or just starting out, inbound marketing has proven to be 10x more effective than outbound for increasing:

📈 Website Traffic.

📈 Sales.

📈 Lead Generation.

📈Customer Loyalty.

No matter which marketing channels you choose, you must always ensure that they align with your marketing goals.  

Most importantly, the marketing channels you use must be relevant to the students or families you hope to attract to your language courses. 

4. Make Sure Your Website Is up to Scratch 

When you start marketing your teaching business, a good place to start is creating or redesigning your school’s existing website. 

It takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of your website. That’s 0.05 seconds. Although quality content matters, first impressions are 94% design-related. 

Studies of user behavior have found that visual appeal and website navigation have the biggest influence on people’s first impressions of your brand.

The good news is that you don’t need a web developer to create a website for your language school anymore. 

For a fraction of the cost, you can make a perfectly good website using sites such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, BigCommerce, and Webnode.

Here are some of the basic things your website should contain:

💻 Calls to action: By prompting users to “Sign up” or “Try it for free,” you increase conversions and make it easy for potential customers to access your product or service. 

💻 Up-to-date contact information: For potential clients to get in touch with you, you must ensure that your contact details are updated and accessible. Otherwise, you risk creating a bad first impression or losing a potential customer. 

💻 Social proof: Testimonials are a powerful indicator of trust. When people see proof from existing students or parents about how your school benefited them, they will believe it. 

💻 Easy navigation: This can mean the difference between a website conversion and people clicking away. Give visitors a clear path to the pages they need.

💻 A user-friendly application or inquiry form: If this is one of the primary ways a potential customer can contact you to learn more about your language school, you need to ensure that these forms are easy to find and complete. 

Remember, Your Website Must Be Mobile-Friendly 

In 2021, approximately 54.4% of global web traffic came from people using their phones. 

This means it's essential for language schools to ensure that their websites are optimized and accessible for mobile phones. 

If a potential customer visits your website on their phones and it isn’t easy for them to navigate, you risk losing an enrollment or lead for your business. 

5. Focus On Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

By increasing the amount of traffic to your website, SEO is a great way to improve your language school’s visibility online. 

As part of a marketing strategy, SEO will consider: 

💭 How search engines work.

💭 Popular terms or keywords that are typed into search engines.

💭 Which search engines your target audience prefers. 

With a carefully planned SEO strategy, your language school’s website will have a better chance of ranking higher on the search engine results page (SERP). 

The higher you rank on the SERP, the more likely it is that people will be able to find your website when they search for specific keywords.

Not only does this mean more people will be able to visit your website, but it also increases the chances of a potential customer finding your language course. 

Before you can get started with an SEO strategy, there are a few key factors that you need to consider first. Let’s take a closer look at some of them. 

Keyword Analysis

Certain words have the power to control your rankings online. Keywords are single words or phrases that people frequently use to find what they are looking for. 

To find keywords to improve your website’s ranking in the SERPs, you first need to research which ones are relevant to your language school. 

After you’ve found keywords that match what your target audience is searching for, you’ll need to strategically place them into your website’s content. 

Content Creation

Not only is website content creation a way to communicate with potential customers, but it also gives you an opportunity to add keywords to your copy so that it ranks higher in the SERPs.

Some of the content you can create for your website includes:

• Blogs

• Webpage text

• Infographics

• Videos

• Newsletters

Once your content is taken care of, you can use cost-effective SEO tools like Keyword Hero, MozCast, or Google Keyword Planner to find relevant terms to add to your website’s copy. 

There are also paid tools like Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, Clearscope, and Frase that suggest how to use keywords in your website’s copy, as well as track how your pages are performing online. 

6. Create Email Marketing Campaigns

Another great way to market your language school is to create email marketing campaigns. 

This is a great way to reach multiple potential customers at once and it also allows you to quickly provide valuable content and relevant offers to subscribers. 

Research shows that 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted via email, which is good news for your language school. 

You can use email marketing in your language school to:

• Welcome new students or families.

• Follow up with leads who enquired on the website.

• Promote school events. 

• Stay in contact with parents regarding payments, deadlines, and exam dates.

Email marketing is also an effective way to increase sales and build your brand image. 

For example, you can share exclusive deals for online classes or popular language courses with subscribers and direct them straight to your bookings or contact page. 

You could also create another campaign that targets parents that have enquired on your website to encourage them to contact you directly. 

Email marketing is a great way to collect detailed information about your customers. 

Based on their habits and preferences, you can segment parents and students into different categories to receive personalized content and offers. 

One of the best ways to manage your email campaigns is with a school management app like Teach ‘n Go. 

Not only do we provide professional-looking email templates, but we also make it easier than ever to send multiple emails to teachers, parents, and students. 

To learn more about our group messaging features, visit our website.

7. Build a Social Media Presence 

Many teaching businesses believe that there isn’t a place for them on social media. 

Think about the fact that there are currently over 4.2 billion active social media users across the world.

If your language school doesn’t focus on building a social media presence, it will miss out on a fast and cost-effective way to reach a massive audience. 

For those who don’t know, social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. 

Including social networking elements in a marketing campaign has proven to: 

💪 Help businesses build better relationships with their customers. 

😎 Improve brand awareness. 

🔎 Reach new potential customers. 

It’s important to note that building an online presence goes beyond merely creating social media accounts. 

For social media marketing to be effective for your language school, you’ll also need to create personalized content for your target audience. 

Before you begin, make sure that you do some research to hone in on which platforms your audience uses most so that you can meet them where they are. 

You can gather this information through analyzing your competitors, conducting surveys, or by asking yourself the following question:

🤔 Who do I want to attract to my school’s social media platforms?

You can narrow down this information by identifying key demographic data about your target market. This includes their age, location, and interests.

Once you have this information, you’ll be able to identify which platforms and content would be most relevant to your language school’s target audience. 

Remember, you can use different social media channels to reach multiple audiences and achieve varying marketing goals. 

For example, you could use Facebook to generate leads and Instagram to build better relationships with your language school’s community. 

Social media marketing also requires constant monitoring. Luckily, there are many tools available online to help you get this right. 

Websites like Later and Hootsuite will be able to help you track key analytics, schedule posts on different platforms, and give you suggestions for future content. 

8. Invest in Social Media Ads

With the right research and strategic targeting, language schools can generate more inquiries from paid advertising on social media to reach their target market. 

As the name suggests, this is where you pay to have your language school’s ads targeted at a large number of social media users. 

The most common platforms that offer social media ads are: 

📱 Facebook.

📱 Instagram.

📱 Linkedin.

Not only can social media ads be highly targeted, but they’re also relatively cost-effective for many language schools. 

The ads on most social media platforms are sold in an auction format. All you need to do is set a maximum bid for a target result or maximum budget each day. 

This is a great way to control how much you spend on your social media advertising. 

The built-in ad manager on most social media platforms will also recommend a bid based on your goal if you are unsure of where to start.

Depending on what your ad campaign goal is, you will pay using one of these methods:

👀 Cost-per-click (CPC).

👀 Cost per conversion. 

👀 Cost per 1000 impressions. 

👀 Cost per video view. 

9. Constantly Measure and Improve 

To know which of your language school marketing campaigns have been successful and what may need more work, you need to track and analyze the results. 

One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics. It helps users identify trends in how visitors engage with their website, as well as where the traffic comes from. 

For example, Google Analytics can determine whether users found your website through organic or paid searches, direct traffic (users type your address into the search bar), social media, or an email campaign.

It’s also essential to know what your conversion rate is. 

This is the metric that determines how many users are taking a specific action such as filling in a form or purchasing a course from your language school. 

By paying attention to the metrics that are doing well, you can also identify which areas of your marketing campaign require improvement.

Not only will this help you use your resources more efficiently, but you may also be able to find more profitable marketing channels for your language school. 

Start Marketing Your Language School Today

Now that you know what it takes to execute an excellent marketing strategy, you can spend less time worrying about it and more time doing what you do best: teaching!

With the language school marketing tips we’ve highlighted in this article, you’ll be on your way to increasing your student enrollment rate and outsmarting your competitors in no time. 

Although successful marketing takes time and effort, it will all be worth it when your language school is spurred to greater heights. 

At Teach ‘n Go, we offer school management software that’s designed to streamline the day-to-day operations of language schools around the world.

To find out more about how we can help make your language school more efficient than ever before, contact us today.

You can also book a demo with us. You’ll have access to all of Teach ‘n Go’s premium features and be able to cancel at any time.