Enrollment marketing is a complex problem that can’t be solved with a simple answer, but one strategy can help: the customer journey.
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Transcript
Heather Palacios: So the way we love to do these webinars is we just like to introduce ourselves first. So I'm going to go first. And again, thanks for joining our supporting enrollment webinar.
Here we go.
So our high level goal for today is really just to give you all a deeper understanding of the customer journey and how this marketing framework can help you move the needle on student enrollment.
And what I wanted to do starting out is really just kind of break the ice, get us talking to each other. I want to know what is your favorite brand and why. So feel free to don't you don't have to raise your hand. Just feel free to shout it out, put it in the chat, but let us know what's your favorite brand.
And I can go first too, just to break the ice.
Recently, we switched over from AT and T to T Mobile, and we have saved a lot of money on our phone bill and Internet. So that is my new favorite brand right now.
Black Rifle Coffee, Starbucks.
Alycia Burns: Yeah. I'm a subscriber to Black Rifle Coffee.
Heather Palacios: I'm shoes. Oh, yeah.
We got yeah. So I got Starbucks for my birthday yesterday for free, and it made me happy. Lots of, like, drinks and food.
Alycia Burns: T Mobile Tuesday? I didn't know that was a thing.
Heather Palacios: No, I didn't know that was a thing.
We have a lot of coffee fans in the house. Nice.
Okay. Yeah. We love Chick fil A. Alright. So the reason why we're asking this question is because I want you to think about your journey in discovering that brand and ultimately becoming an advocate for that brand.
What did that journey look like? And what were the steps to become an advocate for that brand? And that's essentially what we're gonna be talking about today, only we're gonna be talking about that through the lens of enrollment and this framework we like to call the customer journey.
But first, what is this term, right? We've thrown it out a few times in this webinar so far. What is the customer journey? So what we've done is we've taken the privates, it's a private sector framework.
And so we've taken the private sector definition of the customer journey, and we've kind of reworded it so that it sounds better and applies better to schools and districts. So our new definition is the series of steps families move through as they learn more about your school or district. And these steps are broken down into five phases. One, awareness.
Two, interest. Three, decision. Four, retention. And five, advocacy.
So we're gonna go way more in-depth about what these phases are here in a second, but this is just a high level overview. And essentially what the customer journey is doing is it's telling the story of how families first join your district and how your happiest families eventually become advocates for your schools.
And we like this framework for a few different reasons. One, it's incredibly customer centric. It's focused on what families are thinking and feeling and experiencing throughout their entire journey with your schools.
And two, unlike other marketing frameworks, the customer journey continues after someone makes a purchase or in our case, enrolls in your school or district. And that's important, right? Because a family's journey with your school, it doesn't end with registration. It's actually just the beginning.
So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna dive deep and define each of these phases. We're gonna talk about what you should be doing during these phases to market your schools. And then Alycia's gonna make it way more fun.
And she's gonna share like stories and examples and things that she's doing at Twin Peaks to take advantage of each phase of the customer journey and to market their schools.
So the first phase of the customer journey is called the awareness phase.
And in this phase, families are encountering your district for the very first time. So they probably don't know a lot about your district or school. Maybe they're just discovering that it exists in your community.
And they're probably not actively shopping around at this time for a school or district. So what we wanna do during this phase is we just wanna make sure we're making touch point with these families.
Just reminding them that you're here in the community and you're doing great things for the community. So we want to think about how we can do that both online and in person. So when we think about doing that online, things like optimizing your website for SEO, for local school or district keywords, maybe taking out some Google ads, making sure that your social media presence is there and it's optimized. Those are all really good ways to just kind of leave touch points online.
And then also think about those things you can be doing in the community. Alycia just had an open house last week. That's a really good way to bring people in the community in, Fall Fest, all of those fun things.
And then you're probably wondering what the heck is this picture in the bottom right?
So I thought this was a good example of awareness based marketing and I wanted to share. So me and my daughter, we were going on a walk in the summer in our local park and we came across all of these painted rocks and my daughter being two and a half, she freaked out. She found this little itsy bitsy spider rock and she wouldn't let it go and it was a whole thing.
And I thought it was really cute. And I had a couple of thoughts when I saw this. First, I had a prospective parent thought. Since Kyrie is two and a half, she's not going be going to school for the next couple of years.
So I would definitely consider myself in the awareness phase.
And so I kind of thought like what school did this project? I'm assuming it's a school, maybe a third or fourth grade class. And I'd like to know what school did this project because even though it's a small thing, I'd still like to send my daughter to a school that does projects that beautify our local park, gets the kids outside. Those things matter to me.
And then I had a marketer thought, which was, man, I kind of feel like this was a missed opportunity.
And I say that because if they had just put a little sign out in front of these rocks or even painted the rock with their school name, then it would have been free branding for them.
And I know that small, but there's so many prospective families that are walking this path every single day.
But despite the fact that they didn't do that, I still feel like it's a really creative way of how you it's a it's a good way to get creative on how you can get in front of people during the awareness phase of the customer journey.
So now I'm going to let Alycia share a couple of things that they're doing at Twin Peaks.
Alycia Burns: When Heather and I were planning this before the SchoolCEO conference in Little Rock, she showed me that slide of rocks and I thought it was really funny because on my desk is a hand painted Twin Peaks rock that I would have left in there to throw out some extra marketing for Twin Peaks.
I think one of the biggest things we battled, and we're a charter school, which means we're open enrollment. So we are nobody's neighborhood school.
And one of the most frustrating things about that was the phrase, we didn't even know you guys were over here. And we heard it all the time. And how do we correct that? How do we make sure people know about us and know that we're an option?
And like Heather said, that small rock collection, but there's a lot of small things that do add up to high awareness in your community.
Some things that we do, you see our picture with Fang there. So Fang is our mascot. This meeting is being recorded. We've been doing community events. So they're a low cost way to get ourselves in front of the community.
So we're at Oktoberfest, we're at farmers markets, we're at all of the holiday parties and parades and things like that. And we put up our tent and we hand out stickers and we have Twin Peaks tattoos, temporary ones. I haven't got anybody to commit to the real thing yet, but I am working on it.
And we have signs up all over town in families' yards. They're proud to be a part of our school, and they love that. So we've that's my daughter, by the way. She's a rock star sign putter outer. And if there's ever a place where we're like, I'm not sure this is allowed or not, she's the one to go out there and like wave at cars while she does it. So she loves this place too.
We do some social media. We do some online advertisements. We have some Facebook ads and Instagram ads.
Nextdoor, we did for a while. It depends on your community whether Nextdoor is valuable or not.
The thing I want to get across about our social media is I am not a social media expert. I, like many of you, probably grew up prior to when social media was how we advertised for things. But that presence is becoming increasingly important, so we're learning and we're doing our best to make sure our social media presence is engaging and interesting.
There's just a little sample right here. I'll show you guys quick of some of the little things that we do on our social media.
So, my opinion, there are few things more powerful than music in demonstrating your story. So, getting that feeling across of what we want people to feel when they see our logo is important to us.
Showing smiling kids and happy teachers.
I have an unwritten rule around here that if you're posting on our Thrillshare or on any of our social medias, that if it doesn't have a smiling kid or happy teacher, then it better have our logo. So one of those two needs to be the priority when we're posting. So people begin to associate smiling kids and happy teachers with Twin Peaks.
So we're very diligent about that and we just do our best to get the great things that are happening here in front of our community as often as possible.
Heather Palacios: Oh, not again. Sorry. Okay.
Alycia Burns: We love to switch here too.
Heather Palacios: So the second phase of the customer journey is called the interest phase. And in this phase, families are now they're actively comparing schools to find the best fit for their child. So unlike awareness phase, now families, guardians, and parents are pretty serious about figuring out where to send their school, and they're probably going to make that decision really soon. So they could be new to the area. They could have a child reaching school age. Maybe they're just unhappy with their current district.
So what you wanna do is you wanna make sure you're making unique connections with these families, both in person and online, and really deepening those connections. I think that's the key word here.
So when we think about online, I think a good way to make a deeper connection with a prospective parent and guardian is to really take advantage of your website and your enrollment page. So adding those fun features like what your alumni are up to post graduation. Love this example here from an Apptegy client, or maybe a student testimonial video, a parent testimonial video.
Videos are so powerful and kind of like eliminating the distance between the screens.
So those are good ways to make deep connections online. And then also thinking about, of course, like we've got to invite these perspective parents and guardians into the walls of our school. We got to immerse them in our culture. We got to let them feel what it's like to go to our school. And of course, an easy way to do this is just, maybe having a tour, those open houses, things like that.
Alycia Burns: Yeah, I think the part that is important to us in this phase is making sure that everything we're doing is an invitation to get families in person.
So we do know that that's where we are our best, is when we're able to meet face to face and shake hands and show people what's happening in our building. So everything we're doing in the interest phase is really through that come see us, come to a tour, come join us, come to an open house.
Those in person events, I think, are critical. When they're having an interaction that makes them feel like they would be a valued member here and they're important and we care about kids, Anything we can do to get them here.
That being said, we have to go through the online first. And that's usually how parents are finding us these days.
We run some testimonial videos, will show you just a small clip of one here, just to give people a glimpse into what they will discover when they come for an in person tour with us.
Video audio: Hello. My name is mister McCausland, and I teach middle school English here at Twin Peaks.
I think the things that I most enjoy about Twin Peaks, other than our students, I think we have a wonderful student body, is the way that we teachers are encouraged to teach. Obviously, we're a classical school, and we stick to those principles really strongly.
And in my point of view, it brings about a far more interesting workplace for me as a teacher, I'm sure the students feel the same way as well.
Hello, I'm Lina. I'm in tenth grade at Twin Peaks. I think students should attend Twin Peaks because it's like probably the best school in Saint Fran because we actually have really good education and the teachers really care about the students and try to help them.
Hi, I'm Aislinn and I'm a tenth grader at Twin Peaks Classical Academy. The atmosphere at Twin Peaks is really amazing. I love how everyone's so kind to each other and the community's really amazing. The security guards here are super duper welcoming and the teachers are always looking out for all the students and so I never feel afraid or lonely or left out. It's always really welcoming and uplifting to be here.
Alycia Burns: So, there's a lot of things about Twin Peaks that I'm sneaking into testimonials. So, I could list out for you a bunch of things that makes Twin Peaks really unique, but putting them in their in our kids' hands to be able to tell you those things, I think is more powerful and is more part of telling our story. So I could tell you that Twin Peaks has private armed security, but instead I have a student using that as an avenue to tell you how safe and secure she feels at school. So we're using these testimonials as more than just, hey, kids like it here, but we're using them to get strategic information in front of the community.
And again, try to get them here. So once we get them in person, we know we're able to show more about what makes us unique. And so that's always our lens.
You can see that card down there at the bottom, and this is a lesson I've picked up from Apptegy over the years, but that unique customer experience and making people feel valued and important and that we want them here is important to us. So we handwrite thank you notes after every tour that we do and mail those out the following day with a Twin Peaks magnet.
Now this does a couple things for us. One, it emphasizes that in person and personable touch that we think we have better than a lot of other schools and school districts.
Two, it puts my name and logo in front of them yet again.
Hopefully that goes on their fridge or it stays on their kitchen counter. If you guys are like me, there's a pile that they'll go through a couple more times. Seeing that logo just a few more times, making them think about us again is one of the purposes behind those notes. And that is, as we're growing, that's becoming a big deal. So we had an open house last week, as Heather mentioned, and we had over one hundred and fifty families in here. And so writing one hundred and fifty thank you notes this week to get out within a couple of days is a task.
But it's something that we think is really important, and it's a value that we think is worth holding on to, whether it's scalable or not. So we're going to continue to do those, and we're just going to bookmark time and take them home if we have to, to get those thank you notes done and out to families.
Heather Palacios: So the third phase of the customer journey is called the decision phase. And in this phase, families have pretty much decided to choose your school or your district, but they haven't completed that one final and crucial step, which is registering and enrollment.
So things can still go wrong in this phase, right? Things can still deter parents and guardians from taking that final step. So what we wanna do is we wanna make sure we're offering families two really important things. One is radical hospitality and customer service. Do you have a dedicated enrollment team that's there to answer questions, give tours available online and in person for all the questions and concerns that can come up during this phase. And then two, is your website optimized for enrollment? Is your entire website optimized for this experience and especially your enrollment page?
And we're actually going to dive deep into this topic, the last half of this webinar, but I just wanted to briefly touch on that here.
Alycia Burns: Websites are tricky, and I have learned that over the years that we spent a lot of time decluttering our website, getting links that no longer were needed and things like that off of our website. And the thing I learned very quickly is it's a constant job to keep it decluttered and keep it easy for people to find the information that they need to find.
So our first priority on our website is for potential families. Our current families, they know where the information is and they don't mind a click or two to get to the calendar or to get to the information they need. But prospective families, I need to make it optimized for them. So one of the ways we do that is just keeping our website really clean and easy. So you'll see on there our screenshots, but within the first, on our homepage, there are at least three ways to get to the enrollment tab to find information about how to enroll with us.
Once you're on the enrollment page, you see there, I have it laid out for families what the first step is. Step one, you got to sign up for a tour. And that, again, gets people into our building to help them make the decision. Step two, the intent to enroll form and then the online registration form. Now, for us, like a lot of you, I don't have control over the district online registration form. So I can't make that as simple as I would like it to be. It's a little bit cumbersome.
But what I can do is lay it out for them as easily as I can. And what they're seeing is a willingness from Twin Peaks to help make that process as easy as possible.
We do have to say no frequently to putting things up on the website. Lots of different clubs and families and whatever it is want their own little tab on the website, or they want this or they want that. But it does take diligence to make sure that your website is optimized for prospective families, not just current families or staff. So that has been our priority of making sure that things are easy to find.
Heather Palacios: So the fourth phase in the customer journey is called the retention phase. And in this phase, families, they're now enrolled in your district or your school, and and you wanna make sure that they continue to have a good experience so that they wanna stay.
It's all about, this phase is all about just finding ways to deepen and strengthen connections and build relationships. Building relationships is the keyword here.
And of course, and I've said this with other phrases, but how do you do that both online and in person? So things like investing in extracurricular programs, providing exciting course selections.
When it comes to online, I think your newsletter plays a big role in this phase because it's that continuous touch point that you send out on a routine basis.
And then if you're an Apptegy client, really taking advantage of your live feed, this is the place where you can share all those micro stories of things that are happening in the classroom with your teachers, with your staff.
And those stories go directly to those parents, guardians, grandparents, and community members.
Alycia Burns: This one's tricky for us, especially one of our biggest retention or loss of students is from fifth to sixth grade, which is when middle school starts here in Colorado, and then again from eighth to ninth grade. So for us, it's really important that we build those relationships with families, build those relationships with kids, and most importantly, making kids feel like they belong here. So a lot of our focus is around what can we do to make kids feel like they're a part of a community.
You can see our house logos up there. We started a house system. We're now in year three, I believe.
And our kids had a lot of say. They named the houses. They chose colors. They chose logos and things like that to help build that sense of community.
And the video that you'll see here is one of our transition days. So these are fifth graders that we would like to come stay with us for middle school next year. So we we buy t shirts because once somebody buys the t shirt, they're a lot more willing to stay and that's a level of commitment to have a t shirt. So we hand out t shirts like they're candy around here with our logo.
And you see on the back of their shirts is their class of, and that's their year they graduate high school. Not the year they graduate middle school, or finish middle school, or finish fifth grade. But our purpose for that is to make students feel like they're a part of this community for the long haul. We value them, we want them around.
And those things that we're building into their day to make them feel like they're a part of us.
So some of our purpose in that, you're seeing fifth graders transitioning to middle school, and those are our high school student council members that are there playing and goofing around with kids just to continue to build that sense of community.
One of the other important parts for us, and also making our kids feel like they're a part of this, is providing a really reliable and predictable communication experience for our families.
So pre K through twelve, there's a lot of communication differences. And what we're finding is parents were frustrated with the level of communication they were receiving at second grade to what they might intend.
So one of the things we've been really strategic with is to make that predictable. So our teachers are posting at the same time, and our teachers are posting on the same schedule as every other teacher in the building. So our parents know that they can rely on that communication.
If you are an Apptegy client, the Rooms feature is huge for us. And making sure that parents can access any of the information that they want or need makes them feel like we are a predictable and reliable experience and that they can continue to trust us with their kids pre K through twelve. So along with making everybody feel like they're a valued member of our community, we want them to know that we stay consistent. You can stay, you can trust. Once you've experienced Twin Peaks, that experience will stay the same through graduation.
Heather Palacios: Sorry.
Alycia Burns: A good song. It is.
Heather Palacios: So the fourth and last phase of the customer journey is called the advocacy phase, and this is probably our favorite phase. And in this phase, families don't just wanna be a part of your district, they're committed to it. They are your district and your school's biggest cheerleaders, right? They're the ones that are getting into those nasty Facebook comments and they're defending you. So we love those parents and guardians. And our objective is really just to find ways to amplify their voices, give them a bigger pedestal and influence in your school community. So things like engaging with them through community leadership programs, parent and family engagement committees, PTAs, those are all really good ways to take advantage of the advocacy phase.
Alycia Burns: I like to call this phase, don't underestimate the Facebook moms groups phase. This is, as Heather mentioned, I don't think schools can afford to ignore what's being said about them on social media.
That being said, as a school, we don't we try very hard and very, very rarely will we engage in those conversations.
We may call somebody if we see something, but for the most part, we rely on our ambassadors to handle that for us.
So you'll see this on here. This is the Longmont Moms Network. It's one of the bigger ones here in our town.
Somebody just saying, Hey, I'm looking for honest opinions about Twin Peaks Academy and Longmont Christian School.
And you'll see the comments on here. The first comment is from Shannon. She's one of our PTO vice presidents.
Jamie, over here on the other side, is just a new family. They've joined us recently and we've had a lot of interaction with them, positive interaction, have seen them several times at different community events. And then Fawn is one of our board members.
So getting some information in the hands of our parents and making them feel like they also can be a part of this.
They are better ambassadors for us than I can be. So if I log in there the principal or as the executive director and say, Hey, Twin Peaks is the best. You should check it out. They don't know that they can trust me, but they can trust parents that have had this experience.
So we're attempting to develop lots of different ways for our parents to become involved so they feel qualified to be that brand ambassador for us. So whether it's the PTO or the Booster Club or the Board of Directors, but giving them the tools that they need in order to feel like they are qualified to answer those questions.
One thing that we're going to be doing in the future is those community events that I mentioned. I'm going to hand those over to these different parent groups. So the PTO will take on one of those events and they'll be in charge of it and they'll be the ones there representing Twin Peaks and answering questions.
They have t shirts just like we do, event t shirts that make them feel like they're are a valued member of our community, even as a parent, not just as an employee, but increasing that involvement opportunity for them has been really powerful for us to control the dialogue about our school. It's not just me defending it as an employee, but it's these parents and and students that are out there doing that hard work for me.
That's difficult to do if they don't have that feeling that they're able to contribute. So giving them those avenues to be a part of your community has been really valuable in our presence elsewhere as well.
Heather Palacios: All right, so that was a lot.
And we just want to take a brief pause, a little breather, and kind of turn the conversation back to y'all.
We want to know what's one enrollment marketing strategy that has worked well for you. Alycia has shared a lot of different strategies, but we'd also like to hear from you. What's something that's worked from you?
Feel free to just speak out or drop it in the chat.
Any brave volunteers?
Alycia Burns: I'll tell a little anecdote in the meantime, is I got an email from a real estate agent this summer about our yard signs and how she had been seeing our yard signs all over town.
And she called them tacky. She said I was tacky for putting these signs up all over town.
And so we have a pretty good joke in our school about, you haven't seen tacky yet. And so those yard signs have been really powerful for us because even in different communities and different towns, we're pretty widespread.
They're seeing us and that's that awareness phase. So they're seeing our logo, they're seeing us and that's important.
Heather Palacios: Yeah. I love this one. The daily stuff that may not seem important to us, but it paints the picture of the school and district.
Oh, love this idea.
Proud royal family.
Alycia Burns: Oh, cute. I like that.
Kindergarten prep newsletter.
Oh, how often do you send the kindergarten prep newsletter? Is it just once or do you send it on multiple occasions prior to kindergarten?
I think that was Teresa.
Heather Palacios: Well, we'll let Teresa here we go. Once per month.
Alycia Burns: Okay, that's I like that idea. I'm writing that down, Teresa.
Heather Palacios: All right. So the last half of the webinar is we're going to dive deep into how to optimize your website for enrollment.
So we kind of touched on this in the decision phase and how when families are ready to enroll, they still have to take that big step and do that on your website, or at least most of the steps are done on your website. So how do we make that seamless and easy experience for parents and guardians?
So I'm gonna share just a couple of tips of things that you can do.
So one, start with your homepage. I pulled a couple of statistics from Nielsen Norman Group that I thought was really interesting. One, website visitors spend fifty seven percent of their time above the fold or on the first screen of a webpage.
Additionally, they spend seventy four percent of their time on the first two screens of a webpage.
So if we think about our search behavior online, think about pulling up a website online. You're most likely going to the homepage first, right? So if you think about that search behavior and you take these statistics into consideration, what that is telling us is that the top part of your homepage, otherwise known as above the fold, is the most important part of your entire website.
So like Alycia touched on earlier, we really wanna make sure the top part of the homepage is optimized really, really well for enrollment. And what we essentially mean by that is, are your enrollment links front and center? I think a must is that they need to be front and center on your navigation menu, that bar at the very top. So if you don't have your enrollment link in your nav, do that right after this webinar. And additionally, like if you do have a scrolling banner, that's a really good place to put your enrollment link, especially if it's a seasonal thing that's happening, and potentially farther down on the page. But I think we wanna make sure it's definitely in the navigation menu and maybe one other place on your homepage.
Second, think like your audience.
Sixty five percent of consumers expect companies to understand their needs.
The status from Salesforce. So if we think about all the needs, all the questions, the concerns that parents and guardians have during the enrollment process, it's so much, right? This is a huge decision, not just for the student or the parent, but the entire family.
And so if we can be empathetic towards those concerns and questions, one easy way to do that is to simply have an enrollment FAQ on your enrollment page. This is us getting proactive about answering those questions and also being really empathetic towards, think about those families with a student that's entering pre K and kindergarten for the very first time. They don't even know what questions they should be asking. They don't know what concerns they probably should have. So for you to get ahead of that with an enrollment FAQ is just a really good way to provide that radical hospitality that we talked about and that customer service that's gonna stay with them farther along the line in their journey with your school.
Third, make information easy to find and understand. So this stat is from HubSpot. Seventy six percent of consumers say the most important factor in a website's design is that it makes it easy for them to find what they want.
So if we think about all the information and the steps that go into registration, it's so much, right? It's so overwhelming.
So how do we make it feel like it's not? How do we make it feel like actually the steps are kind of light and it doesn't feel so intimidating to me? And I think design and user experience play a huge part in this. So I love this example from Arkansas Virtual Academy.
I know y'all are probably laughing like your school probably doesn't have four steps to enrollment.
And that's fair, this is a very unique school. But what I like is this feature called an accordion, which is when you click on the plus button, more information comes down.
And then when you click on the plus button again, the information is hidden. This is a really good way to bucket information so that initially when I'm looking at this page, it doesn't feel so overwhelming and intimidating, right? Lots of text feels overwhelming and intimidating. So just consider what's the design and user experience on our enrollment page? How can we make that experience feel a little bit lighter and less intimidating?
And why do we wanna do this? Because according to Forrester, good user experience can even increase conversion rates by up to four hundred percent.
So just by investing in design and user experience, you could potentially increase registration rates.
Four, optimize your forms. So if you don't have this feature turned on, I feel like it's the default nowadays, but if you don't have this turned on, make sure you turn on inline validation.
The example is here at the bottom right. It's when you input information incorrectly into an answer, and then the form won't let you continue until you correct that information.
And that's important, because we don't want a parent to get through the end of the registration form, realize they inputted a bunch of information incorrectly, have to go back. That's so frustrating. So inline validation kind of solves for that.
Second, microcopy. The example is here at the top right. Microcopy gives context to complex questions. So if you've got a question on your form that might be complex, by the way, send forms to some of the parent advocates in your schools, ask them if there are questions on the form that's complex so that you can add that microcopy in there.
And it's going to basically do a couple of things. If I don't understand a question on a form, I'm gonna have to Google it, or I'm gonna have to call you. And that's really frustrating as a parent because I just wanna move through this process quickly. So microcopy kind of alleviates that.
And then lastly, consider using a one column form instead of a two column form. Several studies reveal that one column forms, they actually outperform two column forms in terms of speed and completion rates. If we also think about the experience on mobile, a one column form is just a little bit more responsive to mobile anyways. So it's overall just a good best practice.
Okay, lastly, connect with interested families. So your enrollment page, it's not just built for those decision phase families, those families that are ready to register.
It's also built for those interested phase families, those families that are still comparing schools, and haven't made a decision yet. So how do we kind of cater to them too?
And one way to do that is simply to have an interest form on your enrollment page. This form can capture very basic information, their name, number, and email address. And it's a really good way for them to get ahold of an enrollment specialist at your school and have questions answered, maybe coming for a tour. And then that specialist could share more about the enrollment process. And this is a good way to do what we should be doing in the interested phase, which is deepen and strengthen connections.
So that was a lot, but we just wanna recap real quick. This is a recap view of the customer journey. Again, it's broken down into five phases, awareness, interest, decision, retention, and advocacy.
Now, if you're looking at this screen right now, you're probably thinking something I've thought as well, which is oftentimes this path is not so linear and clean in real life. It's it's actually pretty messy.
And if you think about your experience, the question in the prompt we asked you at the beginning, what's your favorite brand and how did you become an advocate for that brand? It probably didn't look exactly like this, right? But that's okay. What we want to stress with the customer journey is that it's not enough to just focus on one or two parts of a parent's experience with your school or one or two parts of the enrollment process, we need to think holistically about a family's experience and their journey with your school from the moment they first hear about you to the moment they're advocates, hopefully for your district and all those moments in between.
And the customer journey framework helps us do that.
So as you are building your marketing strategy this year for enrollment, I want you to ask yourself yourself two really important questions.
One is where are you spending too much time in this journey?
And two, where are you spending too little resources and time in this journey?
Because what you might find when you're reflecting is, Oh, we have a lot of programs and we have a good plan around the interested and decision phase part of the customer journey, but we have almost no resources or a plan built around advocacy.
And advocacy is important, right? Because your advocates are giving you that really good word-of-mouth that is so critical in engaging those families in the awareness and interest phase.
So again, these phases, they're building on each other and they're also complimenting each other.
So yeah, to recap again, the customer journey helps us think holistically about a family's journey with your schools from awareness to advocacy.
And with that, I am going to pass it off to Alycia to share just a couple final thoughts.
Alycia Burns: Yeah, I think that slide Heather always reminds me that I think that the two that often aren't associated with each other are the advocacy and the awareness phase.
But what we're finding is our presence in the community has added advocates that might otherwise not even know we exist, which then contribute to our awareness phase. So a grandparent might come by and get a pretzel necklace from us at Oktoberfest and suddenly, they're telling their friends at the pool, whatever it is, but those advocates can come out of that awareness phase from people that don't even necessarily belong to your school yet.
I think one of the other important parts, high level, that was really important for us is our brand and our brand identity.
We've been around a long time and through that, you guys all know what I'm talking about, but people have screenshotted our logo and used it on all sorts of things. And it was getting a little bit chaotic, the use of our name, the use of our logo, the use of our image. And so what was really important before our awareness phase really kicked off was making sure that we had that cleaned up.
Making sure we had a clean logo and a clean version of that logo that people could use and access so they could be posting the correct one and not a pixelated stretched out one from seven years ago.
So that was really important to us. If you don't have a brand identity guide, you should. So spend some time looking at that. The other important part of that for us was cleaning up social media.
You probably all have found other Facebook pages or Instagrams that are using your name or likeness, whether it's your PTO or whether it's the boys basketball team from seven years ago, whatever it is.
But when people search Twin Peaks Classical Academy, I want them to find the right Twin Peaks Classical Academy, not an outdated version that belonged to the tech teacher who left. So those are kind of things that took a long time, but it is important. It is important to be mindful that those logos and representations of you do matter. And if people are finding the wrong one, we want to make it so they find us easier.
So those are some of the things that were important for us as we began this journey and began to really focus on our enrollment marketing.
Heather Palacios: Alright. Well, thank you all again for coming to our supporting enrollment webinar. Almost everything that we've talked about other than everything Alycia talked about and all her good examples, They are in these two SchoolCEO articles I've listed here. So check those out.
And we also have a webinar coming up. Barrett, will you link that link in our chat? It's Where Social Media Stands Tall and Falls Short. Our VP of marketing is gonna be giving that webinar and he's such a great speaker.
So be sure to sign up for that. And thanks again for joining us. We had a great time.