Language School Marketing Know-How – Outsource It Or Not?
Smart marketing is the motor that keeps your language school business running and will constantly bring you, new students, to your doorsteps. Many business schools, however, struggle to keep up with necessary marketing strategies, understanding new trends and how to get it all done while keeping their day-to-day school activities running smoothly.
As a language school you are in the business of helping people grow their skill sets to communicate in new languages, becoming more competent, confident human beings, able to discover new worlds.
The same is exactly true for yourself as a school if you want to grow your business – you need to grow your skillsets for your own successful marketing results. The challenge is that there are two different groups when it comes to marketing. Let’s find out to which group you belong and which group is better suited to you and your language school.
The two groups: “Do It Yourself” & “Outsourcers”
In any kind of business, you will find people are divided into two camps. One group wants to keep every aspect of their work in control and do it all themselves, the “Do It Yourself” crowd. The other group does not want to get bothered with too many details and just wants to see results and let others do the work for them, the “Outsourcing” crowd.
No matter to what group you belong, one important key is always to educate yourself about all the aspects of marketing FIRST to understand if they make sense for you as a language school. That is our mission here at LanguageSchoolSeo.com for a reason. Any business decision you will be made without understanding specific marketing strategies will make you vulnerable to external business advice and trends where you have to blindly trust others without knowing what they are really talking about.
The starting point should be always to educate yourself which marketing strategies will bring you additional business to your language school first and then decide what parts of the work can be done by yourself or can be outsourced and done by others much faster than yourself.
Not everything happens automatically
So it is important to understand why word of mouth marketing, for example, is nothing that happens on autopilot. If you want to encourage your students to share their positive experiences with others, you need to have specific marketing tools in place and strategically exercise them.
To be more efficient you need to have a routine to share testimonials from other students to be shown on different online channels. Then you use those posted testimonials to get even more and encourage others to give you more feedback about your school and can use both, good and “bad reviews” alike. (In fact, there are no “bad reviews”, you can use any kind of feedback you receive and turn it into something proactively positive).
Not everything can be automated, but as much as possible should
While it is clear that not everything can be automated online, you should consider automating as much as possible. For example, you need to have someone answering emails to your school within a very short time frame. If it takes days to get back with potential language students they might have received an email answer or even a phone call already from your competition instead.
You might want to consider to utilize automated email marketing where you can offer your students to download price and course lists instead of letting them passively look at your price list on your existing website. With you having their email address and name you can automatically follow up and give them additional helpful information spread over several days to remind them and help them to make a decision without putting them under pressure.
You might want to consider to create several email addresses that automatically respond to incoming requests until a human being is able to read and reply to the individual emails personally as well.
Not everything can be outsourced
There are many routine tasks that might be suitable to be outsourced. Maybe you want to have a more talented copywriter to create engaging blog posts with timeless “evergreen” content.
You can’t and don’t want to do all of your marketing on your own, unless you have a decent amount of staff in-house that can be trained and have the time to do things like paid advertising campaigns via Google, Facebook, or other paid networks.
There are maybe a few things you always want to do yourself:
Responding to positive and negative reviews requires someone that represents your Language school the way you want to communicate your brand and needs someone that can show empathy no matter if someone wants to share some criticism or praise.
Anything that has to do with local organizational tasks like organizing student accommodation or picking up your students from the airport might be better done in-house.
In the end, the key success for your language business is this: you strategically group activities that need to be done over and over again and get it done by the people that can do it most time-efficient as possible.