KEY #4
YOUR WEBSITE DOESN’T SIT ABOVE. IT SITS AT THE CENTRE.

You might view a family’s path to enrolment as something like a set of stairs. The family starts at the bottom and your goal is to entice them to the top, where they enrol in your school. Each step brings the family closer to your goal. With this thinking, the value of paid marketing lies in how high up the stairs it sends a family. If you could pick a family up and place them near the top of the stairs (skipping all the steps between), so much the better.

But when marketing schools, this thinking is a mistake. It may work when marketing conventional goods, which aren’t bought through extended problem solving (KEY #2). But when consumers invest lots of time into researching a purchase, their path to the purchase isn’t as linear as the stair analogy implies. A family isn’t made more likely to enrol in a school by placing them next to the finish line.

So your website doesn’t sit on the top step, where you try to corral families. Instead, your website lies at the centre. It lies at the centre of a network that represents all the sources of information families engage with (or wish to engage with) to understand your brand.

Your website is the central hub for your brand communication. But your vision should extend beyond it. Your goal is to help families develop a rich sense of your brand: that’s what they need to enrol (KEY #3). You’ll do this best if you give them information that augments your website, on platforms families use alongside your website.

As we’ll see, this means assessing the extent to which campaigns provide (or don’t provide) this augmentation.