If your enrollment numbers have been flat (or dropping) despite putting real effort into marketing, it’s easy to feel like you’re missing some secret the other schools down the road already know. Most of the time, though, it’s not one big secret — it’s a handful of smaller things adding up.
These are the key steps to improve school enrollment marketing that we see make the biggest difference, in roughly the order we’d tackle them. You don’t need to do all of them at once, and you definitely don’t need to be a marketing expert to get started.
Step 1: Make Sure Families Can Find You Online
A growing share of prospective families are already searching, whether or not you’re visible. A survey from the National School Choice Awareness Foundation found that 60% of U.S. parents searched for a new or different school for their child within the past year. If your website isn’t easy to find, loads slowly, or isn’t clear about how to inquire, you’re losing families before they ever reach out to a competing school that showed up instead.
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
“Parents in our area” isn’t specific enough to build real messaging around. The schools that see the strongest results tend to know exactly who they’re talking to — their values, their concerns, what’s driving them to look for a new school in the first place. That clarity makes every next step easier, from the words on your homepage to which ads you run.
Step 3: Use Paid Search to Reach Families
Not every family finds you through word of mouth. Plenty are actively typing things like “Christian school near me” into Google right now. If you’re not showing up there, a competing school probably is. Getting a basic handle on how Google Ads works — even with a modest, well-targeted budget — can put your school in front of families at the exact moment they’re looking.
Step 4: Show Up Consistently on Social Media
A few posts a month with no real strategy behind them rarely move the needle. What tends to work better is showing real classroom moments, events, and everyday school life consistently enough that families start to feel like they already know your community before they ever schedule a tour. Solid social media strategies built around your actual audience tend to outperform posting for posting’s sake.
Step 5: Follow Up Faster (and More Than Once)
This one’s simple but easy to overlook: the speed and consistency of your follow-up often matters more than which channel brought the family in. A single auto-reply email isn’t a follow-up strategy. A quick phone call within a day or two, paired with a couple of helpful emails afterward, keeps your school top of mind while a family is still deciding.
Step 6: Track What’s Actually Working
None of the steps above mean much if you’re not watching which ones are bringing in real inquiries and enrollments, not just clicks. Even a simple habit of asking every family “how did you hear about us?” gives you enough to start making better decisions with your budget.
Start Where You Are
If reading this list feels like a lot, that’s a completely normal reaction. Most schools aren’t doing all of this well at once, and that’s fine. Pick the step that feels most broken right now (often it’s the website or the follow-up) and start there.
Ultimately, improving school enrollment marketing isn’t about doing everything perfectly. They’re about closing the small gaps where interested families are quietly slipping away. If you’d like a second opinion on where those gaps are for your school, our team at Slater Strategies is glad to take a look together.
