Today’s parents are super busy, between work, appointments, driving their big kids to practices, and hosting playgroups for their younger kids.
Many parents claim that by the end of the day, they’ve barely had a chance to even sit down.
Because of this, it is more important than ever before to be able to get information out to this target audience in a quick and easy way.
Marketing your charter school is no exception.
Make Your Site User-Friendly
Busy moms (and dads!) often have precious little free time to spend at the computer conducting research over what school to send their children to.
Instead, research is often done in the check-out line at the grocery store, in the pediatrician’s waiting room, or on the sidelines waiting for the next soccer game to start.
In fact, in an exploratory study conducted by education research site GreatSchools (2012), the majority of parents in the study had smartphones, and were very comfortable using those smartphones for researching major decisions.
While GreatSchools found that final decisions on school placement often were made following an in-person visit, the majority of the parents in this study did not make an appointment for a school visit unless they were drawn in by available information online.
Mobile Matters
It is essential that your charter school be able to provide the type of information that will make a parent want to call and visit your school.
Getting a parent through the door is the first step in increasing enrollment.
And in order to get the parents through the door, you have to have a strong website that is also mobile-friendly.
- If a parent only has five or ten minutes to research schools in between appointments, the parent is not going to spend that time on a site that isn’t mobile-friendly.
- If your site is not easily navigated on a smartphone, it is likely that the parent – your target audience – will quickly leave the site and look for other options.
- If your site takes too long to load on a mobile device, the individual will likely abandon your site and instead visit one that loads quickly.
- If your site is not optimized, you will not even show up in the search, so your target audience might not even find you!
Don’t Let Your Competition Win
Recently, I was having lunch with a friend that was looking to enroll her child in a local private school.
As we were discussing school options, she tried to pull up one of the schools that I had mentioned, and even after a full minute, the site wasn’t loaded.
To save some time, my friend searched for another school that we had discussed, and that school’s mobile site was so user-friendly and inviting that my friend quickly called for a tour of the school.
A few weeks later, her child was enrolled in that school.
This story helps illustrate why it is essential to ensure that your charter school’s site is powerful, not only in its original form but also with its mobile version.
A strong, optimized, mobile-friendly site might just be the thing that causes a parent to become interested in your school and call for an appointment!
Need help making your site more user- and mobile-friendly?
Let the professionals at Six Degrees Digital Media help you out. Contact us today to see what we can do for your school.
