10 New Year's Resolutions for School Marketers

It’s time for a new year and a fresh start! Let’s leave 2021 behind us and make a splash in 2022!

New year’s resolutions are a way to look back on the past year and set some goals for the coming one. Unfortunately, very few people are successful in achieving their resolutions. Most people lack specifics, don’t know where to start, or have trouble measuring progress. These are just a few of the reasons New Year’s resolutions fail.

We’ve put together a list of achievable New Year’s resolutions for marketing and business professionals for 2022, complete with resources and best practices!

10 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR MARKETING AND BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS

1. FOCUS ON THE USER EXPERIENCE (UX)

The field of UX design is concerned with creating products that provide a great experience to the user. This involves having a deep understanding of the user’s needs, abilities, limitations, and expectations.

Google has announced that it will begin using a new set of metrics, called “Core Web Vitals,” to measure a website’s user experience in 2022. These metrics include load time, interactivity, and visual stability. Google will use these metrics, in combination with the existing Search criteria, to determine a page’s search ranking. This means that it is important for website owners to prioritize the user experience.

User engagement and a positive UX can be improved on your website by making it original, easy to use, navigable, accessible, credible, and aesthetically pleasing.

Go mobile to improve your user experience in 2022. This is because 46% of people use their phone as their primary research tool. If your site has a poor user experience, people will leave and visit your competitor’s site instead. Google rewards sites that are mobile-responsive, so it is beneficial to become mobile-optimized.

If you want to improve your website’s ranking on Google, you should focus on improving your page speed. The average consumer expects a web page to load in less than 2 seconds, and if it takes longer than 3 seconds, 40% of them will leave the site. Google uses load time to help determine a site’s accessibility, so a slow load time means poor accessibility.

If you’re not sure what design changes to make to your website, try A/B testing. This is a method of testing where you create two different versions of a webpage and show them to different visitors. You can then see which version receives more engagement and make changes accordingly. This is a great way to figure out what works best for your users.

Hiring a UX designer will help improve your website design and the user experience.

2. IMPROVE YOUR DESIGN AND VISUAL CONTENT

The challenge for businesses in 2021 will be to stand out from others using digital marketing methods.

It is important to have images that are high quality and have visual content that is appealing to look at if you want to have engagement with your audience. According to a study, 68% of consumers said that they prefer to engage with images, and visual content is shared 40 times more often on social media than other content.

You can improve your design skills by playing with Canva and Adobe, or by investing in an experienced graphic design team.

3. STAY UP TO DATE ON THE LATEST MARKETING INNOVATIONS

It’s safe to say that things in marketing are always changing with new platforms, algorithms, and regulations emerging. The best way to keep up is to dedicate time each week to researching the industry.

You can stay accountable by setting aside some time each week to do some research on your industry. This can involve reading newsletters, listening to podcasts or reading blogs to find out about the latest developments.

4. TRY NEW TRENDS AND STRATEGIES

Once you have familiarized yourself with the latest trends and strategies in your field, it is time to start putting them into practice.

2021 is a great year for people to change the way they consume media. To keep up with the changes, try incorporating new digital trends into your digital strategy.

If you want your business to stay ahead of the competition, you need to be constantly trying out new strategies. Interactive video experiences, account-based marketing, and targeting generation Z are all great ways to do this.

5. MAKE USE OF PAID MEDIA

With so many brands and sources of media competing for attention, it’s not sufficient to rely only on traditional methods of promotion to make people aware of your brand. Investing in paid media placements is an effective way to reach a larger number of potential customers instantly. An organization can use paid media to promote its content in the following ways:

Paid social media post
Display ads
Paid search results
Video ads
Search engine marketing and other promoted multimedia.

The following are some of the best marketing tools that professionals can use to improve efficiency, save time, and grow their business: -Using data to drive campaign decisions by measuring the success of advertisements via paid media key performance indicators (KPIs). -Incorporating different tools into your digital marketing strategy. -Monitoring your progress and making changes as needed.

6. CONSOLIDATE YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNTS

If you wouldn’t want 10 different websites, you wouldn’t want separate social media accounts for every single sports team. This creates confusion for followers who don’t know where to go to find the information they need.

Now, if you’re worried about coaches and athletics team disrupting your Twitter strategy, here are a few things to consider:

The life of a tweet is just about 10 minutes. So, even though you had that amazing Tweet at 2pm, whoever saw it, already saw it.
You can pin a tweet to the top of your feed that is important, so everyone who goes to your Twitter will see that first.
Using Finalsite Feeds, our social media mash-up tool, you can streamline or separate content based on hashtags — so, by giving each athletics team their own hashtag, they could bring in all their tweets into a single location on your website…and that’s where you want people going anyways, right?

7. STOP SENDING MASS, GENERAL EMAILS TO EVERYONE

I learned about “Graymail” this year and it has had a big impact on my life. Graymail is email that your constituents have signed up to receive, but then don’t want. So they never engage with your emails. Even though these emails aren’t marked as SPAM, if you keep sending them to people who don’t want them, your email deliverability will go down, making it harder to get into the inboxes of people who do want to hear from you.

Yeah — scary.

A few ideas for sending targeted emails:

Segment your emails: Make a different newsletter for parents, students, faculty, and alumni. While these constituent groups may need to hear some of the same content, they don’t need to receive all of it. St. Anne’s-Belfield School gets extremely granular in their communications — even for the same event!

Start fresh: Create an emails newsletter subscription form on your website for anyone who isn’t a current constituent. As individuals apply, keep them on their own email list, so if they don’t enroll, you don’t accidentally keep sending them emails.
Watch who replies: While we often fear, someone responding to our emails, this is marketing gold. You might learn that someone has a new email, that they no longer have a child enrolled, or just don’t want to receive your email. Honor those changes.
Keep tabs on the un-engaged: With each email, look at open rates. If there’s an individual, or group of individuals, who aren’t responding to your emails, be sure to opt them out of future communications.

8. MOVE BLOGS AND LANDING PAGES HOSTED ON A SUB-DOMAIN TO YOUR WEBSITE

If you’re hosting your blog on WordPress, your inquiry pages on your Student Information System, and other landing pages on a tool like Hubspot, you’re making it harder for people to find your website organically.

If you’re forcing Google to choose between your website and your blog by putting your great content on a different domain, it will often choose whichever one has the most credibility.

The long story: Blog.yourschool.com and yourschool.com are two websites that are constantly competing for top ranks. This can be dangerous because it can lead to errors and people not being able to find the information they need.

A few steps to getting started:

Take an inventory of how many domains you are hosting your website on
Strategically determine which content you want to move to your website
Form a content migration team, and make it a goal to move over at least 2 pieces of content per day, each. This will vary based on how much content you have elsewhere.

9. POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA EVERY SINGLE DAY

Schools which don’t make an effort to be social will be at a disadvantage in 2017. Here are a few tips for posting:

Twitter: 5-10 times per day: Engagement can drop off after the third tweet
Facebook: 2 times per day: Engagement drops off dramatically after 2x per day
LinkedIn: 1 time per day: 20 posts per month (1x per weekday) organically reaches 60% of your followers
Instagram: 1-2 times per day: 20 posts per month (1x per weekday) organically reaches 60% of your followers

According to research, the following times (in general) get the most engagement:

Facebook: 3:00pm on Wednesday, weekends from 1:00-4:00pm, or any day of the week from 12:00-1:00pm.
Twitter: Weekdays from 12:00-3:00pm and 5:00pm.
Instagram: Mondays and Thursdays at any time, except for between 3:00-4:00pm.
LinkedIn: Midweek from 5:00-6:00pm, noon, or 7:30-8:30am

It’s a good idea to use an app to schedule your content so you don’t have to be online at specific times to post.

10. WRITE BETTER QUALITY CONTENT

2. Creating content that is relevant to the searcher’s intent. 3. Creating content that will keep your audience engaged. Content is still important in 2022, but focusing on creating better content is more important than just writing more content. Google will rank pages based on user experience and existing search signals. This means that content that is relevant and engaging is key. Stop worrying about high-ranking keywords and focus on creating content that your audience will actually want to read.

Content that helps people and creates a connection with them is more likely to be trusted.

3. Creating original and relevant content.

4. Writing content that’s SEO optimized.

To make your content more readable and engaging, check out our blog on creating compelling, optimized content. You’ll find tips on how to identify and curate content that drives results.

Following through on your work New Year’s Resolution

Whether you choose one of these six New Year’s Resolutions, or create your own — follow through! A few tips for staying focused on your work goals (which, I think is so much easier than going to the gym and eating salads):

Dedicate at least one hour every Monday and Friday to your goal. If it’s more social media, spend the first hour of your day scheduling posts. If it’s more photos, take the time to go around school and snag some photos of what’s happening right then.
Create a group to hold you accountable. We can do things alone, but studies show we have more success when we want to accomplish tasks in groups. No matter what your NYR is, get 2-3 other team members on board to make it a more fast and fun process.
Track your progress: There is nothing like checklists to make you feel like you’re making progress! Use an online app like Trello or Teamwork to keep track of tasks and communicate with your teammates.
Share your success story: If you follow one of our NYRs, send us an email at blog@finalsite.com, and we’d love to feature your school

Good luck and Happy New Year!