A Christian school marketing plan aims to achieve full enrollment with strategic steps. It goes beyond generic ideas to create a comprehensive plan. Key actions include value ladder marketing, optimizing website design, and using important keywords. Good SEO, effective advertising, and lead-generating landing pages boost visibility. A strong social media strategy and a complete sales process for closing leads ensure continued growth and engagement.
If you have been trying to fill those empty seats in your school, then you are going to love this ultimate guide to creating a Christian school marketing plan.
If this sounds like you then you’re in the right place.
In this article, you are going to get a crazy effective Christian school marketing plan that gets REAL results, and we will show you some of our results along the way.
I’m going to spill the beans about Christian school marketing because, at Clickmill, we believe the world needs more Christian schools that give children a Christian worldview.
By the end of this article, you will be able to implement a Christian school marketing plan that will get your Christian school to max capacity.
Here is what we will cover in this article:
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 1: No More Marketing Ideas For Christian Schools
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 2: Understanding A Real Christian School Marketing Plan
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 3: Value Ladder Marketing For Christian Schools
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 4: How To Fix Your Christian School Website Design – Yourself
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 5: Keywords Are CRAZY Important For Christian Schools
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 6: How & Why To Use SEO On Your Website
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 7: Christian School Advertising That’s Super Profitable
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 8: Designing Landing Pages That Generate Leads
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 9: Christian School Social Media Strategy
Christian School Marketing Plan Section 10: Full Sales Process For Closing Christian School Leads
There are a lot of Christian School leaders who are searching around online for terms like “marketing ideas for Christian schools”. Maybe this is you. This isn’t particularly uncommon as lots of church pastors are looking for marketing “ideas” too.
It is nevertheless problematic if you want to get your school to max capacity.
Marketing ideas seldomly work because marketing ideas are disconnected from one another.
Trying a bunch of random and unconnected ideas creates chaos, not order.
There are all kinds of Christian school marketing ideas out there that just don’t get results. Here are a few we’ve come across:
-Send out fliers
-Make use of community bulletin boards
-Make more announcements at church
-Post more on your social media page
Some of these may work if an entire marketing plan were in place to support them, but as stand-alone ideas, they can’t accomplish anything.
The more individual ideas you try, the more overwhelming your marketing attempts become and the fewer results you create.
You don’t need ideas to fill your Christian school, you need a proven Christian school marketing plan, and that’s what you are going to get.
To properly set up your Christian school marketing system, you have to properly understand how each strategy is supposed to work together to create the final result – lots of new students.
Without this understanding, each strategy just turns into a bunch of unconnected marketing ideas and you will be right back where you started.
Let’s look at how marketing works on the most basic level and work our way up to your Christian school marketing plan.
Look at the image below:
There are three phases of this Christian school marketing funnel. This is the same process that works for churches, plumbers, therapists, doctors, and pretty much every service industry business out there.
The connect phase of the marketing funnel is the very beginning of your relationship with a new person. New relationships can begin online, or they can begin in person. This might happen on social media, Youtube, through advertising, or organic website traffic.
This part of the marketing process is known as Traffic Generation Marketing because sending traffic to your Christian school website is the #1 goal in the connect phase of your marketing system.
To effectively generate more traffic that ends up on your website you will need to do the following:
Relationship Analogy: Marketing is just the act of systematizing relationship-building strategies. If we were to equate the connect phase of the marketing funnel with a similar phase in a dating relationship – we might say this is the handshake phase. It’s the first meeting when you’re trying to get up the courage to ask the other person to go out to coffee (aka, visit your website). Dinner and a movie are probably too much commitment at this point in the relationship. The other person wants to know you can hold a half-decent conversation in public before they commit to anything more.
People are only willing to commit proportionately to their level of trust in you. When you increase their trust in you they will commit naturally.
This means you should never try to convince them that your school is right for them, instead just focus on building trust and they will convince themselves.
The connect phase of the marketing funnel is the very beginning of your relationship with possible clients.
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Once you have connected with potential clients, the only goal is to send them to your website.
In the convert phase of the marketing funnel, you have successfully sent a new visitor to your website and you now have only ONE new goal. You need to get the new user’s contact information. Remember what we said just a moment ago about commitment increasing proportionately with trust?
Well, there is no amount of trust you can build the very first time someone visits your website to warrant them agreeing to spend thousands of dollars with you. The trust just isn’t there for that type of commitment.
So how do you build this trust?
Your audience wants you to build trust with them in 3 ways. They want to see a brochure. Your audience will want to talk to someone in the office to make sure this is a real place and not some scam (people actually worry about this stuff).
Lastly, this is what most Christian schools don’t realize – your audience wants to see your campus. They want to be sure it’s just like they imagine a school should be – happy kids paying attention in class, chasing each other around at recess.
These potential clients want to know there aren’t any cages in the basement. You might think I’m joking, but people fear what they haven’t seen, and if they haven’t taken a tour of your school, you’re not going to get many new students.
It’s your job to root out and overcome all the fears your potential clients have. Of course, there is NO WAY you can do this on someone’s first visit to your website.
This means you need their name, email, and phone number so you can follow up with them after they visit your website. We will discuss more about how to follow up later but for now, let’s just stick to getting their contact information.
To make it even more challenging, you only have about 30 seconds to get their contact information or they will leave your website and never come back.
This means your entire website needs to be 100% hyper-focused on speaking to new parents in a way they find meaningful, and then offer to solve a problem in exchange for their contact information.
Relationship Analogy: So you passed the handshake part of the relationship and you got up the courage to ask your potential date to coffee, and they said yes. That’s a big win! If your coffee date goes well, the next step in the relationship is to get down on one knee and propose… right? Wrong.
A proposal at this point in the relationship would freak them out and send them running for the hills. Instead, you have to build their trust over lots of dates, meet their family, and become a part of their life. Only when their trust is proportionate to the lifelong commitment of marriage will they say YES when you pop the big question.
So what do we learn from this? Don’t be the Christian school that plasters APPLY NOW all over your homepage. You’re proposing on your first date and they will go find some other school who can build trust with them in a comfortable way.
In the CONVERT phase of the marketing funnel, your goal is to ask for AS LITTLE COMMITMENT AS POSSIBLE while still getting the user’s name, email, and phone number.
When you get direct contact information from visitors, you have CONVERTED them from passive users to active participants.
Digital marketings call this a CONVERSION and it is the #1 most important function of your website.
Once someone has converted on your Christian school website, they become what is known as a LEAD. A lead is a person you will begin pursuing and building a relationship with in hopes they become a paying client. It’s important that you build the relationship in a way that is most comfortable for the lead. We will discuss exactly how to do this later.
In the Convert phase of your Christian school marketing plan, your top goal is to get the people on your website to provide their contact information.
Lastly, in the close phase of the Christian school marketing funnel, your goal is to build trust with each lead so much that when you finally ask them to apply, they are ALREADY SOLD.
Here are the two basic steps in the close phase of any marketing funnel:
Here are some strategies that are used to build relationships in a Christian school marketing funnel:
Relationship Analogy: It’s generally a bad idea to propose until you’re sure the answer will be YES. The same is true with asking parents to hand over their children to your Christian school.
Never ask before you know they are ready.
Below is a more complete version of the Christian school marketing funnel we use here at Clickmill.
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You will notice that there are lots of strategies that can be used to accomplish the main goal of each phase: connect, convert, and close. In the sections below we will go over how to implement each one in a way that gets your school lots of new students.
Before we continue to the next section, I want to revisit what we discussed earlier about marketing ideas.
Look at the complete marketing funnel and notice that no single marketing strategy brings a new student into your Christian school.
You can do EVERYTHING right, but if you miss just one step (connect, convert, or close) you will not bring in new students.
This is often the reason Christian schools don’t get as many new students as they should.
For example, I have worked with clients who successfully created viral social media posts (one post had over 2 million likes). Unfortunately, the client didn’t provide a link that sent those people to the website where they could be incentivized to enter their name, email, and phone number.
Can you guess what results they got?
**NOTE: This explanation of the marketing funnel (connect, convert, close) is an abbreviated version of what you can find in the post below. In that article, I show you how those marketing principles are Biblically sound and look at specific passages where Jesus and the disciples use each one of these principles to influence their own followers. If you would like to better understand this Biblical process, you can see it here: Church Marketing Online: The Biblical Way To Grow Your Church
In this section, you will discover the exact process you should walk your new parents through so that you build their trust and commitment in the most effective way possible.
This is where we need to understand the VALUE LADDER.
The value ladder is how you build trust with your audience One. Step. At. A. Time.
The value ladder has the lowest trust/commitment step of your potential client’s journey at the bottom of the ladder and the highest commitment step at the top. Each step in between should progressively increase the amount of trust and commitment required of your potential clients.
Once they have taken each step on your value ladder and reached the top, they will then enroll their students into your Christian school.
As we continue, we will refer to each rung on your value ladder as an ACTION STEP.
Each time a parent goes up a rung on the ladder, they must take some kind of strategic action step that you have identified with your team in advance.
(If you haven’t defined a clear, step-by-step process for leads to follow with your own team, it’s ridiculous to think that clients are going to figure it out for themselves.)
To use the value ladder properly there are two things that you must do at all times before a student is enrolled in your program:
One Action At A Time: Only give potential clients 1 Action Step at a time – not more. Many Christian school leaders make the mistake of taking a shotgun approach right on the home page. They throw 15 action steps out there all at once.
This not only confuses and frustrates parents on your website (“wait, what are we supposed to do now?”) but it also overwhelms them to see every step all at once. When this happens, they get frustrated and end up going somewhere else.
It’s your job to hold their hand as your potential clients move up each rung on your value ladder.
They should only be thinking about the single action step they need to take at the moment.
The Right Action Step: Each action step on your value ladder should be the RIGHT STEP.
Parents have specific mental expectations of how they want to interact with your school before they commit and they want to feel that you care about and understand them. This is how you build their trust.
For Example: Have you ever called your phone service provider to ask a question about your billing statement and ended up pulling your hair out in the process?
What always seems to happen when you make this call? First, you are routed through 10 different automated voice machines that can’t ever seem to understand you. Then you sit on hold for 45 minutes. When someone finally answers they let you know YOU have called the wrong number. So you get transferred and sit through a hold for a second time and then get someone who barely speaks English. They half-fix your issue while creating another one you have to call back about 30 days later.
So why did you feel so frustrated? You had expected to dial a phone number, get a helpful professional who solves your problem quickly (and without creating more problems in the process.) The frustration came in when things did not go according to your expectation.
Your potential clients also have expectations about your signup process and how it should go. The better you meet those expectations, the more students you will get.
So what is the correct order of action steps you need to guide your clients through without creating undue frustration on the part of your parents?
Before we get into the exact value ladder process that works for Christian schools you need to understand what type of business a Christian school is when it comes to marketing.
We Review Your Digital Marketing Efforts & Suggested stategies that will increase your enrollment!
The marketing funnel is essentially the same for every service industry business – Connect, Convert, Close. In this way, marketing essentially never changes. Every service industry business also has a value ladder that works just as we have described above.
That said, the rungs on the value ladder are often quite different depending on the type of service business. Clickmill and your school both offer services, but the action steps leading up to each of us getting clients will be somewhat different.
For example, our top rung for ministry leaders is to sign a proposal, yours is for parents to go through an enrolment process. They are similar, but not the same.
Understanding the type of business a Christian school is will help you narrow down what the action steps for your leads should be.
A Christian school, from a marketing perspective, is a VENUE BUSINESS. This means you sell your school pretty much the same way you would sell bookings at a wedding venue or Christian camp. Yep, most people find this a little odd but hear me out.
To properly market a wedding venue, the bride must tour the actual venue. If she falls in love with the venue during the tour and can envision her perfect day in her mind, the deal is closed.
The odds of a successful wedding venue booking go up exponentially the moment the bride steps foot on the venue.
The same is true for your school. Mom and Dad NEED (it’s an actual need) to see where their kids will be spending their days. They need to buy into your school and its vision. They need to see kids having fun on the playground and they need to see a clean cafeteria. The moment parents step foot in your school for a tour, your odds of closing the deal skyrocket.
Here are the Christian School Value Ladder Action Steps we have found to be most effective with our clients:
Action Step 1 – Website Brochure Download
Action Step 2 – Phone Call To School
Action Step 3 – Website Tour Booking
Action Step 4 – School Tour
Action Step 5 – Enrollment Process
Here is a brief description of each action step and how it leads to getting new enrollments.
ACTION STEP 1 – Website Brochure Download: When a website user downloads a brochure, your staff will be notified online and they will follow up with the new leads.
ACTION STEP 2 – Phone Call To School: If Parents choose to call the school instead of downloading a brochure, the #1 goal of the call is to get them to book a tour of the school.
ACTION STEP 3 – Website Tour Booking: Whether your website visitors called your school, downloaded a brochure, or just walked into the office, your goal is ultimately to get them to schedule a time to come and tour your campus.
ACTION STEP 4 – School Tour: Once your leads are taking your guided school tour, you should give them every reason to fall in love with your school.
ACTION STEP 5 – Enrollment Process: At the end of every school tour be prepared to call your leads to action. Ask them to fill out an application with your school right there and then.
We will get into exactly how to apply each of these action steps at the end of the article. I will give you lots of practical tips, but first, let’s look at the marketing strategies that bring in new leads.
We Review Your Digital Marketing Efforts & Suggested stategies that will increase your enrollment!
This Christian school marketing plan is 100% based on your website being able to entice people to hand over their name, email, and phone number.
If your Christian school website design isn’t accomplishing this now, it’s a HUGE problem and you need to get it fixed ASAP.
Before we can fill your Christian school website with new visitors, it has to be able to successfully fulfill its role in your Christian school marketing plan; it has to convert new visitors (get name, email, and phone numbers).
To increase your website’s conversion rate (the percentage of people who give you contact information on your website), you need to INCREASE CLARITY and DECREASE COMPLEXITY.
Before we go over exactly how to do this, you must understand what FRICTION is and how it affects your website viewers.
Design elements that hinder your audience from taking your Action Steps increase friction.
These elements make your website hard to understand.The more friction that exists between your audience and your website, the less likely they will be to take your desired action. Your website visitors should know the following within 5 seconds of looking at your web page (and without scrolling down the page):
If they don’t get all of that information from the top of your homepage (or landing page) the likelihood that they leave and never come back is about 100%.
Friction creates resistance that inhibits your audience from taking action.
Your goal is to REDUCE FRICTION ON YOUR WEBSITE TO ZERO.
We Review Your Digital Marketing Efforts & Suggested stategies that will increase your enrollment!
Have you ever gone bowling and stepped past the line and found yourself slipping and sliding uncontrollably down the bowling alley? This happened to me once. Besides being embarrassed, I didn’t even know what had happened. How did I get from here to there so fast? It took no effort on my part. The friction was so low, I just kept moving toward the pins.
Christian school website design works the same way.
The friction on your website should be so low that your website viewers should enter your website and be taking their first action step before they even realize what happened.
So let’s go over some practical steps you can take to make this happen.
If you want to see this in action, Clickmill is also a service-based business. We follow all of the rules in this article. Take some time to look around at the design elements on our website to get some inspiration for how to implement it yourself.
Let’s talk about how to tweak your website to reduce friction.
Website Copy: The first friction-reducing strategy is a tall order if you haven’t done copyediting before. Keep the message on your website intact while cutting down your word count by half. Then do it again.
The more text you have on your website, the more friction your users will experience. If your viewers had it their way, your website would teleport the information right into their brain so there was no reading at all. People on the internet generally don’t read, they skim. If your website isn’t skimmable, your potential customers are going to get bogged down, bored, and frustrated.
The reason we don’t do this at the outset is because WE don’t understand what we’re trying to say. The act of cleaning up your website text not only creates clarity for your visitors, but it also creates clarity for your team.
Have your team review the site and revise your copy. In another week, have them do it again. Repeat this process until your messaging is crystal clear.
Calls to action: Christian school website design is often cluttered with way too many calls to action (or sometimes none at all). Read the list below and ask yourself how many actions you are asking your audience to take:
Remember, the ONLY GOAL of your home page is to appeal to new visitors. This means you need to get ruthless and start cutting out the clutter. If you’re not selling your school to new parents at the upcoming missions outreach event, take it off the homepage. Everyone else can have a page somewhere else on the website, but the home page, about page, contact page, etc, is where new visitors show up and look around.
Your website should have 3 calls to action at the VERY MOST. Ideally, 2 is better, but in the case of Christian schools, it seems that potential clients are split between preferring a phone call or a brochure download as their first action step. If you find out that one of these is much more effective for your school, keep the more effective one and partner it with a “Schedule My Tour!” button.
Example: After testing a few calls to action for a year, we found 2 that are very effective for us here at Clickmill.
If you look around the home page, you will find there is nothing else to distract visitors from taking one of these two actions. Download My Ebook or Schedule My Free Strategy Session. There is little or no friction, the only question is if our website viewer wants to take the next step with us. The same should be true for your Christian school website.
Color Pallet: Your website should have a fairly neutral color pallet, with one bright color. The bright color should match well with the rest of your color pallet but be much more eye-grabbing than everything else on your website. The ONLY thing you should use your bright color for is your call to action buttons. This is called your ACTION COLOR because your audience will begin to realize that if they want to know more about your school, all they need to do is look for that bright color. This requires little conscious thought on behalf of your website visitors and so it reduces friction.
If you have lots of bright colors on your website, or you have no bright colors, your visitors will have to consciously search for what they should do next. This takes effort and attention and will ultimately wear them down until they quit trying to figure out what to do next.
If you’re not sure how to choose a matching color palette, check out Coolors. It’s a really helpful color palette generator that you can keep refreshing until you get a beautiful set of colors.
Matching Font Pairs: Your church website should only have 2 fonts. Both should be very easy to read. One font is used for your heading and the other is used for your normal text.
Be aware that some fonts match well giving your Christian school website a professional look and others look bad when paired together. If your fonts don’t match, your users will feel like something is off. They may not be sure what it is but it will take their attention away from what you want them to focus on.
To find a great matching font pair just do a Google search for “Matching font pairs” and you will have tons of options at your fingertips.
Website Images: Hire a professional photographer to take pictures of your school and use these on all the pages that potential clients will see (home page, about page, contact, etc).
For other pages on your website, custom photos are always best, but you can also use images of high-quality paid stock photos.
If you are really on a budget you can get no-cost, royalty-free photos at Pexels or Unsplash but I wouldn’t use this option if you can avoid it.
Navigation Menu: Like everything else, simplify your navigation menu as much as possible. A good rule of thumb is to keep the number of buttons in your navigation menu to 6 buttons or less. Keep the drop-down tabs as simple as possible as well.
Each additional menu option you have is another thing your website viewers have to think about, which increases friction.
One of the easiest ways to reduce unneeded menu tabs is to consolidate them.
For example Location, Directions, About Us, Meet the Team, and many other tabs can all be included on the About page. There is no need to have a page for all of these because when someone has only 6 options to click on – HOME | ABOUT | ACADEMICS | ATHLETICS | RESOURCES | SCHEDULE MY TOUR | -It’s pretty clear that all of that information falls under the about page.
This reduces friction.
If you implement all of the suggestions we just went over and guide every first-time viewer clearly defined call to action, your website will begin to generate more leads.
