Beauty School Marketing Ideas to Increase Enrollment this Year

Did you know that higher education marketing isn’t exclusively for state colleges and large private universities? Trade schools and niche training academies often have smaller, more focused student populations. This demographic difference means that having a strong marketing strategy and business plan is key.

Trade-based institutions, including beauty schools, can use personalized marketing strategies to connect with a greater number of students and boost enrollment. And for many beauty schools, greater enrollment means more resources, revenue, and longevity.

As trade schools experience a spike in popularity, now is the time to take advantage of the same strategies and proven marketing practices that other schools use to scale their admissions goals.

What is an Enrollment Marketing Strategy?

At Element451, we’re totally fixated (in a good way) on helping schools, and higher education institutions create, define, and implement modern marketing strategies. Our process involves helping schools leverage their own unique enrollment marketing stance, which can be defined in the following way:

“Enrollment marketing is a comprehensive higher education outreach strategy focused on finding, attracting, and enrolling students at a new institution.”

As you might have guessed, your marketing team needs to understand a few important pieces of information before you can start working on your enrollment marketing playbook. You won’t get very very without first understanding factors such as:

• Your school’s unique target audience
• The expectations that prospective beauty school students have about their experiences
• Your institution's unique value to enrolling students

But at the end of the day, an enrollment marketing strategy attracts students and kicks off the process for application and enrollment. Beauty schools must have an active and effective strategy in place so that new enrollments become automatic.

How to Market Your Beauty School for Growth This Year

If you own and operate a beauty school, your primary enrollment goal is filling seats for new courses. Although word of mouth and direct referrals can be helpful, a comprehensive marketing strategy casts a wider net. The purpose is to attract as many of your ideal students as possible.

You might be wondering how this works in a digital economy, when most future students conduct their research online and through social media channels. 

Here’s a hint—knowing where your beauty school students spend time gives you an advantage when designing marketing strategies that are meant to reach them.

5 Marketing Strategies That Actually Work to Boost Your Cosmetology School Enrollment

As you look for marketing tips that suit your school, it’s best if you can start implementing those that align with your available budget, resources, and work capacity. We’ve narrowed down the list to five methods you can use, whether your school is in the “startup” or “scale” phase.

Tip 1: Know Your Target Audience and Ideal Student Persona

Before you can start to generate a pipeline of new leads, you have to build a reliable foundation. Work with your leadership team, instructors, and recruiters to determine the most important facts about your ideal students. You pull current student data and build profiles around the following:

• Student demographics related to the beauty industry
• Academic backgrounds
• Anticipated time to graduation
• Budget or financial aid available for degree attainment
• Major concerns, challenges, or roadblocks
• Long-term business or job goals

In other words, who are you speaking to when you create new content? What problems or hurdles can you immediately address in order to help them enroll more quickly? By understanding who your target audience includes, you’ll be able to better communicate the high-quality education you provide. 

The end result? No more wasting time or resources speaking to potential applicants who aren’t the best fit for the services and programs you provide.

Tip 2: Build Your Mailing Lists

As an up and coming trade school, it’s important to spend time cultivating your mailing list. Yes, this means a physical list and an email list! You can use both formats to enhance your marketing efforts and to build your community network.

• For physical or direct mailing lists, take advantage of in-person fairs, high school events, occupational and recruitment events. Connect with students one-on-one, and then have an efficient way to collect personal information. Depending on your strategy, you can use this to distribute physical mailers or other types of communications.
• To build your email marketing list, use a well-designed website to collect information from site visitors. You can use a simple pop-up message, web form, or content in exchange for an email address. This allows you to stay in touch with website visitors and prospective students.
• An additional option is to collect mobile phone numbers for future student contact. This data enables SMS marketing and promotions, if you decide to launch these campaigns at a later time.

Tip 3: Get Serious About Social Media Marketing

There’s a reason why social media is one of the most impressive outlets for digital marketing, even decades after its first appearance. The reason is that it works to build brand recognition and success. Many potential students spend hours a day surfing, scrolling, and finding answers to the questions they have.

Ramping up your social media marketing plan allows you to take advantage of a diverse set of options within each social platform. This includes:

• Social media advertising (some free, most paid)
• Influencer campaigns to showcase experiences and expertise
• Multiple content types, including photos, videos, discussions, and groups 
• Live streams and virtual events
• Special promotions and benefits for social media followers

The possibilities for building relationships with more people (including future hairdressers, salon owners, and potential students) through social media is as diverse as the number of channels and platforms. This diversity works in favor of schools like beauty schools, since so many of your school’s unique selling points can be easily displayed and shared on social media. 

Tip 4: Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Lead Generation

If you think that SEO is only important for small businesses and large corporations, think again. Optimizing organic search results is one way to improve the visibility of your beauty school for prospective students. 

Although SEO is multifaceted and occasionally technical, the benefits of having SEO strategy for beauty schools are many. Think about it this way—when future cosmetology students search online for the best programs, don’t you want your school to be one of the first that they see in Google?

SEO optimization is a long-term strategy, built from the ground up using your website and published content to answer questions that people are actively searching for. As you create published marketing content, keep SEO in mind by using the following tactics.

• Perform market research in your niche to see what students are searching for
• Develop a keyword strategy to start ranking for keywords like “best beauty schools”
• Know where your competitors stand and how they advertise on the internet
• Construct a relevant Google Business profile to rank better in local searches

Tip 5: Invest in Smart Tech and Automations

As your beauty school marketing scales, you might find it difficult to manage some of the backend processes that make it all possible. This includes connecting with real students and delivering valuable messages to them in a timely way.

Delivering on the promises you make to future students is a surefire way to build trust, and automated marketing tools can ensure that you never miss a beat. Higher education marketing software is also beneficial when you want to accomplish the following goals.

• Implement an education-specific CRM tool for managing student data
• Deliver automated marketing messages and reminders to new students
• Engage new and current students with powerful campaigns
• Review and analyze data on current admissions and enrollment trends

A student engagement platform is suitable for beauty schools of any size looking to grow and scale enrollment. By taking control of your campaigns and insights, you’ll be better equipped to deliver an experience that satisfies your students.

Personalize Beauty School Marketing with Element451

As you set goals for beauty school enrollment this year, remember to put students in the driver’s seat. Without prioritizing personalized student engagement, you might be left running lots of marketing experiments that sound great but miss the mark. 

At Element451, we’ll help your trade school find its rhythm. With modern student engagement tools, you’ll be equipped to deliver personalized marketing experiences that increase enrollment while generating positive results for your program.

>> Schedule an Element451 demo today. <<