For virtually any school, increasing enrolments is not just necessary – it constitutes a perpetual battle of how best to communicate with parents and students – both existing and prospective. But a common mistake that schools make is to treat their entire customer base as one single buyer – in other words, that every parent who considers sending their child to your school has exactly the same needs, wants, expectations and objectives.
In this article, we’ll look at how to create buyer personas of parents, and how doing so makes your school’s communication strategy more meaningful and effective in increasing enrolments.
What are parent personas?
Parent personas are fictional characters that help you understand your real life customers and prospective customers (parents, in this case) better. This makes it easy to tailor your content, communication and offers to have maximum impact within a defined section of your target market. In other words, you might know who your target buyers are, but parent personas help you understand their specific wants, needs, fears and interests. Parent personas should be as detailed as possible – going as far as giving each persona a name, age and background.
How are parent personas the key to increasing enrolments at my school?
Schools typically treat their target market as a single, amorphous group: parents. But with a bit of thought, it’s easy to see why that’s an ineffective marketing tactic. Parents, even of children around the same age and in similar lifestyle brackets, often have little else in common, and as such, marketing to them as a uniform group likely means you won’t be communicating with anyone in a truly meaningful way. Creating parent personas allows you to see your customers and prospective customers as individuals, and deliver content and messaging that provide real value to them.
How to create parent personas
The first step in creating parent personas is to put yourself in the shoes of potential students and their families to get a feel for their expectations, motivations and aspirations. The more in-depth you get with these motives and concerns, the more your brand will resonate with your target market.
School business managers are in a good position to create parent personas as they have ample opportunity to engage with parents and prospective students and get to know them better – it’s advisable to use these insights strategically. There’s nothing more dangerous than assumption here: make sure that your data is based on verifiable facts, otherwise the entire exercise will be a waste of time and energy. Parents today have different expectations compared to those of years past, so approach the exercise with an open mind and remember that you may end up with several different personas, which may have radically different needs and expectations.
Key questions to ask when creating parent personas:
- What are the demographics of our parents and students?
- What kind of lives do the parents lead?
- Where and how does our audience consume content? How can we best reach them? Think outside the box here, as the average person today consumes content from a wide variety of channels and sources.
- What drives them to make buying decisions?
- What problems, challenges or concerns do they face?
- What problems do they come to us to solve?
- How can we solve these problems, and how do we make them aware of the solution?
- How do we define a successful approach to engagement with parents from the start?
- How do we ensure that our engagement with them continues throughout the buying process?
Developing parent personas is only the first step in your journey to increasing enrolments
Once you’ve created detailed parent personas, it remains to put an effective and engaging marketing strategy in place. Creating personas alone isn’t the key to increasing enrolments in your school – you need to use those insights to communicate with prospective customers in a meaningful way that addresses their particular wants, needs and concerns.
Understanding your parent personas is vital. To make sure you get your personas right the first time, download our free guide to creating buyer personas for students and their parents. 
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