Why does your school need a landing page?

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If your school’s running a paid traffic campaign with Google PPC, Facebook, or LinkedIn adverts, then you need a dedicated landing page.

Read on to discover…

  • What a ‘landing page’ is – and how they differ from websites.
  • Why landing pages are superior to websites for advertising.
  • How a landing page works – and how you can build one.

Why should you never send paid traffic to your school website?

You need a dedicated landing page to get impressive results from your advertising campaigns – as visitors can disappear anywhere on a traditional school website.

Sending any kind of paid traffic to a website is a digital marketing faux pas.

Your website isn’t designed to drive conversions.

Imagine sending invitations to your birthday party.

You wouldn’t send your guests an invitation telling them that it’s ‘in Geneva’ and hope they found your house – amidst thousands of buildings – without getting lost.

You’d send each guest clear directions to your front door, guide the way with balloons and welcome them in with cake and champagne.

You need a website page that’s designed to do one thing – guide parents to your brochure download form.

A visitor could do anything when they arrive at your website.

You’ve probably got tens or even hundreds of hyperlinks and pages for them to click and read while they quickly forget about the advert that they clicked on.

Eventually, they’ll get bored and leave.

So, you’ve just paid for a click that cost money and gave nothing in return.

If you’re running a paid traffic campaign to recruit students, you need a focused, single-purpose website page designed to serve this goal.

We call this a ‘landing page’.

How can a landing page help you to recruit more students?

A landing page will deliver a focused pitch to each parent, build their interest – and generate far more enquiries than any traditional website.

Your mission is to recruit more students to your school.

Student recruitment is about lead capture

As we both know, student recruitment is a complex process that involves building a huge amount of trust and ‘nurturing’ each parent with personalised outreach, high-quality content, and conversations with academic staff (more on this in another article).

So, the primary goal of your paid traffic campaign is to capture their contact details.

Typically, a school landing page will offer a brochure in exchange for a parent’s email address, name, and phone number.

Secondary goals could include booking a meeting, a Zoom call, or a campus tour, to kickstart the nurturing process.

You can configure your landing page to automatically send the brochure via email and trigger an automated sequence of email follow-ups that build engagement and ask if they’d like to book a meeting (again, we’ll explore this in future content).

Landing pages are purpose-designed to capture leads

A landing page is a dedicated, standalone website page designed exclusively to achieve these goals – with no hyperlinks, menus, or other distractions.

You can even customise multiple landing pages to serve specific markets, audiences, and more granular goals – like different age groups, campuses, and curriculums.

A personalised landing page will speak to parents directly and convert far more into warm, engaged sign-ups than any traditional website can.

That’s why your student recruitment campaigns should always point to a dedicated landing page that will maximise your ROI (return on investment).

How does a landing page work?

A landing page features a ‘Hero’ section, followed by several benefits sections and a call-to-action – with some strategic tracking under the hood.

Always start with a Hero

Every landing page should start with a Hero – an introductory section that delivers your entire pitch in several lines, with a call-to-action.

A Hero includes three main elements:

  • Headline – an evocative, inspiring hook that sells your school.
  • Explainer – a more detailed explanation that adds credibility.
  • Call-to-action (CTA) – typically a contact form and brochure download.

You can also include examples of social proof (eg. statistics about your school’s ratings and performance) in the Hero section.

If a parent’s a strong match for your school, then they may be sufficiently excited that they will immediately fill in your contact form, without checking the rest of the website page.

It’s important that they can do this and don’t have to scroll down.

Warm-up cooler visitors with benefits and extra content

Some parents will respond positively to your headline and explainer, but want to see and hear more about your school before they decide to request a brochure.

It’s important to consider your school’s standout features.

  • An amazing location.
  • Exceptional sports facilities.
  • A unique curriculum for a specific type of student.
  • Fantastic reviews and ratings.

You can capture these with a short, punchy section for each – remember that your landing page should be concise, energetic, and quick to read.

A short, inspiring video of your campus, staff, and students can also build engagement.

Finally, you can deliver an inspiring and personable message from your headmaster, along with extra social proof (reviews and ratings) – then deliver the CTA again.

It’s worth hiring a professional copywriter and a designer to ensure that your website copy and design are engaging and ready to deliver results.

Track and iterate your landing page to perfection

Your landing page will only deliver optimum results when it’s regularly tested and improved – a process that we call ‘iteration’.

It’s important to track your visitor interaction in detail so that you can check the performance of your landing page – section-by-section.

Tools like Hotjar enable you to see areas of the page with low interaction, which presents an opportunity for your team to improve that content.

Google Analytics offers powerful tracking tools, but it’s complex and can be difficult to use.

You can host your landing page on your school website, but you’ll need to deactivate your header and footer – along with any other distracting elements.

For these reasons and more, a dedicated landing page builder like Unbounce, Leadpages, or Instapage usually makes more sense than self-hosting.

Ensure you have a performance marketer on your team who can track your campaign results and analyse any data to suggest improvements.

Get a professional landing page and campaign solution

School Funnel Pro can build, deliver, and optimise a complete paid traffic campaign for your school – including a professional landing page.

We supply a world-class team of creative professionals – including a dedicated sales copywriter, designer, and performance ads manager – who will design, test, and iterate your landing page to ensure that it delivers great results.

All you have to do is respond to the parents that we’ll send straight to your inbox.

We can also integrate our campaign with booking systems like Calendly to book campus tours and consultations on autopilot.

Simply book a call with Nick, our Accounts Director, to find out how easy we can make student recruitment for your school.

Book your free consultation

Discover out how easy your student recruitment could be.
Just book a free call to find out how you can get started.

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Why does your school need a landing page?

If your school’s running a paid traffic campaign with Google PPC, Facebook, or LinkedIn adverts, then you need a dedicated landing page. Read on to

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