Boost Your Online School's Presence In 5 Simple Steps
Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll be outlining the things any school (same contents apply to any business) can do and focus on to achieve growth below:
1. Obsess Over Your Student's Overall Learning Experience
From day one, tending to your student's questions, frustrations, and overall educational experience is really seminal in their satisfaction. This, of course, helps increase the chance of them telling their friends about you.
You can do this by:
- Using tools that help you provide a better “educational” experience so that they are better seasoned to enter the work-force. This is essentially how you are supposed to think; if my students complete their “educational” experience with me, they ought to be able to work using what I taught them the next day. Free products like Tendoledu will help you do just that.
- If you haven’t already, explore platforms that can offer tools that help you provide a concierge educational experience for your students. (This will help you boost word-of-mouth.)
2. Use Tools That Are Both High Quality And Niche
Make your online school stand out by making sure that you use the most efficient tools that save you time and catch your students’ interest. Using niche tools helps you distinguish yourself, a high-quality learning experience makes sure of that. Make life easy for yourself by utilizing tools that help you in your resource organization, measuring student satisfaction, and test/quiz creation. You can easily access cheap tools that allow you to create up to 15,000, surveys, tests, ePortfolios, in your subject.
There are plenty of tools out there that you can take for a spin but the most effective tools I’ve used are these ones:
- Accredible
- Vizzual Forms
- Poll Daddy
- Symbalooedu
- Yacapaca
3. Focus On Updating Your Content Regularly
Keeping up with the latest updates in your area of expertise will help you prepare up-to-date content. Your content speaks for you more than your headlines do. Offering students top-quality educational content and skills highly depend on your content’s relevance to today’s market. Search for new ways to introduce information, better examples and more interactive content to your students. Always try to put yourself in the students' shoes in order to know which parts of your content you can improve. Empathy with students is always key to improving your customer experience. Aim to update your content every 4-6 weeks in order to match new students’ interests and provide the ones you already have with more relevant and up-to-date know-how and skills.
4. Open Doors For Student-Student Interactions
Helping your students interact with one another, and with you, is a great way to instill a sense of community to your school. Helping your students connect is a great way to:
- Build a loyal following that will promote your school to their peers
- Keep everyone in the loop
- Engage with your students on interesting topics
Many schools have taken to existing social platforms to do this. Starting a subreddit or a private Facebook group are the easiest and cheapest ways to build a community. To understand how beneficial helping your students connect to one another, we have to first look into the subject of human psychology but, unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this article. To sum it up, though, humans are in need of feeling social and are always looking for a sense of camaraderie. Anything that facilitates this will help you in building a better experience for your students.
5. Keep Your Students Engaged At All Times
One thing everyone forgets is the importance of sending newsletters, and how it could help with:
- Nurturing your students' curiosity by sending them relevant articles and informative reads daily... There are great tools that will help you do just that!
- Staying relevant to your students
- Increasing your retention rate
If you choose to follow the pointers outlined above, you should end up with these 3 takeaways:
- Getting to know your students more will help you to gain valuable insight into their needs, and how you can re-structure your school to meet these needs.
- Empathy is key; always putting yourself in your students' shoes will help you build and grow your school better.
- Always obsess over making your students happy, even after they complete your school’s course. Try to give them real-world experience so they enter the work-force with confidence. They will thank you for it.
As a closing note: Always remember to make sure that you provide an exceptional learning experience, use the best and most unique tools, and update your content regularly in order to successfully boost your online school’s presence.
