Marketing in a school environment has its unique challenges. Welcome to "3"ā€¦three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker. To find out more about these challenges and potential solutions, I've turned to Josephine McKenrick, the Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications at Cincinnati Country Day School. Josephine, what drew you to marketing in the educational world to begin with?
Josephine McKenrick: What drew me is that I love the school environment. I love working with children, faculty, and staff in a school setting, and I get to be a jill of all trades. I get to do everything! I'm challenged at every turn, no two days are the same. And, I get to work with parents and faculty and staff; and, especially this parent piece: I'm working with parents, children, and their money. And, I love that they trust me and hold me accountable to that.
Drew: That combination seems to bring with it a lot of emotion, priorities, and perspectives. How do you approach this?
Josephine: Primarily you have to meet people where they are, and I think the key to that is reinforcing to them that they've made a good decision for their family, for their child. So, whether that's a public school, private school, independent, Catholic, whatever that is, that you need to just reinforce to them, that their choice was a good one, and that means that you're constantly asking for feedback and applying them.
Drew: So what do you do with the feedback from the parents? How has that leveraged?
Josephine: Well, I think one example of this is that, during COVID, parents could not come into the buildings, and so they really...we heard from them that they wanted to see into the classrooms, they wanted to see what their children were doing on a day-to-day basis, so we really leaned heavily into social media and storytelling on that platform to make sure that parents were catching a glimpse of what their children were doing most days of the week, and really being able to experience that with them along the way.
Drew: That's a great example of the feedback loop, understanding what your market wants and then giving it to them, and it certainly helps them confirm that they made a good decision. "3" is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com and just one of the resources we provide marketing and business leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.