Branding your school

Are you a school administrator with a lot on your plate? It can be difficult to keep track of all the moving parts and make sure your school is well-branded. But don’t worry, we’re here to help! In this blog post, we’ll give you some tips for branding your school. Keep reading to learn more.

What is branding and why is it important for schools?

Branding is the process of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates your school from other schools. Branding is important because it sets you apart from other schools in the way that potential students view your offerings. Branding can help you recruit new students, faculty and staff to a more appealing environment by ensuring your marketing materials are cohesive and professional and by advertising the right benefits of your school. Branding is also important for keeping track of who your school is, so you can keep your branding consistent across all platforms.

How do you brand a school?

Branding begins with having a plan in place to give yourself or team direction on how to create professional marketing materials that are universally recognizable as coming from your school. Branding also includes creating a cohesive message that can be applied to all material, such as email templates and PowerPoint presentations. Branding takes time and requires careful planning and consistency across all aspects of your marketing materials.

What should I consider when branding my school?

When you’re thinking about how to brand your school, you need to think about your audience and who is going to be seeing these materials. School branding isn’t just for parents, it’s also for students, faculty and alumni. Branding can include the school mascot or a logo that incorporates the school colors along with an easily recognizable acronym or name of the school. Branding should also always convey a professional and welcoming image. Branding should also convey the right message about your school’s offerings. Branding is also an ongoing process that needs to be regularly reviewed and updated as needed because circumstances change over time.

What are some benefits of branding a school?

Branding your school can benefit you in a number of ways, including: increasing enrollment, improving the school’s image and standing in the community, expressing a credible and serious image to parents, students and other stakeholders. Branding also helps you keep track of what your brand is so that it can be consistently used. Branding gives you a platform for what you want people to think about when they think about your school.

By Branding your school, you’re helping to ensure its success in the classroom. Branding can help you reach an audience through marketing materials that are attractive and well-organized. Branding your school takes careful planning and requires a cohesive message communicated consistently across all channels. Branding also helps you establish the right image for the school, one that is

What are the different elements of a school’s branding strategy?

Brand strategy: A brand strategy is a plan for how to achieve branding goals and provides the overall view of what your school wants to accomplish with branding. Such as reaching certain audiences with messaging or having a cohesive brand.

Branding: Branding includes creating a logo, name and color scheme that can be consistently used throughout all marketing materials.

Brand elements: Brand elements are the individual parts of your school’s brand such as its logo, colors or motto.

Brand guidelines: Brand guidelines help you maintain consistency in all areas of the school and all platforms used to present information about the school so that everything looks professional and polished. The best way to keep branding consistent is by having strict guidelines in place at every step along the way so no one person or department can change branding elements without consulting others. Brand guidelines can include how to use the schools colors, the schools logo and name, and other instructions on how to reproduce marketing materials that convey a cohesive image. Brand guidelines also should be reviewed regularly because circumstances do change over time and branding should remain current as needed.

How can you create a brand that represents your school accurately and authentically?

Creating a brand for your school that represents it accurately can be challenging. Branding is an ongoing process that requires regular review to ensure the image you are portraying remains relevant and consistent over time. Branding also should convey a professional and welcoming image because those are important qualities for any school to convey to those who see their materials.

Branding should always reflect the right message about your school’s offerings as well as giving off a credible and serious image to students, faculty and alumni as well as parents, guardians and other stakeholders involved in your school’s success.

Branding also helps you reach an audience through marketing materials that are attractive and well-organized.

How can you make sure your branding is effective and resonates with your target audience?

There are a few steps you can take to make sure your branding is effective and resonates with the target audience you want to communicate with such as:

• Define your target audiences
• Identifying key messaging and brand elements
• Maintaining consistency in all ways of presenting information about the school including using only approved vendors.

Your target audience should be considered when creating messaging for your school, because it will play a big role in how you want to present yourself. You should also consider what certain target audiences would expect from the brand you are creating. For example, if you are trying to communicate with students at high school age, they might feel turned off by imagery that is too professional and polished so messaging should reflect this.

Branding elements such as logos, colors and even fonts can be chosen to target specific audiences.  For example, certain colors can target different age groups more than others. For example, purple might target older students while pink might target younger students or even children in general. Fonts can be chosen to target specific audiences too . For example, comic sans might target children while more traditional fonts would target older students or target an adult audience.

Once you have identified your target audiences and the messaging you want to convey then messaging should be reviewed for consistency with other branding elements used throughout all marketing materials. Consistency is very important when it comes to branding because a professional

Keep branding consistent across all platforms

Maintaining consistency in how you present information about the school is an important part of branding because anything that gets changed or updated should always be approved by others involved (such as your marketing team) to ensure imagery remains consistent with messaging. For example, using approved vendors for printing materials ensures the quality of the final product does not suffer.

With over 10 years designing and developing branding strategies for education; including high schools, K-8, Universities and charter schools.

After getting his start marketing professional sports, later developing branding and promotional strategies for the music industry,  Mike Robinson got his start developing branding strategies for charter schools in the Akron and Cleveland area.

Applying and building creative strategies for businesses and organizations, including many non profits.

Adept creative has the experience and proven track record to provide effective marketing and branding strategies that drive more enrollments and improves retention rates for schools.

Contact Us today to see how we can help you reach your enrollment goals.