49 Independent School Content Marketing Topics

Here are two facts. First, content marketing has been proven to be an extremely successful means of differentiating and driving results for businesses and organizations. Fact number two – independent schools should be doing way more content marketing.

Stop. Let’s make sure we understand what content marketing is. According to the Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

In very simple terms, content marketing is providing parents or prospective parents with information or experiences (think video) they will consider valuable and will share with others. The real point is that by providing this content, a school demonstrates both its expertise and its ability to relate to the interests and concerns of parents. Great content can make a school’s website or social media platforms a hub for those seeking valuable information or expert opinions.

To be clear, content marketing is not news about the basketball team’s big win, your school’s state-leading performance in standardized tests or a video from the latest science fair.

Content can be delivered from a resource section on your website, through blogs, in e-newsletters, videos, prezi-type presentations, via social media platforms, Vine videos or even apps if your school has one. Content is most effective when it’s written or developed by people within in a school – heads of school, educational leaders, faculty, administrators, lay leaders, staff people and maybe even students. Content marketing also works best when its themes align with your school’s brand or experience and when its part of a plan. This post provides some useful perspectives.

If you think about content marketing as a form of knowledge transfer, you would think that schools, which are wells of knowledge, should be overflowing with ideas for content marketing. And yet, when I talk to schools about content marketing the response I inevitably get is “what would we talk about?”

So, in the interest of making it easier for schools to get going with their content marketing planning, here are 49 suggested content marketing topics for independent schools.

1. Pre-literacy activities you can do with your child
2. The pros and cons of standardized testing
3. How to help your child with homework
4. How do you know if your child is gifted
5. Age/grade level book recommendations
6. How to prepare a pre-schooler for Grade 1
7. Activities at home to build fine motor skills
8. How do know if you should hire a tutor for your child
9. How to talk to children about terrorism
10. What exactly is critical thinking?
11. Humorous conversations overheard at school
12. Suggestions for educational apps
13. A teacher’s view of parent teacher conferences
14. Is being perfect a healthy goal?
15. The school day from the perspective of a front office staff member
16. Until what age should you read to your children?
17. The most outrageous rumors heard in the parking lot
18. How to watch TV with your children
19. What does 21^st century learning really mean?
20. How to help your child build self-confidence
21. What your children really does with the lunches you pack
22. The pros and cons of teenage cynicism
23. When is it too early to talk about college prep?
24. How to help your children learn from receiving a poor grade
25. The pros and cons of student competition
26. A teacher’s perspective on managing teenage angst
27. What’s better? – Summer camp or summer jobs
28. Do students need to know cursive writing anymore?
29. Strategies for improving SAT scores
30. Managing the transition to high school
31. How you can help your child find a school/career path
32. Is it really bad to be a helicopter parent?
33. The academic benefits of participating in athletics
34. How to help your child cope with the stress of exams
35. The best ways students can study for tests
36. The best excuses for not having homework done
37. Is it ever ok to complain about the mark your child received on a test?
38. How to argue with your teenager
39. The synergies of STEM
40. Where do teachers go to learn?
41. How do you know if your child is over programmed?
42. The differences between bullying and arguing
43. What to do when your child says, “I have no friends”
44. The challenges of raging hormones in a high school classroom
45. The funniest excuses students have used for being late
46. Some school-related signs that your child needs glasses
47. How students are using their phones in the classroom
48. Do students really need to know how to tell time?
49. Strategies for surviving car pool

 You can see that topics don’t always have to be serious. They just have to be interesting or of value. I figure that if I could come up with 49 topics, there must be thousands more that you can write, blog, video, prezi or talk about.

What do you think?

Have you used any of these for your content marketing? Which ones do you hate? Which do you love? What’s the state of content marketing at your school?

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.netPhoto