Why Your Private School Needs a Strong Brand [Podcast]

Angela Brown is the Enrollment Marketing Leader, K-12 at Niche, where she's on a mission to help make K-12 admission and marcom professionals' lives easier. Before joining Niche, she was director of marketing and communications at Flint Hill School, a PK-12, co-ed day school just outside of Washington, DC. Angela joined Flint Hill in 2014 after spending 10 years focusing on B2B marketing communications. She is a member of the American Marketing Association, National Association of Independent Schools, and Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington. In December 2020 she served as a judge for the InspirED Brilliance Awards, which honors marketing and communications work from PK-12 private schools around the world.

Angela Brown

Angela Quoted

“Every industry believes they are nuanced, but schools really are.”

“People are in schools for a much higher purpose.” 

“When you’re a school marketer, you are one of the only people, if not the only person, who has a background doing something outside of schools.”

“If you’re an elite school with high enrollment, you probably don’t think you need to invest in branding. And that’s a misconception.”

 “Schools don’t understand having a strong brand is connected to their ability to do everything else that they’re doing.” 

“There’s a lack of understanding of the role of marketing communications at a school.”

“Not having the director of marcom in your leadership team puts you at a disadvantage.”

“As an exercise for groups at school, I took the taglines for a handful of peer schools in our local market and I put them next to the names of the schools. I asked them to match them and no one could do it.”

“People overlook photography when they’re talking about branding, and it’s as much your visual identity as your logo.”

What You’ll Learn

• Making the change from corporate to private schools

•  One of the mistakes Angela made when she first got to a school.

•  Branding is about more than just you see. 

•  The why is just as important as the what. (Simon Sinek)

•  How to help families differentiate your school from the one down the street.

•  How to look at how job descriptions are written.

•  When hiring, it’s important to convey the school’s brand and what success looks like for that hire in 3, 6, 9 months.

•  Advice on how to break silos down for the benefit of the brand.

•  What you need from the school for a brand to be successful.

•  Branding isn’t a marketing project. It’s organizational initiative.

•  Why taglines don’t get you very far in marketing or provide meaningful differentiation from other schools.

• Why is marcom still not part of the leadership team. 

• Why thinking of your school as person helps your marketing.

• What is your school’s personality and voice?

• What is Niche, what do they do, and how do they do it?

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