25 Inbound Marketing Tools for School Marketing

Inbound marketing for schools is all about helping potential families find your school. It is a strategic approach to creating valuable content that inspires families to want to learn more about your school. It’s also about being present wherever your potential families are engaged.

Inbound marketing services, such as email marketing, content, SEO,  and marketing automation are all great ways to provide relevant, helpful information to parents. But providing content means you need to utilize inbound marketing platforms so that your inbound marketing strategy is consistent and effective.

What Are Inbound Marketing Tools?

Inbound marketing tools are software applications you use to facilitate your marketing efforts on various inbound marketing channels. A combination of inbound marketing platforms helps move families along in their enrollment journey.

In today’s article, we will explore top inbound marketing tools to help you increase inquiries for your school.

Types of Inbound Marketing Tools

While there is a wide range of inbound marketing apps available today; most are centered around content optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), website optimization, social media, customer relationship management, marketing automation, videos, and analytics.

Here are 25 top inbound marketing tools you school should consider using to help save marketing time and resources.

Content Optimization Tools

Let’s start with content optimization. Afterall, quality content is an essential element of inbound marketing for schools. Content optimization tools can help your content creators produce strong content for your target families.

Getting your content ranked high in search engines isn’t easy. It’s all about using the right keywords, graphics, meta and title tags, and links. Schools should learn to rely on content optimization tools to help increase their chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages.

  1. Small SEO Tools

Small SEO Tools is one of the best collections of FREE content optimization tools every marketer should consider using. They offer over 120 tools organized into 17 categories. To give you an idea, the 17 categories include:

  • Text Analysis Tools
  • Design Studio Tools
  • Image Editing Tools
  • Keyword Tools (I personally love the keywords density, keywords suggestions and keyword research tools)
  • Backlink Tools
  • Website Management Tools
  • Website Tracking Tools
  • Proxy Tools
  • Domains Tools
  • Meta Tags Tools
  • Password Management Tools
  • Online PDF Tools
  • Development tools
  • Unit Converter Tools
  • Binary Converter Tools
  • Online Calculators
  • Other Tools

There are so many nifty tools here be sure to check them out!

  1. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is a content research and keyword planner tool that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI). MarketMuse helps marketers analyze their content, suggest topics, and develop content briefs. It also offers real-time feedback on content using a scoring system to help creators improve the quality of their content.

  1. Canva

Canva is a popular graphic design tools that can be used to create beautiful visual content. As you already know, graphic design is an important aspect of content creation. Visuals not only support written content but also are a great way to present complex concepts easily.

  1. Grammarly

Grammarly uses a sophisticated AI system and cutting-edge algorithms to find issues in your content and make suggestions. I use it to help with spelling, grammar, style, punctuation, tone and even plagiarism. It also helps improve the fluency and readability of your text.

  1. SparkToro

SparkToro is a great tool for conducting audience research to gain a deeper knowledge of your target audience and their needs. The idea behind SparkToro is as a replacement expensive market research surveys. It really is one of the best audience intelligence tools on the web.

  1. Content Row

Content Row is a powerful headline generator and analyzer tool. To use the headline generator tool, enter one to two topics and choose what type of headline you want – blog title, YouTube title or clickbait title. To use the headline analyzer tool, enter your seed headline, receive a score, assess the strengths of the title and get suggestions for improvement. It’s that simple!

SEO Optimization Tools

  1. Keyword Tool Dominator

Keyword Tool Dominator helps you find long-tail keywords. It can be a very useful tool when you want to optimize your content for Google as well as other search engines.

  1. Keyworddit

Reddit is a very popular network and it’s a great place to connect with target audiences. If you can find a subreddit that fits the persona of your target audience, you can actually conduct research to find out more about what they are interested in and talking about. Once you’ve found the right subreddit, just enter it into Keyworddit and it will give you keywords and their monthly search volume.

  1. LSI Keywords Generator

Search engines are very sophisticated in terms of how they recognize and rank content relevant for any given query. LSI keywords can help search engines understand your content even more. LSI keywords are related keywords to your primary keyword.

A top tool you can use to generate LSI keywords is LSI Keywords Generator by Keysearch.

  1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the most underrated SEO optimization tools. It’s primarily used to check the performance of your website from Google’s point of view. However, it also will show you underperforming keywords that can be easily optimized to improve your search engine results page (SERP) ranking. Read more: 9 Google Search Console Features Important for School Marketers

  1. SEMRush

SEMRush is a great tool to use for keyword research and online ranking data. It also collects information about keywords gathered on search engines.

  1. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a great tool for generating seed keywords. It will give you actual queries related to your search term based on “what”, “when”, “why”, “how”, “who”, “will”, “which”, “can”, and “are”. This can give you excellent information on what people are searching for based on your topic. The information gleaned from this tool can also be used to help you determine content topics.

  1. ScreamingFrog

ScreamingFrog is a website audit tool you can use to crawl your website and find common SEO issues.

Social Media Management Tools

  1. Hubspot Social Media Management Software

Hubspot gives you the ability to run all your social media campaigns from one dashboard. It’s easy to set up your posts, monitor for @mentions and keywords so you never miss an opportunity to engage with your audience.

  1. Buffer

Buffer is an all-in-one social media scheduling tool. If you’re looking for a tool to schedule and manage your social media and gather analytics, Buffer is a good choice.

  1. Tailwind for Pinterest

Tailwind is a top tool for managing your Pinterest account. It is a scheduling tool that allows you to schedule an ideal 20 pins per day. You can even schedule pins to multiple boards in intervals to place the pins 5 days or more apart. The analytics suite offers plenty of benefits as well,  including performances of every pin, tracking pins, repins and growth comments, board insights, and domain insights. Popular pins give you an idea of what your target audience really wants.

  1. Later for Instagram and TikTok

Later is a top tool for scheduling Instagram and sending TikTok reminders. It includes a digital content calendar, Instagram grid preview, media library, conversations management and offers insights.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

  1. Hubspot for Educators

Hubspot for Educators is a popular CRM tool that offers specialized features for educational organizations. Their CRM is designed to target and track prospective family journeys through the admissions process. Hubspot really shines when it comes to inbound marketing, integrating with social media, SEO, and blogging, and converting them through email marketing. 

  1. Zoho CRM for Education

Zoho CRM is integrated software for managing relationships with potential families. It brings your inquiry, marketing and family support activities together to streamline your process, policy, and people all in one platform.

  1. Salesforce Education CRM

Like Zoho, Salesforce offers features designed for educational institutions. It can helps schools get a better and holistic view of student and lead retention, which allows you to improve the inquiry and family enrollment journey along the way.

Video Tools

  1. Vidyard

Vidyard is a video creation and hosting platform. It offers analytic information to help organizations assess the ROI of their video content.

  1. Lumen5

Lumen5 is a video creation tool that uses A.I. to help users create engaging video content. This is an easy to use tool.

  1. Animoto

Animoto is another video creation and editing tool that’s easy to use. The templates make it easy to create videos with stunning designs.

Analytics and Reporting Tools

  1. Databox

Databox is a cloud-based analytics tool used by marketers to view key performance indicators (KPIs) and generate reports.

  1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have tool for school marketers in order to get the most out of your website and marketing efforts. Google Analytics gives you the tools you need to better understand your visitors. GA collects data from your website to create reports that provide important insights. Read more: Basic Google Analytics Guide Schools Can Use to Improve Inbound Marketing Efforts

Although this is not a comprehensive list of all inbound marketing tools, I hope this will help get you started on the right path. These tools will help you determine how best to use your time and resources, improve your online content, inquiry management strategies, and overall online presence.

What inbound marketing tools does your school use? What tools should be added to this list? Please comment below…

About the author 

Brendan Schneider

Hey, I’m Brendan, and this is my blog. After 28 years working in private, independent schools in mostly admissions, enrollment, marketing, communications, and fundraising roles, I decided to make SchneiderB Media my full-time job, where I help schools get more inquiries through my Fractional Digital Marketer program. I also started the MarCom Society, a membership created expressly to help, support, and train marketing and communications professionals at schools.