How to Advocate for a Bigger Marketing Budget at Your School
Many private school marketing teams are being asked to do more with less – even as competition for families continues to increase. According to our 2024-2025 State of Independent School Marketing Report (developed in collaboration with NAIS), budgets for many schools have remained flat or even declined, while expectations for outcomes have grown.
To sustain enrollment momentum and support institutional goals, school marketing teams need to be equipped with more than just creativity and effort – they need a clear, data-backed case for why investment in their work matters.
In this blog, we’ll show you how to use the data you already have to advocate for more resources, make smarter spending decisions, and demonstrate your team’s impact on enrollment.
Why Marketing Matters More Than Ever
Marketing plays a far more strategic role today than it did even five years ago. It informs admissions, strengthens community engagement, and supports your school’s development goals. Families now expect seamless digital experiences at every stage – from initial discovery through application and yield – with marketing often serving as their very first touchpoint.
Schools that view marketing as a growth and engagement driver rather than a cost center are seeing meaningful returns in both brand strength and enrollment outcomes.
Build Your Case
To build a strong case for investment, you first need to know what your current marketing budget covers – and how it compares to peer schools.
According to NAIS survey participants, most private school marketing budgets include:
- Digital advertising (search, social media, and retargeting)
- Websites
- Branding projects
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Traditional print and admissions collateral
- Events
- Yield communications
These categories form the foundation for your marketing mix, but it’s important to understand how your allocations align with your school’s size, location, and priorities.
Benchmarking helps with this. Comparing your school’s spend to industry averages can help reveal where you may be underinvesting or overinvesting. Read: How Does My Marketing Budget Stack Up Against Competitor Schools?
Find Your Inflection Points
After you’ve level-set your expectations for reasonable dollar amounts, take a look at your enrollment funnel to identify where you’re losing families:
- If inquiries are low, consider increasing your budget in awareness channels like search and social
- If applications lag after inquiry, focus on nurturing tactics such as remarketing campaigns and strategic email automation to guide families to their next step
- If accepted students aren’t enrolling, consider investing more into your event engagement and personalized follow-ups
Your budget should reflect where the greatest opportunity – or friction – exists along your family journey, according to the data.
Bring the Right Data to the Conversation
Marketing’s value is best understood when it’s linked to measurable outcomes. When preparing a report, show direct ties between your campaign results and enrollment pipeline goals. For example: “Our paid search campaign drove 40 new inquiries last quarter, 15 of which became completed applications.” You might take it a step further and track these applications through to enrollment, calculating the average life span of a student and the average tuition for each of those years to present a powerful ROI story.
Tracking these connections is sometimes the hardest part – especially when families engage with multiple channels, multiple times, before converting. That’s where attribution modeling comes in. By mapping key marketing touchpoints along the family journey, you can show how each tactic – from search ads to email nurturing – plays a role in driving inquiries and enrollments.
Learn more about how to build and interpret these models in our blog, Understanding Customer Journeys and Attribution Modeling
Consider taking a look at our recent Cost per Enrollment (CPE) Whitepaper, which provides a framework for understanding how effectively your budget drives actual enrollments. By tracking CPE – not just clicks or impressions – you can identify which channels deliver the best return and shift your spend accordingly.
Tell a Story Leadership Can Hear
Data matters, but memorable narratives help seal the deal. Use visuals, concise summaries, or dashboards to make complex data – and the resulting insights – digestible. Frame your recommendations in terms of opportunity: what could be achieved if marketing had the resources to scale proven tactics?
The goal is to show that your request isn’t for more budget, but for smarter investment.
By pairing data with strategic insights, you can help leadership see not just the cost of marketing, but its return – in mission, visibility, and long-term sustainability.
Learn more about creating powerful marketing presentations:
The Data Everyone Should Care About
Turn Your Head of School into a Marketing Champion
3 Golden Rules for Reporting to Your Board
Why Your Board Needs to Understand Assisted Conversions
At Metric Marketing, we develop measurable and practical strategies to help private and independent schools like yours to make the most of your marketing efforts. We’d love to discuss your private school’s marketing requirements with you. Contact us today to speak with our marketing professionals or use the form below to sign up and receive more marketing tips in your inbox.
