English UK is keen to help all its member centres improve their digital marketing skills to attract more students. We work closely with ELT digital marketing specialist Richard Bradford of Disquiet Dog, offering both open and bespoke training courses for members and groups of members.

The courses are very popular with participants, as from the first hour they learn practical skills to make their marketing more effective. Chris Belcher, of Richard Language College in Bournemouth, who joined the June course, said: "What I got out of the course was how to make our digital marketing more effective. I found it really useful, in an area I didn't know much about. I know what I need to be doing now. I expected to be lectured at but there was a lot of 1-2-1 stuff, and exercises like looking at each other's websites was really useful."

Maribel Cabrera-Molina, principal of Country Cousins, also on the June course, added: "I really enjoyed it. There was an intense amount of knowledge and I learned a lot of new things about digital marketing and it was really useful.

"I will definitely recommend it to others – I feel anybody who works in a school or other business nowadays really needs to have insight into digital marketing and this is the right course to go on."

How can ELT centres make their digital marketing effective?

Disquiet Dog's messages are simple for centres to learn and master. They explain how you need to create ELT marketing content that is unique, relevant and original, and do it using keywords which best describe your centre, rather than every other centre in your town or city.

Some of their ideas on how to get your message across can be more surprising. Read on to find out more.

Outreach: Get your agents involved

On the June Digital Marketing course, Richard asked: "Have you got your agents involved in marketing your school?" He suggested:

• Asking agents to include your chosen keywords when they write about your school on their website
• Encouraging visiting agents to make short videos of your school and publishing them on their website
• Encouraging agents to post student films about your centre on their website

All of this helps your profile on search engines because of the link to your school from a third-party website.

Outreach: get other members of staff involved

This might be a more surprising suggestion, but Richard also encourages centres to get different members of staff involved in the marketing effort.

"You could give your finance people the analytics to look like – and stand well back! They know what pays in your organisation – how does that translate into the most popular pages on your website? Plus, you build a nice new relationship with that department and that can be very useful," he said.

Want to be better at digital marketing?

Why not book your place on our next course in January 2018, or organise a bespoke session? This is a cost-effective way of getting lots of staff up to speed, or sharing the session with other ELT centres.