What Every School Leader Should Know About Strategic Marketing

This episode of the Independent School Moonshot Podcast is sponsored by RG175. Behind every successful school is a great leader—learn more about how RG175 can support your school's next search!

👉 https://rg175.com/

What if the secret to enrollment growth isn’t doing more but doing it the right way?

In this candid and insightful episode, Brendan Schneider, founder of SchneiderB Media, a longtime advocate for school marketers, and author of School Marketing the Right Way, pulls back the curtain on why so many independent schools struggle to market effectively, how his new book aims to close the knowledge gap, and what building a marketing system means in 2025.

You will walk away with actionable ideas for refining your school’s marketing efforts, whether you’re a head of school, a one-person MarCom team, or an enrollment director trying to do more with less.

From SEO to print advertising and CRM strategy to the dangers of bloated inquiry forms, Brendan challenges school leaders to rethink what effective marketing truly looks like.

What You'll Learn from Brendan Schneider:

Marketing ≠ Communications: Brendan distinguishes marketing as recruitment and communications as retention—a distinction many schools still blur. Misunderstanding this leads to hiring the wrong people for the wrong jobs.

Tactics Don’t Work in Isolation: Too many schools expect magic from a single tactic—like Google ads—without supporting systems. Brendan emphasizes that strategy must be holistic to be effective.

Stop Asking for the World on Your Inquiry Form: Only ask for information you’ll use. An overloaded form feels like an application and scares prospects away. Prioritize a clean conversion path.

The Secret Sauce: Measurement + Iteration: Schools rarely measure results and iterate accordingly. Brendan argues that marketers must be allowed to fail, test, and learn to find what works.

Most Schools Overweight Social Media, Undervalue SEO: Organic reach on social platforms is nearly dead. Meanwhile, good SEO remains one of the best-underused opportunities for schools to get found.

Discussion Prompts

Do we differentiate between marketing and communications in our org chart and expectations?

Where are we investing time or money in marketing efforts without clear measurement?

How might we build a sustainable marketing system instead of relying on one-off tactics?

Are we creating space for our marketing team to experiment, fail, and learn, or are we playing it too safe?

What are the sacred cows in our marketing plan need to be challenged or eliminated?