15 reasons why African schools need a business website

By website, I mean a well-designed website with quality contents. It is a website that customers would want to visit over and over again, which is what makes it possible for you to have a good return for your money.

Of course the best option for schools today is School Management System that incorporates both the internal school structure (dealings with staff reports, administrative processes, student’s fees, classroom management and the general assessment report) and external engagement platforms (communicating with parents and potential clients, online admission and blogging platform).

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A number of schools are already embracing this technology. While very many others are still grappling with the conventional offline stuff, with its numerous limitations.

Technology has made virtually everything easy, including education administration. It is expected then that African schools see the good side of technology and embrace it holistically.

While technology has its own cons, there are lots of goodies inherent in having business website for your school.

Consider these:

A Business Website Makes Your School Visible to Many

 Ordinarily, when dealing with offline business, it is only those that come physically to your business location that can know about your business. But if you have a website, anybody who has your website address can log in to your website and know what you do, read about your various offers and services and might end up making a decision to patronize you.

A Business Website Increases Your Market Reach

If you do not have a business website, you can only have a limited market within that limited geographical setting where your school is located. And in today’s business world, where there are a lot of competitions for customers, it would be a minus to your school to be confined to such limited setting. But, with a business website, you’ve got the entire globe as your market, making it possible to have students admitted into your school from beyond your geographical location.

A Business Website Makes Your Business to be Open 24 Hours a Day and 7 Days in a Week

Your brick-and-mortar business can open by 8.00 a.m. and close by 6.00 p.m. Anybody that comes to your school premises outside these hours will not be able to do business with you. Even if you create a platform to get a market reach beyond the national boundary of your business location, the differences in time zones around the world makes it impossible to be there for everyone at all times, as when you might wish to make contact, would be the exact time your potential clients would be deep in sleep.

But business website is open 24 hours in a day, seven days a week and 365 days in a year, which enables people visit your website at their convenient time, learn about your school, make necessary enquiries and even get registered online, no matter the time of the day. Even while you are sleeping, people could be making orders on your website. This will greatly increase your turnover and grow your school.

A Business Website Offers Cheaper Means of Advertising Your Services

Ordinarily, if you want to advertise your school activities and programs, you either buy a space on a newspaper to do it or you advertise on radio, television, magazines, etc. To buy a small space or slot in any of these media is very expensive and you end up not telling your prospective customers all that you want to tell them because of the high cost of space.

However, on your own website, you have ample space to tell your customers whatever you want to tell them about your services and programs. You can even include pictures, video and audio clips. You can also include the directions of use and whatever information you want to relate to them. The most interesting aspect of it is that while a newspaper, radio or television advertisement will only publish/show your advert for just one or few days; coming to your own website, your advert can stay as long as you want it to last without attracting any extra charges on you.

A Business Website Offers a Cheap Source of Market Research

Market research enables you to understand what your potential customers like and what they don’t like. By doing more of what your customers like and minimizing or eliminating what your customers don’t like, you can grow your school business very rapidly. Some tools on your website like; visitors polls, online surveys, website statistics and guest books enable you to carry out market research to improve and grow your school business online.

A Business Website Improves Your School’s Credibility

People usually regard schools that have websites as credible educational centers. When you want to do business with foreign partners, the first thing that would convince them of your genuine disposition and seriousness is your business website. Even while in their country, they can learn everything that they want to learn about your school through your website and find out how credible you are, which would then guide them make an informed decision on whether to do business with you or not.

Business Website Helps You Maintain Your Customers in Case of Relocation

Most schools that relocate their brick and mortar addresses usually witness a temporary crash in their revenue because their current customers may not have been properly informed prior to the time of relocation, leading to a loss of customer base. This may last until they make more customers in their new location to replace the ones that left. However, if you have a business website, communication becomes easier, and be sure many of them would still keep faith with your school. This will greatly reduce the drop in revenue that occurs with loss of customers due to relocation.

A Business Website Offers Two-Way Communication Marketing

One good thing about a well-designed school management website is that there is room for two-way communication using a contact form. Visitors simply fill in their names, email addresses and their requests and click the ‘Submit’ button to send across their message in form of request, question etc.

Often times, while the visitor is sending message across, the admin may be online at the same time to grant an instant reply, which gets to the visitor immediately, thereby reducing the stress and rigorous exercise of opening his email box in order to reply the message. This two-way communication helps the prospective customer to clear any doubts he/she may have about the school and its service offer.

A Business Website Helps You to Showcase Your Expertise and Get More Customers

People like doing business with those that are experts in their own fields. A website gives you a platform to showcase your expertise in writing quality contents in your area of business, using the blogging platform in your school website. When your prospective clients see these useful and quality articles, they would acknowledge that you are a master in that field and would want to do business with you. Other websites can also link to your articles thereby bringing more customers to your website and making your school to grow rapidly.

A Business Website is Very Convenient for Your Customers

In these days of traffic hold up, busy schedules, etc., it is more convenient for people, even those living within the same geographical location with your business office location, to communicate with you and get the required service from your website instead of driving to your physical location.

Moreover, many customers feel that when they go to the school administrative office, they may be pressured by smart reps to make hasty decisions that they might regret later. They therefore prefer to engage through the website where they take their time to make clear decisions after getting needed information.

When you have a school website and make it known to your customers, you will find out that many of your customers will be engaging with your school more online.

A Well Designed Business Website Delivers Superb Sales Messages to Every Prospect

When you send out salesmen to the field, definitely all you have would be a mixture of good and bad salesmen. The bad ones among them may be both unconvincing and irritating in their delivery of sales messages to potential customers. The daunting consequence of that would be a huge decrease in turnover and customer base building.

However, when you have a well-designed website with excellent sales messages, every prospect gets the same superb sales message thereby converting many prospects to real time customers.

A Business Website Helps You to Build a Contact List of Prospects and Customers

It is common knowledge that some prospects do not make final decision in their first contact with your product or service. You need to contact them a couple of times for them to be ready and comfortable with patronizing you

. A well-designed website enables you to build a contact list for your prospects and customers. This will enable them to patronize you when they are ready. Also it helps to keep your business fresh in the minds of your previous customers so that they can make repeated engagements with your school.

A Business Website Helps You to Beat Your Competitors

When you have a business website and your competitor does not have, it enables you to beat him to it in obtaining new customers. Even when your competitor has a website and yours have a richer content and more powerful sales message, you tend to attract more customers and beat him on the game.

Business Website makes You Appear Bigger than You Really Are

Do you know that even as an average school owner, you can use a website to make your school appear bigger than it is in real term? When you have a well-designed school management website, foreign partners will imagine that you are very big and want to get affiliated with your school.

A  Business Website Creates a Huge Return Value for Your Business

With a well-designed business website, being hosted by a trusted name in the game, you’ve got to have a good return on investment. In fact, from every side of the argument, you earn more when you have an online platform for your school business than in the offline situation.

Do you notice for example, how an e-book of few pages might be sold for say, $20 (about N3200), and people are willing to buy it because of its quality content. But the same book, when sold offline as a hard copy, might not attract sales if the price goes beyond $4 (N640 equivalent). That is an instance to show you the return potential in getting your business online, by creating a quality website.

You can also earn by offering advert spaces to related businesses for a return check.

The above points are also relevant for any kind of business. However, we’ve just narrowed it to school business especially here in Africa, where the potentials are yet to be tapped.

African schools have so much to do to work at par with their counterparts across the globe. Now is the time to start.

In addition, to monetize your website engagement, it will be nice adding a blog to it; or preferably create a separate blog for your school

Join our campaign and get a blog for your school before the promo goes off.