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PROLOGUE
The Questions Your Website Refuses to Answer
A family is deciding between your school and two others. It is nine at night, the kids are in bed, and instead of opening your website, they open ChatGPT and type your school's name followed by a real question.
Is it worth the money? Would my kid get in? Do they actually give financial aid, or is that just on the page?
Something answered them. It was assembled from your site, a few directory listings, an old news article, and whatever a parent said about you on Niche in 2023. You were not consulted.
The questions you get asked are the ones your site is quietest about
Walk a tour and listen to what families actually ask. Cost, and what cost really means after aid. Whether their specific kid belongs here. What happens to graduates. Who this school is not the right fit for.
Now search your own website for those answers. Most schools find a tuition figure buried two clicks deep, a financial aid page written in the passive voice by someone protecting the institution, and nothing at all on fit.
This is not negligence. Those pages got written by committee, in a year when families arrived through the front door, and every hard sentence in them got softened by the third person who reviewed it. The pages are thorough. They just do not answer anything a family is actually weighing.
There is a second reader now
Marcus Sheridan's argument, which the MarCom Society book club discusses this month, is that the questions buyers are afraid to ask are exactly the ones you should publish. That was good advice when the reader was a human with a browser.
It matters more now, because there is a second reader. The systems summarizing your school to families can only repeat what you have written plainly enough to be quoted. Vagueness does not read as discretion to a machine. It reads as absence, and absence gets filled from somewhere else.
Three moves
Write down the five questions you answer on every single tour. Not the ones you wish families asked. The ones that come up before you reach the science wing.
Answer the money question in plain language, on its own page. Real tuition, real aid ranges, what a family at a given income actually pays. This is the page schools most want to soften, and softening it is expensive. When the numbers are plain, the families who were never going to afford you self-select out in August instead of in November, after your admissions team has spent three months on them.
Then go ask the machine. Type your school's name and one of your five questions into ChatGPT, and again into Google's AI results. Read what comes back the way a parent would, with two other schools in other tabs. That paragraph is doing more admissions work right now than your viewbook.
Fall inquiry season is a few weeks out. What comes back today is what those families will read in September.
One quick win
Ask an AI your five hardest tour questions with your school's name attached, and screenshot the results. Bring the worst answer to your next admissions meeting and ask one question: who owns fixing this before September?
Thanks,
Brendan
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UPCOMING EVENT
For MarCom Society Members Only
They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer
Hello, book clubbers! I’m excited to share that, based on our recent poll, our next book is They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan.
Grab your copy on Amazon here and start reading: https://amzn.to/4vL1jFy
I've read this book, recommend it, and can’t wait to discuss it!
I hope you join us!!
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