What a school should spend on admissions marketing.

Most school budgets for admissions marketing are set the same way. Someone takes last year's figure, adds a little, and hopes. It feels prudent. It is the reason so many schools end the season with spend gone and seats still empty. Here is how we would set it instead, and how we would defend it to a board.

How much should a school spend on admissions marketing?

Start from seats, not a round number. Work out how many seats you need to fill, multiply by the cost per admission you can afford, and test that against what one admission is worth to the school over the years a child stays.

That last part is what most schools leave out. A family that joins in the early years may stay for a decade of fees. A budget that looks large next to one term's fees looks very different next to the life of an admission. The board should see both numbers on the same page.

Why is a school's budget different from a university's?

A school sells to parents within a short drive, over a long decision, so its money goes into local trust and follow-up rather than wide reach.

A university recruits across states and programmes, and its numbers behave differently. At Rishihood University, cost per admission came down from ₹4-5 lakh to about ₹2.10 lakh over two years, across 100 admissions to date. That is a useful benchmark for a university. It is the wrong one for a school, and boards that compare the two end up underfunding the one channel that matters most to parents: being known and trusted nearby. If you run a university, our brief on what education marketing actually costs a university covers that side.

Where should the first rupee go?

If parents in your area do not know your name, the first rupee goes into being known, not into lead forms.

Holy Writ School in Badlapur was hard to fill for exactly this reason: few parents nearby knew it. We built the brand first, with a celebrity-led campaign. Then we layered on lead generation aimed at parents ready to act, and follow-ups that walked them from a first click to a school visit. That season, Holy Writ took 300 new admissions. Lead ads alone would not have done that, because parents do not enquire at a school they have never heard of.

If your school is already well known locally, the order flips. Spend goes straight to capturing and converting demand that already exists.

What does a lead cost, and is that the number to watch?

Across our partners we have managed more than ₹1.5 crore in ad spend and generated over 10,000 qualified leads at a blended ₹1,500 each, across Google, Meta and calls. But lead cost is not the number to manage a school by.

A cheap lead nobody calls back is the most expensive lead you will buy. The school that halves its lead cost and then takes three days to return a parent's call has raised its cost per admission, not lowered it. We wrote about this gap in why most school enquiries never become admissions. Budget for the follow-up (people, a CRM, same-day calls) as part of marketing, not as an afterthought.

How should the budget be spread across the year?

Weight it to the months your parents actually decide, and keep a small always-on base for the rest of the year.

Most of the money should sit in your real admissions window, the weeks before and during the period when parents visit and fill forms. Outside it, keep search and retargeting running at low spend so parents who start looking early still find you. Make sure the page they land on works on a phone. Our brief on admissions landing pages lists the fixes we check first.

What should a board ask before approving the budget?

Five questions, each answerable in one line:

1. How many seats are we trying to fill, by grade?
2. What cost per admission are we targeting, and why that figure?
3. Who calls a parent back, and how fast?
4. What will we see each month: admissions and cost per admission, or impressions?
5. If results lag by mid-season, what gets cut first?

If the agency or the team cannot answer all five, the budget is a guess.

We have spent nine years in EdTech marketing and work with five institutions at a time, schools and universities alike. You can see how this played out for each of them in our case studies of admissions marketing for schools and universities. Nothing in this brief is something we would not say in the room.