Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Art schools live on three audiences. Most marketing only talks to one.
An art school's revenue lives on three completely different audiences stacked on top of each other: kids in after-school classes (where the parent is the buyer, the trust signal is qualified teachers and safe materials, and the conversion is a term enrolment), school-holiday camps (which generate a disproportionate share of the annual cash flow in four short windows and live or die on whether the programme drops a month early), and adults plus senior secondary students (where the buyer is the student themselves and the offering ranges from a casual life-drawing evening to a full HSC Visual Arts or VCE Studio Arts portfolio program). Each one needs different pages, different ad copy, different social rhythm, and different newsletters. Most art schools market only the kids' classes (because they are the easiest to write about), discover three months too late that the holiday camp didn't fill, and watch the local HSC majors go to a competitor with one tutor's Instagram account because the school never bothered to write the 'preparing your HSC Visual Arts body of work' guide that parents Google in year 11.
Good art school marketing is three things, in this order: a website with one page per medium plus age plus suburb ('pottery classes [suburb] kids', 'wheel-throwing [suburb] adults', 'after-school art [suburb] 7-12', 'HSC Visual Arts tutoring [suburb]', 'VCE Studio Arts [suburb]') so you rank for every parent's and student's actual search, a school-holiday camp campaign that drops the programme 4 weeks before each break with single-day, multi-day and full-camp options, and an HSC and VCE portfolio programme presented as its own offering with clear teacher credentials, a sample body-of-work portfolio, and an honest 'what an ATAR-bound portfolio actually looks like' guide. The studios at 90 percent term capacity and sold-out holiday camps are doing exactly this. The studios at 60 percent are still posting one finished kids' painting a fortnight to Instagram with no medium specified and no link in bio.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around all three audiences and the four-times-a-year camp cycle: a term 1 kids' after-school push starting in early January, a school-holiday camp push 4 weeks before each break, an HSC Visual Arts and VCE Studio Arts intake push in October and again in February, and an adult evening-class push in February and August. Briefs the other agents so the medium pages, the term and camp ads, the finished-work posts and the HSC majors all reinforce 'fill the kids' classes, sell out the camps, become the local HSC studio'.
Imports your existing site so you stop paying Squarespace plus Acuity plus a separate landing-page plan, and ships a page per medium plus age plus suburb. Adds a proper pricing matrix (term vs casual vs camp, materials and kiln firing broken out), a school-holiday camp landing page that refreshes per term, an HSC and VCE portfolio programme page with sample body-of-work, and an enrolment flow that lands in your existing booking system.
Goes after every medium-plus-age-plus-suburb search the council community centres cannot defend: 'kids pottery [suburb]', 'wheel-throwing classes [suburb]', 'after-school art [suburb]', 'HSC Visual Arts tutor [suburb]', plus school-holiday-camp queries. Ships ArtSchool and Course schema, optimises the Google Business Profile with the full medium list, and earns review prompts after every term and every camp. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes.
Runs Meta and Google Ads timed to the art-school calendar: lifts spend 4 weeks before term 1 and term 3 with after-school kids' copy, drops a school-holiday camp campaign 4 weeks before each NSW or Vic break, runs a separate HSC and VCE portfolio campaign in October and February targeting year 10 and year 11 students plus their parents, and runs an adult evening-class layer in February and August. Drops broad 'art class' keywords entirely.
Turns every finished kids' piece, every adult life-drawing session, every kiln firing, every HSC body-of-work development into a post in your real accounts: a Tuesday after-school class finished-work carousel, a Sunday morning wheel-throwing demo Reel, a Friday kiln-opening story, a year-12 HSC student's body-of-work walkthrough. Builds the visual portfolio that turns the parent of your kids' student into the parent who books the spring-holiday camp and enrols the older sibling for HSC.
Drafts the guides parents and students Google before they enrol: 'when should my child start pottery classes', 'how to prepare an HSC Visual Arts body of work: an honest guide', 'what does an ATAR-bound portfolio actually look like', 'choosing a kids' art school: materials, kiln firing fees and what's actually included'. Two drafts a month, in your voice, that catch the buyer four months before they enrol.
Your first 30 days.
- Site imported, Squarespace and landing-page tool subscriptions cancelled
- Annual plan around term, camp and HSC cycles delivered by Sam
- Google Business Profile flipped to 'Art school' with full medium list
- Medium-plus-age pages indexed for kids' pottery, kids' painting and adult wheel-throwing
- Meta school-holiday camp campaign live 4 weeks before the next break
- Clear pricing matrix (term vs casual vs camp, kiln fee included) shipped on every medium page
- First fortnight of finished-work captions queued from your photos
- 'Preparing your HSC Visual Arts body of work' student guide drafted
Art schools don't fail at the teaching; they fail at running three parallel marketing programmes plus a camp cycle that delivers half the annual cash flow in eight weeks of the year. The after-school kids' class fills three weeks late, the spring-holiday camp sells four spots because the programme dropped four days before it started, and the HSC Visual Arts majors go to the studio with one tutor on Instagram because nobody wrote the 'preparing your body of work' guide. The work is the medium-plus-age page library, the 4-weeks-early camp launches, the HSC and VCE programme positioning, and the consented finished-work posts that turn one term's pottery kids into next year's camp bookings and the year after's HSC enrolments.
Agencies are too dear to actually run all of this for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but the finished-work photos you mean to post tomorrow are still on the studio camera the following Sunday. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the medium pages, run the term and camp ads, post the finished work and the HSC body-of-work, and draft the parent and student guides. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day between classes. Fill the kids' classes, sell out the holiday camps, become the local HSC studio.