There’s no shortage of speculation about AI in school marketing—but how many people are actually using it to generate meaningful results?
Like many others, I had my share of adoption jitters. But having pushed past them, I now see the real value AI brings to school messaging every day. It hasn’t replaced my judgment, intuition, or creativity—but it has made me more efficient and more strategic, grounding ideas in data and revealing insights I might have otherwise missed.
To help you get the same edge, here are 10 messaging prompts—each one based on real use cases from schools I’ve worked with. These aren’t just theoretical exercises. They’re practical, proven tools that can sharpen your message and improve your results.
AI tools/platforms
The prompts presented were used with Google Notebook LM and ChatGPT. Notebook allows you to upload a wide array of sources for the AI to consider. That includes websites and online resources, PDFs of brochures, presentations and reports, and other sources. ChatGPT combines analytical and creative elements, producing thorough and often unexpected results.
1 Assess current messaging
If you’re thinking about redoing your messaging or just wondering whether that’s necessary, try using this prompt. You will want to closely consider whether the results are what you are aiming to communicate.
Prompt: You are the marketing director for KayTwelve Academy (K12A) and have been tasked with reviewing and revising the school’s messaging with a view to increasing admissions activity and ultimately enrollment. You need to review the website to assess whether the current messaging is accurate and effective. Review the current website and answer these questions:
- What are K12A’s outstanding qualities?
- What is unique about this school?
- What are this school’s strengths?
- What kind of families would be interested in this school?
2 Create a persona
Personas are a critical element in developing messaging. Most often, the idea is to tailor messaging with a persona in mind. In this case, we are evaluating whether current messaging is targeted accurately.
Prompt: Create a persona of a parent who is most likely to respond positively to the website’s current messaging.
3 Develop Value Proposition
The power of a value proposition is that it presents what your school uniquely offers to a target audience in a competitive context. That makes value propositions a critical building block of messaging. Here, we are building on the result of the prompt above.
Prompt: Using the persona created above as a target audience and referencing the added sources (in Notebook), create a value proposition that details what K12A offers and how that differentiates it from other schools. Then, condense that into a paragraph of no more than three sentences.
For more insight into value propositions, you may want to read this.
4 Create Positioning Statements
The positioning statement is the essential power tool of messaging. It forces you to consider what your school offers to a particular target audience and provide the proof that it is a competitive advantage. This is the template for a positioning statement:
For (target audience), (brand name) is the (frame of reference) that delivers (benefit/point of difference) because only (brand name) is (reason to believe)
Generating position statements often takes much consideration. Adding to the complexity, schools will likely have multiple positioning statements because they have multiple benefits related to several target audiences. That makes this an excellent task for AI.
Prompt: Complete a traditional positioning statement for K12A that corresponds to this template:
For (ideal target parents), FA is the school that offers (differentiating benefit) because only FA provides (proof point related to benefit)
5 Convert Positioning Statement to Copy
The positioning statement is an internal resource intended to be the basis for creating messaging. AI tools can help with that transformation.
Prompt: Convert the positioning statement into persuasive, parent-focused language that could be used for recruitment marketing collateral for KayTwelve Academy.
Here’s a resource that highlights the messaging inventory that can be created.
6 Improve Messaging/Positioning
Now, you can constructively evaluate current messaging as it relates to target audiences and the competitive context.
Prompt: Given what K12A and its competitive schools offer, how could K12A’s messaging be improved to better highlight its competitive advantages and positioning?
7 Evaluate Consistency
Consistency is a hallmark of effective messaging. Yet websites often contain conflicting messages, which creates skepticism and disinterest. Determining the consistency of messaging is a highly analytical task ideally suited to AI.
Prompt: Based on the materials uploaded and our previous interactions, evaluate the consistency of K12A’s messaging and suggest improvements.
8 Key Themes
Effective messaging needs to be hyper-focused. For every school, a few key themes define the experience and articulate goals. Those key themes must be the focus of everything from the messaging in recruitment collateral to spoken remarks at school events. In this case, AI can be used in two ways. First, if you haven’t determined key themes, AI can distil them from current messaging. Alternatively, it can be used as a kind of quality control test to ensure the themes that emerge are the ones that were intended.
Prompt: With reference to the selected sources (that were uploaded to Notebook), what are K12A’s key messaging themes?
For more perspective on key themes, see this.
9 Create a Marketing/Messaging Program
Now, we are in a position to use AI as a creative tool.
Prompt: Given what K12A offers and its competitive schools, what are the most effective ways to market K12A to the persona above, including key messages and the ideal channels and media?
The results of this prompt are robust, with content that includes key messaging themes and how they can be applied to everything from the website to personal experiences to local partnerships.
10 Produce Digital Ads and Strategy
Prompt: Based on the attached files and the messaging on the website for K12A, please provide concepts for digital ads that would motivate prospective parents to inquire. Include ideas for both digital search ads and social media ads. For each concept, provide a headline, a description and suggestions for visuals. Feel free to ask for additional information or resources that would improve your responses.
Again, the results will be detailed, thoughtful, creative and ready for implementation.
To be certain, I’m not ready to let AI do all the messaging work I do for schools, and I’m not suggesting you turn responsibility for messaging over to AI. But it’s clear that AI can speed up analysis, offer unexpected insights, and sharpen your creative output. With time as a precious and unrenewable resource, the value of AI can’t be overstated.
Try using these prompts with your school’s messaging. If you need some suggestions for applying AI to your school’s unique context or if you would like to explore a messaging audit or workshop using AI, let’s talk. And, if you just need some help with AI-induced jitters, get in touch.
You can also download a printable PDF version of these prompts to use with your team.
