· 5 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh
When to advertise a term intake
Four to six weeks out. Two weeks is enough time to spend the money and not enough to learn which ad works, which is why late campaigns pay full price for every enquiry.
Start four to six weeks before the term starts. Two weeks is enough time to spend the money and not enough time to learn which ad works, so a late campaign pays full price for every enquiry it gets. Six weeks out, the same budget finds the winning ad first and then spends the rest behind it.
The school term calendar is the whole planning frame
Every decision below is set by dates you do not control. Australian school terms run four to a year, families plan around them, and a junior program that misses the first fortnight of a term has lost that intake until the next one. Your marketing year is four short windows with holidays in between.
Term dates vary by state and between government and independent schools, so use the calendar your families actually live by rather than a national summary. Put the four start dates in one document at the beginning of the year, count back six weeks from each, and add those four dates too. That single page is most of your media plan.
Term dates are the trigger, not the copy
The most common reason a club starts late is that something creative is not ready. The photos are from 2019, nobody has written the offer, the head coach wants to shoot a video first. So the campaign waits, and the calendar does not wait with it.
Launch on the date with what you have. A plain ad naming the days, times, age groups, price and start date will beat a beautiful ad that goes live nine days out. You can replace the creative in week two. You cannot replace the four weeks you skipped.
What a campaign needs before it spends efficiently
Two to three weeks of running, at minimum, for two separate reasons. The platforms need volume before delivery settles: Meta's own advertising documentation describes an ad set as sitting in a learning phase until it has gathered roughly 50 optimisation events in a week, and results swing around until it gets there. You need the same period to see which ad, which audience and which offer are producing enquiries at a price you are happy with.
Start at six weeks and that period costs you very little, because it happens while the deadline is still far away. Start at two weeks and it happens during the only window you have.
4 to 6 weeks
The lead time a term intake campaign needs, so it has already learned what works before the enrolment deadline arrives.
| Weeks before the term starts | What should be happening |
|---|---|
| 6 | Term dates, days, times, age groups and prices confirmed. Enquiry page built. Tracking checked with a real test enquiry. |
| 5 | Campaign live with two or three genuinely different ads on a small budget. You are buying information, not sign-ups. |
| 4 | First honest read on cost per enquiry by ad and audience. Turn off the worst performer. Email lapsed families from the last two terms. |
| 3 | Move budget behind what is working. Waiting list starts filling. Coaches briefed on how many places are left. |
| 2 | Retarget everyone who visited the page and did not enquire. Add the days and times that are nearly full to the ad. |
| 1 | Last call, with the start date named in the ad itself. Phone anybody who enquired and never enrolled. |
| Week 1 of term | Keep it running. Late enquiries are real, and a first session with spare spots is inventory you can still sell. |
Two things clubs skip and should not
The first is the enquiry page. Sending paid traffic to a home page and asking a parent to hunt for the junior program is how a working ad becomes a wasted one. One page, one program, one form, with the days, times and prices visible without scrolling twice.
The second is your own list. Families who did a term last year and did not come back are the cheapest sign-ups you will ever get, and reaching them costs an hour of writing. Do it in the same week the ads go live, alongside them rather than instead of them.
Holiday programs are a shorter game
Two to three weeks is enough for a holiday camp, because the decision is smaller, closer and made later. A parent commits to a four term pathway weeks ahead of time. They book a school holiday camp in the week they realise the holidays start on Monday and nobody is minding the children.
So the run up compresses. Have the camp live and bookable three weeks out, spend most of the budget in the final ten days, and keep an ad running into the first days of the break itself. Late bookings are normal for holiday programs in a way they are not for a term.
The January window almost nobody uses
For a fortnight every January the Australian Open puts tennis on free to air television across the country, and Term 1 starts a week or two later. It is the one period in the year when demand arrives without a club having to create it, and most of that demand goes to nobody, because almost no club has an ad running while it happens.
The parent watching a night session next to a seven year old who suddenly wants a racquet is a warm enquiry you did not have to warm up. They will search, find nothing local that looks organised, and forget about it by February. A modest budget running through that fortnight, pointed at a Hot Shots page with Term 1 dates on it, is the cheapest attention a club will see all year.
If you are already late
Run it anyway and change what you ask for. With ten days to go there is no time to test three ads, so pick one, point it at the clearest offer you have, and be explicit about the start date. Then ask for the enquiry rather than the enrolment, so a parent whose week is already committed can put their name down for next term while they are thinking about it. A late campaign that builds a waiting list has not been wasted.
Before you set the budget, it is worth knowing what one of those enrolments is actually worth to you across their whole time at the club. That number is what tells you whether four weeks of spending was cheap or expensive.
The calculator takes your fees, term length and average stay and returns a lifetime value for one junior. It is the number you hold your cost per sign-up against when the term is over. Work out what a sign-up is worth first
Then go and book the next four launch dates in the calendar before you forget. That is the part that compounds.