Since March, I’ve personally fielded over thirty calls with edtech founders. Some of them are getting into the direct-to-consumer game and pivoting their product to the parent or teacher market. Some are launching new resources such as surveys, whitepapers, and other helpful free resources. Others are creating new lines of their product entirely or are looking for ways to make their product/service relevant in these challenging times.
Regardless of what they are doing — all of them need sales fast. In April, a survey of edtech founders revealed that 71% projected a decrease in sales (of those decreases, the average pipeline reduction was 52%) and 66% reported a runway of 6 months or less. Dire situations like this has made a lot of edtech founders reactionary. They are thinking as short term as possible and it’s all about getting sales fast. Don’t get me wrong, I think if I were in these edtech founders’ shoes, I may also be tempted to go this route. But the question remains: are companies jeopardizing long-term success by going after short-term and unsustainable growth strategies?
I walked away from all of those calls frustrated. I started this agency to help brands with their most pressing needs and I couldn’t help these founders’ short term desires. My team excels at helping education brands connect authentically and provide consistent value to their audience. We do this through social media marketing, content marketing, and community creation/building. However, all of these things don’t just magically produce sales overnight. It takes time to build trust with your audience.
So I remained at a standstill for some time and continued to show brands how being as valuable as possible, above everything else, is more important now than ever. As I continued to get requests for this short-term sales need, I reached out to current and former clients and collaborated with other agencies serving education brands and decided to come up with a more DIY-type of package that combines these four major marketing channels to achieve sales.
Social Media Marketing: Rather than crafting an entire long-term social media strategy, we develop a social media campaign strategy that provides sample posts along with channel-specific image templates, a social media schedule, expected goals and industry benchmarks, and hashtag strategies.
Media Relations: I’m not going to lie. Our team knows very little about the earned media/public relations world. That’s why we have collaborated with Forthright Advising, a team that has devoted their lives to helping organizations that love kids and work with nonprofits, school districts and brands. They will thoughtfully craft a press strategy that’ll begin to help you form meaningful relationships with a targeted media list. They write a press release, form talking points to ensure you stay on message, and even develop pitch notes to help you succeed when reaching out personally to your most important media contacts.
Paid Social Media: Ding, ding, ding! This is where the short-term need of sales really shines. While paid social media is not something you should fully rely on, as it is unsustainable in the long term, it can provide a boost of sales in the short term. To do it right, you should hire experts that do this all of the time. We partnered with a team that regularly develops paid social media strategies for education brands. They craft the campaign strategy for you, collaborate with us to develop the ad creative (gifs, images etc), and even personally manage the campaign to ensure you’re reaching the right audience at the right cost per acquisition (CPA) and CPMs.
Influencer & Partner Marketing: You can only say so much. People make decisions based on people they trust. We work with our huge network of education influencers to craft a blog post that centers on the problem your product or service is solving. They’ll talk about it in a value-driven, packed-full-of-tips way and then mention your product where it makes sense. This is not a blatant product endorsement post. Teachers, educator administrators, and parents can smell a paid pitch a mile away and it doesn’t work. We also customize a partner reach out media kit for you to easily activate your network to promote your product/service. As a bonus, we also give you our secret sauce strategy of how to reach out to influencers, your followers, and your overall audience authentically through direct messaging (DMs) or through public tweets on Twitter.
You can read more about what this combination of services in what we’re calling a “Go To Market Launch Toolkit.” See if it’s something you want to try or hopefully it just gets you thinking about the right marketing mix for this unique and challenging time.
Rather than thinking solely short-term, something like this can incorporate some short-term elements in a strategic way that can uplift some longer-term marketing strategies with content marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, and media relations.
As with everything, this is a work in progress and as we work with more and more clients through this package, we’ll continue to tweak it to ensure that it offers the best possible combination of marketing elements to reach your short term AND long term goals.
I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts about this all. What has been your experience as an edtech founder? What has worked for you for sales in a way that hasn’t jeopardized your long-term growth?