This interview was originally recorded on May 6, 2022, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
[Start of recorded material 00:00:01]
Elana:
Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week, I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience.
Hi, everyone. I am Elana Leoni, and welcome to this week's episode of All Things Marketing and Education. Today, I am really excited to talk with Rebecca Shaddix, who I think is one of the more brilliant minds in marketing in Edtech. We'll be talking about all things go-to-market plans. And if you don't know what that is – like me a long time ago, I didn't know – don't worry. After this episode, you will know. And we'll also be breaking it down step by step, inch by inch, and I'll be asking all the fundamental questions. So if you're an EdTech company, this episode is not to be missed. If you're an educator, this episode may be particularly helpful for any one of you that are thinking about transitioning into the world of EdTech, or really any educator that wants to gain insight on how EdTech companies work, what are their goals, how do they begin to measure success. If you know that, you're a better partner for them, too.
So back to my beautiful friend Rebecca. I actually met Rebecca from a tweet I sent her in October of 2019. And Rebecca, I think that's absolutely crazy that we met kind of like a blind date on Twitter. And I tell this story to my audience because it's the power of Twitter. It's the power of social media. I hadn't actually thought, Rebecca, I've known you for five years. It's only been like three or something. Just for my audience's sake, I want to go into our initial exchange a bit to show you all this amazing power of Twitter. So I sent this tweet. I just –
Rebecca:
I don't remember this, so this will be fun.
Elana:
Yeah. This is the tweet, and I can link it to you later, but it says, "@RebeccaSadwick. Enjoyed your Forbes post. I was just talking to a former EdTech founder, and we reflected on one of the points you touched on, scale versus depth. Many startups are being forced to grow fast, but by doing this they jeopardize actually fulfilling their user needs."
I can't believe I got that into a tweet, one, but you liked it and followed me. And I don't know if we went to DMs or we went just public, but we ended up setting up a coffee date, and said, "Hey, you're going to be in San Francisco, let's have coffee." And I remember our coffee day, too. And I was kind of intimidated, this Forbes writer who knows so much. She wants to have coffee with me, but the rest is history. And I just feel like you have helped me grow so much. I've learned so much from you. And I just want to – for those people that always think that social media is only used for entertainment's sake, know that it's amazing for networking and finding people that are like-minded or can inspire you like I did with Rebecca. So I wanted to share that. I just thought it'd be a little bit of memories for us.
Rebecca:
Yeah. I don't remember. I actually went to a conference in New York, or an unconference almost exclusively to people who had met on Twitter. Almost nobody in the room had met in real life. So I think it's a great place, like you said, to have your ideas challenged by people in your niche.
Elana:
Yes. Yes. So I know at the time when we met, you were a managing partner of Strategica Partners. Did I say that?
Rebecca:
Yeah. Strategica Partners. Yeah.
Elana:
Yeah. A go-to-market strategy firm. You have also led marketing efforts as the Director of Marketing at GoGuardian, which I know is one of the fastest-growing education companies in U.S. history. So I mentioned all this stuff, one, because I know she won't because she's humble, and two, I want to really display how much expertise Rebecca has in this. And I'm just so grateful for her time.
So Rebecca is now the VP of Marketing at Curious Cardinals. And that pairs K-12 students with college mentors, which is super cool because it bridges that really much-needed gap. And it helps them develop the skills they'll need to become creative and confident lifelong learners. And I love that term on lifelong because it's not just about the in-school part of it all. Rebecca was recognized as the Los Angeles Business Journal's Rising Stars of 2019 for her track record of growing startups where both mentors and various EdTech startup accelerators together. She, like I said, as a Forbes contributor, she writes about implications and society around the advancements in the tech sector in particular.
I can go on and on about Rebecca. Her entire bio is going to be in the Show Notes as well. I want to mention that what I love about these guests on these shows is they give back so much, and they're passionate about education and the future of really our society. So she's also the Chair of the Board of Directors of Girl Develop It, which is a nonprofit organization that helps women and non-binary adults transition into technical careers. So all of that said, what this bio does not say is when you meet Rebecca, she's an incredibly kind, selfless, and passionate person. And I never doubted that she is 100 percent dedicated to really improving and making a difference in education. So welcome, Rebecca.
Rebecca:
Thank you. That was quite the intro. Great to be here.
Elana:
OK. Let's get right into it. Let's talk about these go-to-market plans, what they are, really, and why people should be doing them – all of these things. So let's start at the beginning. Let's define for our audience what go-to-market plans are.
Rebecca:
Totally. At its core, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's their plan for going to your market. And that's an oversimplification of something that is kind of complex. The very first thing we need to do for that is to find what our market is, but equally importantly, what it isn't, right? And so it can't be everybody. It can't be all educators. It can't be all types of schools, right? There's a specific application that we are best positioned to fill. And we wanted to find people who are in the position to see and deliver the value of the product that we have in mind.
And at its core, that's the marketing strategy, too. It's the tactics that we layer on top of it to go to our market to bring them something they care about. And so there's that, the product-market fit, of course, and we spend a ton of time thinking about the product in that, that less so the market. There could be an amazing application of this exact product in a different market. And if we haven't segmented it effectively through effective customer and buyer and user discovery research, we could be over-indexing on the wrong part of that. There's also the channel-market fit component of the go-to-market strategy. Certain products lend themselves to being bought and discovered and shared through different channels differently. And if we forget that, we just kind of start doing things everywhere without a real comprehensive strategy or story or reason why.
And especially in the early days, there's just not enough traction there to have that recipe for success. We can't be on nine channels effectively at once. We should pick the couple that our audience is on, deliver them a message that they care about, that makes them think, "Yes, this is exactly what I need. This is exactly what I'm looking for." They really get it, and then bring them into our funnel. And I think that we can miss sometimes, feeling really clever. Marketing that makes you say, "That's good marketing" isn't the goal, right? It's, "Oh, I need that, oh, I want to buy that." And so if we're listening to the wrong people, their feedback less than irrelevant. It can actually be harmful.
Elana:
Yes. So Rebecca said a lot in, like, 30 seconds. So I'm going to break it down, too, because a lot of times – I'm even taking notes right now. But the first thing she talked about is that go-to-market is for one specific market. You potentially could have different go-to-market plans for different markets, but pick your market. And she said there's a product-market fit there. So that's really important. But then she started diving into, OK, let's think about the specific channels. And then that's my jam where I can say, "Yes, OK, we always need to prioritize where your primary audience is and what channels they're on and more likely to be receptive of your messages," right? So she's saying don't go to nine channels. Pick two to start. Pick two that there's evidence that your audience is there. Did I get all that right, Rebecca? Do you want to add?
Rebecca:
That's exactly right. And I'll give an example here. Sometimes I'll talk to really awesome marketers or founders, and they'll say, "What's the best channel to sell this product?" And I have no idea. All I can say is, "Well, for products that seem to be similar to yours, these channels have worked selling to a similar audience, but I have no idea, right? So talk to your early customers, talk to the people you're trying to sell to. Ask them really high-level questions that have nothing to do with your product, because that's how they're existing in the world right now, right?" Like, we can't scale a company – just the customers that we acquire in its first year, but so many people miss this opportunity that the real benefit of early customers is less so to the revenues and the learnings that come from it. So it was worth turning down the wrong revenue from an audience we can't scale to for use cases and we're not positioned to win to make sure we actually understand.
The last time you bought a product, what happened? The last conversation you had with your principal, what were you discussing? The thing that keeps you up at night? Your biggest pain point? The biggest source of conflict? These are kinds of things. How are you feeling it now? How did you find that solution? And people tend to really over-index on other startups, stuff like, "Oh, look, there's four startups that are doing something kind of similar to us." But what we really want to know is the alternatives that your audience is using right now to solve the problem that they know they have. And that's where we then sound like a genius, because when we've captured that in their own words, that's the foundation of our positioning framework. Things that you and I think are synonymous, they may not. And so we really just want to capture the essence of their problems, in their own words, the channels that they're turning to to solve them. That's the foundation of the go-to-market strategy.
Elana:
OK. I'm going to make – almost make you say that last part over again, because so good. But what you said prior to that is around audience, too. And there is a misconception in EdTech, in particular, that all EdTechs are kind of – I mean, it is a unique industry. And for those of you that are listeners or would like to listen to other podcast episodes, Sandro talks, specifically, he runs an EdTech accelerator called Project FoundED. He talked really in depth about the nuances of EdTech. And then Rayna talked about how to get into the front of buyers in that world right now, and post-COVID and funding and EdTech. So there's a lot of things that are somewhat similar, but the audiences are so different. Like, what you said was beautiful. You said, "Well, I don't know yet. I need to see how your audience reacts, because all audiences, depending on your niche, and where you're at, and your focus, and all of these things, what challenges you're addressing, they're all very different." So I want to just pause on the audience thing and see if you have something to say on that.
Rebecca:
Absolutely. I think we have this misnomer that EdTech is this kind of amorphous conglomerate, that there is an EdTech go-to-market motion that will work for all products being sold to districts, but the budgets that are being used to leverage them are different, the buyers are different, the priorities are different. They may overlap in that certain conferences they attend may be effective to sell many of these products, but there really is no EdTech go-to-market playbook that will work for all products all the time.
And our market is changing, right? Like, if I were to just try to plug in the strategy that we used at GoGuardian in 2016 right now, it would be a colossal failure, right? I have no idea what GoGuardian should be doing right now, because I've been removed from them for years. So the idea that anyone who's removed from your business knows how to scale your business is just completely false, because they don't know your audience's needs at this time, how they're searching, how they're buying, and what they're looking for. That's the core of what we need to answer. And so anyone who thinks that there's just like a Twitter strategy that you can plug and chug without really understanding which audiences which you're trying to speak to and what you're trying to offer as your unique point of view, you're missing the foundation of it. And that's where we start doing lots and lots of things that are just ineffective.
Elana:
Yes. Yes. And you, at the end, we were talking a little bit previously about just what are the foundations of a go-to-market plan. And you were asking some questions. So fundamentally, a go-to-market plan should answer what? What are the top two or three questions?
Rebecca:
Who are we trying to reach? What do they care the most about? How are they solving these problems now? Where can we reach them?
Elana:
And is it how can we reach them, too, or no?
Rebecca:
Yeah, absolutely. So email can be a where channel, right? Cool. Can we reach them via direct mail or via Reddit or something like this? So basically, wherever they are discussing the problems they have with people they care about, that's probably a winning strategy. And that may mean leveraging their peers as social proof for email campaigns. I talked about how neighboring schools in their same state have used your product. It may mean going to conferences and speaking about things that we know they care about with really actionable recommendations. We want to avoid the common trap of thinking of ourselves as these, like, thought leaders, because really, at the end of the day, the customer is the thought leader. They're the ones who know what is working in what they need in schools. And so that's a common mistake I see people take is, of course, we want to be creating and sharing unique, relevant educational content, but we don't ourselves have the expertise that people who are on the ground in schools every day do. So don't overestimate your role in the thought leadership conversation versus elevating the voices of your customers and partners.
Elana:
Gosh. I love that so much. I love that so much because so often people come and say, "I want to be a thought leader." I say, "Great. You're on the right path. I want you to contribute to the dialogue in a way that's valuable for your audience."
Rebecca:
But I have a question. I think you're right. And you're so kind answering the spirit of that question. The question really is, "How can I provide more value?" Right? It's not, "How can I be a thought leader?" because then it's still me-centric. And that's the core of a lot of marketing missteps. Not, "Why don't people buy our product? They're so dumb. This is obviously great for them." How do we convey what we do in terms that resonate with them? And if we can't, we have to reevaluate if this is the right market for this product.
Elana:
Yeah. So if I'm a startup and I'm understaffed, I'm doing lots of jobs – you know them just as much as I do around all these types of startups – I know I need a plan. I know I need to be thoughtful in my entry to the market. How do I get started in a go-to-market plan? I'm assuming the audience is involved, because we've talked a little bit about them. How would you create some steps?
Rebecca:
Distilling the factors that go into our buyer personas is the very first output deliverable of the steps that we've talked about. And so, we'll need to be doing lots of market research, user research; if we have early traction, customer research of people who may be buyers, but not users in it for selling to districts, et cetera. And distilling that into the factors that change how people buy. And so, if we look at them, basically, the breakdown should be the factors that they're using to buy. And so, we really understand that when we're creating content, we're speaking to our Anxious Aida, who is just really stressed out about how her kid is going to get into college. Not teachers, because speaking to teachers is really hard, because they're different. They want different things. They teach different grades. They have all kinds of different challenges. And so we wanted to instill the actual criteria that makes a fictitious overarching representation of the people who we're actually selling to. So that's the very first step. Once we have the personas, it's clear how they're – that journeys come from there.
And so, what is a sample journey of how somebody would really find your product? Would they become aware of this issue and Google solutions, using which keywords? What kinds of things would they be looking for? Would they be scholarly publications? Would they be general blogs and searches where they go to a forum and post about it? When they go to a conference and ask what they share with a friend? That kind of thing. Their persona informs the journey, and then that tells us the core of which of these strategies and tactics we want to emphasize. And so, if it really is so primarily word-of-mouth-driven, then content strategy may take a long, long, long time to see any traction whatsoever, especially if we don't have paid budget to distribute it.
So it may mean that doing fewer things better – i.e., more effective email marketing, referral marketing, and spending a little bit of money in a couple of key events – is the better approach for that. But we do that from the buyer personas, and the journeys that show us how they're actually transacting and buying, and gives us the ideas of where the levers we have to pull are and the channels we prioritize.
Elana:
Great. Does some of this depend on the startup's or the company's runway or expected short-term versus long-term results? I say this with, like, a curiosity lens, because COVID forced a lot of EdTechs to say, "I need something right now, or I'm going to try to go into another market to parents," or whatever it may be, but that really affects the all of what you're saying.
Rebecca:
Absolutely. So that definitely does. If we have six months of runway, hopefully not, we say we need to raise a Series A 11 months from now. Then I would probably say that maybe we over-index a little bit on paid ads to get more awareness and eyeballs and impression, even just to test the messaging. And we would – if we were saying we want to grow organically and slowly, we don't plan to fundraise, or we have these different long-term goals, then we would say that we would index in different channels.
So there's also, like, the channel-market fit I mentioned. Certain products lend themselves better to certain types of channels. And so, there's a really long buying cycle and consideration cycle, usually paid. It saturates pretty quickly. And if we don't have a more robust organic behind it, then we've actually just, like, burned that bridge. So if it takes me, on average, to sell the district nine-ish months, then maybe a paid ad will get me in front of somebody, but I need a much more robust content engine behind it to actually convert them from there. And so, keeping in mind that the type of product we're selling the time to see the value, all of this influences that channel-market fit of which kinds of programs would make sense. And then our goal is, of course, right? If we are going out of business in a month, then we really need to need to double down on focusing on those core users and how they're transacting and buying. And then those are the ones that we're focusing on.
Elana:
Gosh.
Rebecca:
Those are the ones we're focusing on when we're building our buyer personas, by the way, right? So where people go wrong thinking of edge cases, like, "Yes, 80 percent of our customers are like this, but we have these 20 percent who are like this." And sometimes they miss that, if we're actually disaggregating these cohorts, those 20 percent could be the power users. And so, if we say more of our users are like this 80 percent, but less of the revenue comes from them, we've missed the buyer persona, right? Those could be a neutral persona. Neutral, we think negative, somebody that we would sell to if they come to us, but we're not actively devising our product roadmap and our strategy around them. We really want to understand these power users.
If we were going out of business in a month, who are we thinking of focusing on? That's the core of the buyer persona. And where it gets trickier is people who think they're in your target market, but aren't in a position to see you deliver the value of your product, those are people we don't really want to be selling to, and we certainly don't want to be changing our strategy around. So it's not just about sheer volume, or traffic, or impressions. It's about really analyzing those cohorts to understand who is the one that comprises that power user and would be most upset if your product disappeared, because those are the ones that we want to replicate.
Elana:
And not to complicate this more, but in the world of EdTech, we have B2C and B2B, right? So I know that the power –
Rebecca:
B2B, we're selling to student direct, kind of.
Elana:
So B2C, we have the power users, and that's really helpful. That's really helpful. And also on the B2B, we don't want to ignore the power users, but sometimes in EdTech, the power users don't have decision-making authority to renew or buy as well.
Rebecca:
So you're hitting on something really important. Users versus buyers versus customers are not interchangeable terms. So users may be teachers. They're the end users of the product. They may be students. And so, their happiness is really important for retention and re-engagement, right? And we really want to keep them happy with the product, but the buyer may be the director of instructional technology, or curriculum or something at the district, and they might not even know each other. And so, their priorities may be different. So when we're talking about our personas, the buyer persona and the user persona are influential, but they're not necessarily interchangeable in a B2B setting.
In a B2C setting, the parent may be the end user, so they would be the buyer and the user, but if their kid is the end user – I should be with the setting, right? Yeah – the kid is the end user, and we still have two different priorities, potentially. And we want to keep that in mind. It's a lot easier in a B2C setting because they tend to know each other. Either I am the end user, or it's my kid and I know them. When they don't know each other, there's a lot more complexity involved.
Elana:
Yeah. And then even in the B2B, we have this gray area of people that influence purchasing but don't make that, and then those sometimes can be the connectors between the user. So we're talking about instructional codes. It really depends on your product, but when you're thinking about doing these personas, do you do, like, "Here's my personas of my users, my buyers, and my customers," or do we not go down that rabbit hole?
Rebecca:
So early, early on, customers may not be necessary. And so, unless we're really actively thinking, "We have to develop our lifecycle campaigns more effectively, we need a more effective upsell, retention, cross-sell strategy," customer personas are really important. At the very beginning, we're talking about just developing this go-to-market strategy. You could probably get away with just really thoughtful, well-developed buyer and user personas.
Elana:
OK. Great. And then something I thought you'd find interesting, and you might know, is that when people come to us and they don't have those, we can create them, but they're never going to be as good as someone, like, "I was hiring your team back in the day," if you were a consultant to them, we will – but what I love doing is looking at what they think their current personas are and then adding a slice, if we're getting on Twitter, I'm going say, "Here's your persona on Twitter –"
Rebecca:
I love it.
Elana:
"– because this influences their behavior and who they are." And we show, like, "This is an example of your persona there."
Rebecca:
Me, too. Yeah. It's a really good point, and what I see go wrong most often, and that is that only current customers are used to create the buyer personas. And so, by the time you've said, "Hi. My name is Elana. I'm from Curious Cardinals, and we pair our K-12 students with college mentors to pursue their passions," everything somebody says in response to that is filtered through the lens of what they think you want to hear. And so we need prospects who are the doppelganger by any number of factors, because they're teachers in similar districts, et cetera, to compare and then say as little about our company and project as physically possible until the very end. And so it's usually just a sentence like, "Hi, my name is Rebecca. Thank you so much for talking with us. You fit our target audience perfectly. And so what I'm trying to understand today is just your authentic answers to a couple of these questions. If it's all right with you, I'll say as little about the product we're thinking of as possible so I don't bias your answers."
Two people have ever said, "No, that's not all right with me" – and I don't even know how many thousands of people went through that process – basically because we want to understand what their actual pain points are; not just the secondary ones that we currently envision. Because if we're in the secondary zone, it's totally possible that we end up in this kind of nice-to-have vitamin category of put them where they're first to go, right? Versus it could be the exact same product, but if positioned differently, if calibrated slightly differently, or if different features were emphasized or prioritized, it would be so important. And so we want to understand how they are actually interacting with the world today without our product. Those are the customers that we need to convert.
And again, we can't scale a company with just the customers we acquire in any given year. So it's not really an opportunity to sell and pitch your product. It's really an opportunity to understand if you don't exist, how does your prospect think about and engage with you? The objections that come up, the questions, the confusion, will be in your marketing campaigns, but you won't know why. Right? Like all of the data in the world will tell us what's happening. This screen, this page, this button is a source of tremendous drop-off, but the conversations tell us, "Well, I don't really care about that, I didn't get this, it seemed too expensive." We don't know that just from the data.
And so we want to make sure we're not biasing the answers with leading questions. This is not an opportunity to sell prospects. And people who have never heard of you absolutely must go into the buyer personas. Otherwise, they're just customer personas, because people already know how to solve the problem that they're paying you to solve.
Elana:
Yeah. And fundamentally, by just looking at that one slice, you're ignoring an entire market opportunity that your product can make a difference, right?
Rebecca:
Wait. Wait. And it may be a better one.
Elana:
Yeah. And that's where I love talking to Rebecca, because she says a lot of the times her instinct is, "Is that the right market for you? What is your best product market fit?" And for those of you that have not even thought about that, I want you to just pause and think about the people you're reaching currently, what your product's serving, and do you have a handle on all those questions that Rebecca was asking, because I think nine out of ten startups I meet – and sometimes they're also mature companies, and they might be going through a transition or rethinking or trying to keep up with competition – they do not know their audience as well as they should. And it's a significant gap.
Rebecca:
It's a good point.
Elana:
So let's get into a little bit of mistakes around developing go-to-market strategies. You mentioned a couple, but I also noticed that people call them go-to-market plans and strategies when they're not. Like, if somebody's out there and saying, "I want to make a plan but I think I should call it go-to-market because people might perk their ears up." So do you see people mislabeling it? And then also, what are the common mistakes when people are going through it?
Rebecca:
It's a great question. So the way we want to set a go-to-market strategy is by making our objectives very clear, then defining the strategies to get there, and then implementing the tactics. And so, the tactics would be, like, post twice a week on Twitter, this is the blog article we want, et cetera. Too often, we start with the tactics of our go-to-market strategy is tactics – is a campaign calendar, which is so important. We have to have that to have a roadmap of where we're going and visibility into the company, but we also have to be willing to pivot off of that. If something is disproportionately performing well, we want that to be like, "Great. This is fantastic. This is our new benchmark to beat." Let's iterate and pivot from there, because our tactic needs to support this strategy, which is basically this set of plans. It's going to help us reach the objectives that we have.
And so, the way I see people going wrong is that they have basically an editorial calendar. This is the tactics that they're calling a go-to-market strategy, but they've missed the actual strategy of "We're going to reach these customers through these channels for these reasons with the overall company objective, which is increasing top-line revenue, growing the number of monthly active users" – something like that, right? And so, we need our objectives with our North Star metrics that are most important – this strategy for how we think we're going to get there, and then the tactics. But too often, we just go straight to the tactics, or go-to-market strategy is just a campaign calendar.
And so, when we do that, we've really lost the plot. And things can only be so effective there. When we're evaluating how things are going, we go the exact opposite order. So instead of saying, "Email marketing doesn't work for this audience," we would evaluate the tactics. What was the subject line? How is the list segmented? When was it sent? What was the offer? What's the formatting, even? How many users are looking at mobile? Then we might say, "OK, we have some levers to fix here. The subject lines are performing well, but our calls to action aren't because our click-through rate is low, and our conversion rate is low." That would be a tactic we evaluate before we would say something like the strategy.
And so, the analogy I use is kind of like, "This is developing your blueprint." To set your blueprint, you never start just, like, lugging bricks around and saying, "This will be a fireplace, I think. The foundation is over here. Like, this is the door." We will have an actual blueprint before we start just, like, applying bricks, right? So that's our objective strategy and tactics. We develop the blueprint first before we start building. We also would never say, "Indoor plumbing, it's just not going to work in this building. Too bad," before we would evaluate the tactics, which are how are the lines configured. "I'm not a plumber." This is kind of the analogy, I think. But basically, this is the analogy of, "We need to evaluate the tactics before we say the strategies are an effective, anchoring back to the objectives that we wouldn't be hitting if they weren't effective."
But we can't decide on what these are until the objectives are very clearly defined from a top-level business perspective and aligned with all the departments. The strategies for how to hit them are implemented, and the tactics are from there, but too often people just, like, "Our audience isn't on Twitter." That's it, without evaluating what are we tweeting; is it valuable, is it consistent, et cetera. And so that's probably – I'd love to hear your thoughts in your world, to have you hear that if people just being, like, "We need a new magical marketing hack channel that is going to help us scale forever." And usually that's not the truth. There's probably not a missing magical channel that we never heard of. The objective and the strategy hadn't been aligned to the tactics.
Elana:
Yeah. Thank you for that. I think going tactics first is what I see a lot, too. I think people go to tactics for a lot of reasons. One, they've always done them before, so they've got up capacity. And even if they did all those smart things you suggested, they may still continue on the channel because that's what they've always done, and "That's what I see."
Rebecca:
I feel good about it because I know how to use it, right?
Elana:
It's that I feel good about it – all of these things, but the more set up you are in a channel and the more you hire and invest in that channel, the less agile you are to switch to other channels. So yeah, I just noticed that because that's the number one reason I think when people ask us – because we fundamentally – our strategy with organic social media and community that, for us to succeed, we already have to embed into a go-to-market plan, right? And we have to already be a part of and connect the dotted line to what your ultimate organization objectives are. So we come in and be amazing on social, be amazing in community, but if it doesn't connect to the dotted line of what your organization is, eventually the fundamental belief that this is working and contributing to what the organization cares about is going to stop, and they will stop with us. So that's why I always pause.
And that's why, a lot of times when you were working at your company, I would funnel people to you. I'd say, "Rebecca can help you because you need that framework in place before you can really assess if organic social is the right fit." And I reject – I mean, not reject, it's a bad word – but I say, "You're not ready for us yet" to so many people that come to us, because I can just tell that we're not the right channel for them at the right moment. Tactic-driven first, and we've always used to do this, maybe we used to have an agency that's done it, so we're going to do it now. That kind of –
Rebecca:
It feels good because it feels like you're making progress, right? You're doing things that are in public. You're getting some kind of external validation in the form of measurable metrics of impressions and clicks and opens, and so it feels like you're making progress, but you could be even farther from your goals as a direct result if this is the wrong audience, for example, right?
And another mistake I see people make is letting each platform's metrics just kind of be evaluated in silo, right? And so, each platform will have slightly different ways of reporting. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn will all have relevant, overlapping metrics, but the way they're calculating them is different, the way the goals are different. And so, if we're just saying, "Let's evaluate the Facebook strategy by looking exclusively at on-platform metrics, we've really lost the plot of the overall objectives and these North Star metrics, and if they're laddering to them effectively or not.
Elana:
Yeah. I mean, you're hitting on some really complicated things, and I think we're going to definitely have you on as a part two guest.
Rebecca:
Great.
Elana:
For those of you that are educators, thank you for hanging in here. I hope you find what we're talking about valuable. Even if you know what Rebecca and I say, you might not understand some terms and acronyms. We'll do our best also in the Show Notes to give you some resources around it, but I hope it provides you a foundation of how EdTech companies are really trying to serve your needs and your challenges, and potentially how they go wrong just because, you know, they're human and they have a lack of resources as well.
But is there anything you want to say to the educators that might be listening? Some of them are thinking about getting into Edtech, some of them just got into Edtech, some of them are just curious and use a lot of Edtech products.
Rebecca:
Totally. I think that's a great question. So the whole goal of the EdTech industry is to do what you just said, is to leverage the innovation and the power of technology to solve some of the most complex, pressing problems that our schools are designed to solve. And so this is supposed to be an ecosystem. And I say that there should be, for the educators, pedagogical skepticism of whether or not the efficacy of the products we're seeing is actually satisfactory to you. And so I love Edtech. I think it is the best way to solve some of the most complex societal issues that we face, but not all EdTech is good or efficient or effective. And so, being skeptical of that is so valid and warranted and something that I love, and the best EdTech companies are proactively addressing. Those are the ones that care about efficacy – are routing their design and research. It's not just one lone visionary founder who wishes he had something when he was a kid just kind of like sails into the sunset, right?
So I think that being mindful that we're all part of this ecosystem, that the innovation that comes from the speed and the autonomy of the private sector is designed to complement the far-reaching services and proof that we don't harm a whole bunch of kids in the process of having a lot of more checks and balances in the nonprofit and the public sectors. And so, I think this is all a rich ecosystem that for any of us to be successful, we really need to be thinking about that.
And so, where people go wrong is forgetting that, right, not any one of us on an island. If I am a teacher who rejects all tech, my kids are worse off. If I'm an EdTech founder who is never in classrooms, my products aren't as effective as they could be. This is an ecosystem that has to really think about serving each other first, and that's where the rewards come from. And as we talked a little bit about this idea of being a thought leader, but really adding value. That's where I see people go wrong, is forgetting that if you put the students and the teachers and the educators at the center of any of this, that is essentially the foundation of your go-to-market strategy.
Elana:
Gosh, I love that. I love how you've fundamentally flipped the script so much for EdTech organizations, because a lot of the times they fundamentally believe in their product, as they should. Absolutely. They just don't understand why people aren't buying it. And then the way for them, they think, for people to buy it is to talk about their product more, to talk about their features more.
And I know we're getting more into the marketing lesson to the go-to-market, but it's how do you specifically meet the challenges and the needs? And what you said is if they did not have your product, what would they do before that? Get into that stuff, because a lot of EdTech products – we worked with ABL Schools way back in the day, and master school scheduling. Like, what? They just used method boards. I kid you not. They use a Google spreadsheet and physical magnet boards and whiteboards, but that's what they did. So they couldn't really reimagine. And when you talk to educators, I want to bring up Rayna's episode – we'll put it in the Show Notes – because she talks about how you as educators can really be empowered, especially when you are doing pilots, and be a partner alongside them. And don't ever as an educator feel like you need to say, "Things are good because they're better than they were before," right? I know, educators are the most nicest human beings ever, but you being nice is not going to help them succeed, too. So just speak with your heart, speak with your truth, and is "good" good enough? How do you make it great?
Rebecca:
Yeah. I mean, that's part of the leading questions, too, right? It's just the educators who are in a pilot or in a focus group, which I hate, by the way. Don't do focus groups, they're not all the customers we need to scale, right? And so, if we're asking questions that lead to certain answers, we haven't helped anyone because they're trying to be nice, they're trying to be helpful, but you're not actually getting the insights that you need. And so, removing your ego, removing any attachment to the answers, not correcting people when they don't know how to use something, right? All of these are factors that go into the go-to-market research that make it much more effective.
Elana:
And if people are trying to figure out – like, I do market research, but not to the level of you. And it is kind of slightly intimidating the way you're talking about it, because I'm, like, "I bet you she knows how to do it really, really well." Like, how do they get started in thinking about it, especially if I'm a founder? I can't hire a firm or anything like that, but how do I get some resources that can help me? Maybe we can put them in the Show Notes, too.
Rebecca:
Completely. Stephanie Marsh, I want to say is her last name, User Research, is the book. It's this amazing field guide that I used when I was just getting started. It's this lime green cover. And it essentially breaks down all the different types of research you could want to do, which scenarios are best suited for them, and then a field guide to how to do them effectively, and cost-effectively. It's a great place to start.
Elana:
Oh, good. Good. And for those of you listening still, you can tell I'm a learner as much as you all, too, so I'm going to go out and buy that book. Your audience is the foundation of everything. So if you don't know your audience, you don't know their challenges, you don't know how they word things, what keywords they look for, you're fundamentally going to fail, and all of your efforts are going to be for naught.
Rebecca:
Yeah. I mean, the best encapsulation of this is actually in The Wolf of Wall Street. Do you remember that scene where he asked him to sell him the pen? And the guy started saying, "Oh, it's a nice pen, it's a heavy pen," but the way he actually sold effectively is by asking the customer, "What are you using this pen for? What are you in the market for? What are you using currently? Well, based on what you've told me, this is the only pen in the world for you." Right? That's essentially the go-to-market strategy, right? If it's just, like, "This is a nice product, it's a good product, it's a pretty product, we designed it for this" versus "What are you using for? Why do you want this?" That flip is the difference between effective and ineffective go-to-market strategy and the copywriting there.
Elana:
Yes. And then we can even take it a step further and tell that person's amazing journey with that one pen so it resonates with other people like that. So when we start getting into those case studies and talking and saying – because in education in particular, I don't care what you do, but I do care if my colleagues or someone like me has had success with the product.
Rebecca:
Yeah. 91 percent of educators say that word of mouth is the most important channel to them. It's almost shocking, if not higher, right? And so, leveraging those case studies. We do things often with nearest neighbor campaigns of who is the nearest customer who's satisfied with our product to a target market? It could be based on state, it could be based on any number of geographical factors. Let's leverage their success, because that is so much stronger than anything we can say. Even if you or I say the exact same thing that a customer says, it's more credible coming from them.
Elana:
Agreed. Agreed. Well, Rebecca, you have been amazing. I am jotting down notes like crazy, thinking of buying books. You've got me thinking even differently. And I love having these conversations, because I'm steeped in a different world, and we have this Venn diagram where we overlap, but you're also on the other side, too. And, gosh, I learned so much.
So I want to end this podcast with a couple of questions that we ask all of our guests. One is, I think that you'll have some really interesting answers on this one, but in this world of being online, virtual, boundaries between work and personal life and pandemic and stress and burnout, how do you keep going? Are there things that inspire you or that you read? Things that you do physically? How do you keep going and put that pep in your step in the day?
Rebecca:
Yeah. It's a great question. Seeing where I get energy, and not trying to force things where they don't go, is important. So in the morning, I really try not to have meetings if it's at all possible, because that's where I get energy from being creative and writing, and strategizing the research. So having a routine around where my energy is best suited to tasks, but also things I love doing. I love mountain biking. And so, doing that with as much frequency as possible, even if it's for 20 minutes, just making sure that there's some degree of routine to things that I just enjoy doing. Those are my two big things.
Elana:
Yes. And for you educators out there, too, you might not have flexibility on your schedule during the day, but you certainly can prioritize things that give you joy. And one of the episodes we had with Tracy Selock, one of our educators, talks specifically about bringing up boundaries and saying no at times, because educators in particular say, "Yes, I can do yard duty, yes, I can lead the robotics club - yes, yes, yes." And then they forget about themselves. So your thing about mountain biking really reminded me also of educators from their passions. And sometimes they even forget they have passions, right?
Rebecca:
Yeah. Absolutely. You can't miss what you don't have, right?
Elana:
Yes. Well, the last thing is how can people get in touch with you, Rebecca, if they want to learn more or just follow along with you?
Rebecca:
The way we did. Let's connect on Twitter@rebeccasadwick. That's my maiden name. S-a-d-w-i-c-k.
Elana:
OK. And we'll put that in the Show Notes, too. So please follow Rebecca. I follow her, and it's prioritized. I see her every time I open up my stream, because I'm more likely to respond to you. So I'm like, "Ooh, smart. Ooh, I didn't think of that." She's a great one to follow. I really appreciate your time, Rebecca.
For those of you that are joining us, I want to just send a heartfelt thank you. We really appreciate your support. I don't do this for the views, the downloads. I do this to hope that I make a difference in one of your lives where you can say, "Hey, I thought about this differently." And it might be a strategic shift or a perception shift. It might be like, "Oh, I'm just going to do that one thing." You know, like what Rebecca said around personas. I'm going to start some doing some personas, and they don't have to be great. I don't want the perfection to be the sake of just good enough, get something done to start, and then you can make them better. So think about the little things Rebecca said as well, as well as just mind shifts. Like, how do we reframe things? How do I think differently of when an EdTech company approaches me if I'm an educator? And if I'm an EdTech company, gosh, do I have a go-to-market plan? And then say, "Good, do I know my users?" So that's what I hope for all of our episodes, is that you fundamentally walk away with at least one thing.
So thank you all for joining us. You can access this episode's Show Notes at Leoni Consulting Group.com – two G's – Consulting Group.com/20 for all the notes and all the resources that Rebecca talked about as well. So thank you all. We will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education.
Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit Leoni Consulting Group.com/podcasts for all Show Notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. And we always love friends, so please connect with us on Twitter@Leonigroup. If you enjoyed today's show, go ahead and click the subscribe button to be the first one notified when our next episode is released. We'll see you next week on All Things Marketing and Education.
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Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Rebecca Shaddix, Guest
Rebecca Shaddix is the Managing Partner at Strategica Partners, an award-winning international consulting group focusing on a strategic, financial, environmental and human perspectives. She was recognized as the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Rising Star of 2019 for her track record of growing startups.
As a Forbes Contributor, she writes about societal implications of advancements in the tech sector, and led the Digital Technologies Initiative at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation - launching its Women in Tech research initiative.
Rebecca is the Chair of the Board of Directors of Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization that helps women and non-binary adults transition into technical careers.
She previously served as VP of Marketing at Curious Cardinals, which pairs K-12 students with college mentors to develop the skills they'll need to become creative and confident lifelong learners. She also led marketing as Director of Marketing at GoGuardian, which Inc. 5000 calls the fastest-growing education company in U.S. history.
Rebecca is an alumna of UCLA and the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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