This interview was originally recorded on September 30, 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.
Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I'm really excited to be sitting down with Charlene Blohm. She is the president and CEO of Charlene Blohm & Associates known to the world as CB&A. They are a PR and communications agency in the business to education B2E love that acronym. I never use it and you all use it so well I just say we work with education brands. I've known Charlene probably now for over a decade.
For all of you that are my audience gosh, you're like, "She's old. She just brings in people she's known for 10 years and she says the same thing." I love to be able to highlight the connections I've been blessed to forge since my career at Edutopia, and Charlene was one of them. We actually worked in a very short stint at Edutopia together way back in the day. It feels like a different lifetime, it almost does. I've always admired Charlene for what she provides in the education space.
She is a force. She knows everyone. She's worked with education brands since 1991 when I started LCG, It's really when you start your own company, you feel very vulnerable. You feel like, "Oh my God, am I going to fail? There's so much pressure." There was really no reason for you to be so kind and you gave advice. You said, "I'm here." You offered ways to collaborate, but you did, you volunteered that. I feel so blessed and just grateful that people like you in the space that welcomed just random people that are just trying to start their own thing. I loved, loved, loved it. Charlene, as you can tell, has a wealth of knowledge in so many things. We're going to talk about branding, we're going to talk about media, what it is, earn versus paid. We're going to be talking about KPIs around business education marketing.
I know this sounds very EdTech-oriented for the educators listening, but believe me when I say that, when you are looking for jobs you're going to want to think about your profile, you're going to want to think about branding. Charlene's got some thoughts around ways to tie a lot of this in for you as well. For those educators that are thinking of transitioning into the EdTech world, this is an especially important episode.
I'm just going to leave it there. I think Charlene has such a big bio. I'd love for her to talk a little bit about her experience and maybe anything I missed about her bio. I just want to pause and say thank you so much for spending time with me today, Charlene.
Charlene:
You are so sweet. I am so glad to be here to support you. I remember very well the conversation we had. It was at an ISTE. I can remember the sound of the escalators behind us because we were meeting really near the escalators. I'm not picturing which exact convention center, but I can hear those escalators going up and down behind us. That's where you first told me that you were about to make the jump that you were about to get your own business going. I remember standing there visiting with you some other folks that you brought with just to make sure that we could do everything that we could to surround you with support because we need more voices like yours in the industry. So glad that you've had the successful run that you have. I know you're going to have many, many more successes to come.
Elana:
I love how our space collaborates too and just how can we best support the ebbs and flows of EdTech and there's so much going on there's no way we can all support it. It's rising tides. I wouldn't have survived a pandemic without agencies like yours where we're just trying to say, "What the heck's going on?"
Charlene:
It's in it to win it together is the way that I always like to think about that. I'm all about the growth. It's about the growth for ourselves. Personally, it's about the growth for our companies, our businesses, what we're trying to create. I think that makes a ton of sense and I know that at CB&A as we often call it, we focus on the three core things. We look at strategy, which you need to have an idea of who you're going to do what for.
You need to figure out your personas of who you're going to market to. Then, you need to figure out your content, how you're going to reach in. We're definitely going to talk about that today. I'm with, historically I founded the company and the public relations realms because that's what was the key at the time. Still, a very critical component of so much of what goes on in the industry today. Glad to take our conversation into any of those and any other realms that come up today.
Elana:
I'm excited. Well, let's get into it. Let's jump right into it. I think maybe we can talk about something a bit more big umbrella where most people know the term, let's talk about branding. I think some people have visceral reactions to the word branding. I don't care what you call it, you a personal profile, whatever. Educators in particular, I know you all are a very selfless bunch. You don't like talking about yourself, but it's really important that you have a footprint that you really embrace this. I want Charlene to talk about what branding is, what it isn't, and how do EdTech folk and educators really get started on the right foot?
Charlene:
I think those are big, deep questions and we really got one hour together today. I'd like that you're starting at the top of the mountain and we can work our way down from.
Elana:
We may not work down. Sometimes I just throw bombs at people and they're just like, "I'm going to try."
Charlene:
Well, we're on ski slope down the mountain then and I think this is going to be a lot of fun. I think the first thing that I want to say to the EdTech vendor community is that there's really no line items for brands in school budgets. It doesn't have a brand connection to it, it doesn't have your name in it, doesn't have your competitor's name in it. A lot of branding is about making sure that your product, your unique differentiators, are something that educators are aware of.
It's about reading, it's about math, it's about curriculum. There's no discovery education line item. The discovery education is used in so very many schools it's covered under other under budget. It has to be how we talk about our brands. Again, if educators aren't aware of the fact that we exist, they're never going to place a purchase order for our product, for our service. We have to talk about our brand, but we have to also make sure we're talking about it in ways that resonate with educators.
I had just a couple of thoughts about that. I want to come back and honor the educators who are listening with us at the end of this as well. I think the first thing is to remember that any brand messaging that we do, it's got to be relevant. It's got to be relevant to the teachers, to the administrators that we're working with. To that point I have to say, if you can show to an administrator that you have an appreciation for the big picture priorities that they have, that you're solving their needs, your brand is going to do so much better.
You've got to make sure that you're presenting a persuasive case, if you will, to administrators, to educators when you're making up their minds. The second thing that I would say there is that so many districts in particular, there's a committee of people who make decisions. Your brand has to be resonant with teachers as well as the administrators to sign up on the purchase orders. You can't have one audience and not the other. You have to make sure that everybody can approach your brand, understand your brand, and embrace your brand.
I think that's the easiest way to do it. I would say that the last thing there to think about when you're creating a brand, is it's got to be based on listening skills. I know you talk a lot about social media and listening skills and I have to say the same really applies on the branding front here as well. You have to be able to talk about what you do, how you do it, and that you've got to feedback loop really for the educators in there to help you understand what a good brand is.
Maybe you have your branding idea, your ideas in mind's eye, think about inviting some educators into a focus group. This is where we really need that educator voice. If a vendor reaches out to you, educator, and says, "I'm trying to make sure that my messaging, my positioning, my branding is spot on, can you help me? Can you sit in on a session for an hour for 90 minutes and help us with that?" If the idea is you want educator opinions and you want to know that you're on the right track, test, test, test. Get out of your own head and sit down with a group of teachers at an actual table at a conference, or virtually together in some Zoom session. Just really work on practicing your listening skills and testing your brand messaging with real people.
Elana:
I think sometimes we think of branding of like, "I got it done, check mark."
Charlene:
No.
Elana:
It's constantly evolving because the industry is constantly evolving and educators needs are constantly evolving and your product is evolving. You bought all of these things of how can I make sure, like you said, listen to educators and hit those pain points and challenges in a way that maybe they talk about it in keywords, right?
Charlene:
Absolutely. Then think about again, it's a needs based solution. It's not about necessarily to the vendor community, it's not about the bells and whistles, it's about what you do and how you change the lives of kids, of teachers, of other administrators of parents, however you're slicing and dicing the market. I do think that that breaking it down like that and showing that is really significant.
The other thing that I would add into that is one of the things for us to think about is how we talk about how well our product works. Again, it's not about bells and whistles, it's about efficacy, and how to talk about the great things that our products do has to be talking about we worked with an educator, we worked with a district that had this need and here's how we were able to solve it.
I think those are some really successful ways to dive deeper into branding is to make sure that you've got that voice out there and that you've got a listening loop of some kind set up. Again, vendors, what is your listening loop? Educators, when you hear vendors saying, "We need help," that's your chance to get in and have those conversations. You mentioned frequently actually, Elana, the idea that some educators are looking to make that transition from the classroom to the vendor community. Those vendors that are out there asking for questions, those vendors whose products you're already using, that's a great way to begin a relationship with them.
Elana:
Efficacy is a whole 'nother ball of wax. What I will say is that if you're EdTech folk, please invest in it. It is something that you will never regret. I feel like it is very overly light in the industry right now to be nice about it. For those of you that are interested and maybe you're a startup and don't have budget for efficacy studies or evaluation, we had a podcast with Jason Torres Altman back in the early days. We'll put it in the show notes. He talks about ways you can incorporate it just into your daily practice and really look at am I making the intended impact that I want? When we think about branding, I always try to bring the brand back to the why a little bit. That resonates with the educators because they don't care about your product. When we think about branding, I want to also let educators know what would you choose and prioritize as your things that you are the most passionate about? How can you demonstrate that you have expertise in this area? Is that what you want to be known for in the industry?
Charlene:
I agree with all that and I think that, again, it can be done in cooperation. I think this is again the place where the vendor community and the educator community can work so brilliantly well together. I know that educators constantly are trying to tell vendors that impact on academic performance, this is something that they really care about. How does your brand solve the need for us to make bigger, brighter, better, smarter students?
If you can get that in there, that's helpful. I would say that loved by teachers, that's important, but it's not as critical as is the academic performance piece. Think about how your brand can deliver. I would say two more things, innovation or as they say in my family, innovative, that is important to us on the vendor side, I have to say that educators, it's like, "Okay fine, it's innovative. I've been innovating in my classroom every day. I was innovating five minutes ago." I don't know that a brand that's focused on innovation, innovation, innovation is going to resonate well with educators. I don't think they want to hear too much about that because they're the ones that are doing the innovation on their side.
Then, just one last point and that's about pricing. We're talking about brand and not pricing, but don't be afraid of pricing. When you're out there doing your brand architecture make a decision really on when you want to talk about pricing. Don't make educators go hunting for it. It's a way to develop, I'm going to use the word trust here. I can trust this vendor because they are telling me upfront what the expected investment is going to be. I think that that needs to be part of the brand architecture at some point you have to know when you're going to start talking price and how you're going to address it.
Elana:
I swear, I'm probably just going to "yes and" all of your points because they're so good. I would say yes and don't put a mysterious schedule a demo button all over your site because if you're thinking about scaffolding and using that terminology in education into the marketing world, you can't just get someone from social to your website and then get them to schedule some mysterious demo with no pricing or anything like that. Maybe baby step that experience.
Charlene:
I couldn't agree with you more. I know from the vendor side, and I respect this so much, that when they can get somebody to actually look and see their product and experience a demo, they have an incredibly high close ratio. I understand the need for call to action, but there are calls to action that you can have before that because you have to understand and respect the buying process. I don't want to mirror you yet, but I might want to have a first date. What is that?
The answer is click here to learn more, click here to download a case study, click here to look at a successful implementation. Click here to learn what educators have to say about our product. There are so many calls to action that can move people along that continuum while also having, for the folks who are ready to go straight to demo. They've done all their research, they've done their homework, they've seen that your brand is about efficacy and about delivering results in the classroom. They know they want to learn more, give them that chance, but give them more than one opportunity, give them more one call to action. I see that a lot that it's straight to the demo and I respect so much, why?
I can't think of too many educators who click first time on are on someone's website to look at the demo. I just can't imagine that's what they're after. They want to learn something first. Let's help them with that journey.
Elana:
You use the word trust, and really what you are doing is building trust and you're building value. Think about what your target audience needs. Create some downloads, create some things. You can put them on a drip campaign. Here you go, here's more resources, here's more resources. They're going to trust you so much that it's not a big leap for them to want to look at your demo.
I know we can talk about this forever, but let's jump into the world of PR because this is an area I am not very knowledgeable and I know that you've spent your entire career in this world for those of, I know there's a varying degree of EdTech folk on the audience that are maybe don't have ever invested in PR, but if they were going to do it, they might try to do it themselves a little bit versus somebody who has very well-versed in PR agencies. Can you just give us a brief overview of the role that PR plays in EdTech, and then specifically I'd love for you to talk about earned versus paid media.
Charlene:
That's such an important point and this is really my favorite topic and we didn't cover this in the intro, but just to briefly share with the crowd here. I am indeed a recovering journalist. My early career was indeed spent in newsrooms in Montana and Texas. I was a reporter, I was a columnist, I was a managing editor. Earned media is really in my blood, and paid is something that has come to us more recently and I love that.
For those of you who remember what the Associated Press is all about, I will tell you that the AP teletype machine used to make the bam, bam, bam typing sounds in the background and I still sleep to that when I'm in a hotel room someplace when I'm traveling and I want to block out hollow noise in my hotel, I still have the AP teletype sound on my phone and that is indeed what I play with. Let me just describe a little bit the earned media side and how that really works. I think that there could be some misconceptions we might want to talk about on that front as well.
I think earned and paid really compliment each other. Earned media is when you take a piece of information that's timely, that's significant, and relevant. Those are the big three hooks here. Timely, significant, relevant, that's something that you want to share with the market. It can be company news and there are indeed media outlets that care about the company news.
I would tell you in the education space, it's just as interesting if not more so interesting to again have that educator voice. I honor the educators who are with us today. The real stories from real classrooms with real kids that can be shared in an earned media story I think are completely brilliant. If you reach out to somebody and say, "I've got a great story about how wonderful my company is," you're probably not going to get very far.
It goes back to what we were saying a minute ago about brand. Make sure that the stories that you're telling are based on authentic experiences in real classrooms. You're going to get a lot further with your media relations pitch and you're going to get a lot more positive results out of that. On the earned media front, it's got to be about pitching a story that's going to be of interest to an educator so that you can take their experiences and amplify them if you will share those successes with others.
That's really what the earned media side is about. Paid, now that's different. That's a little bit more about getting your phraseology, your company information out and posted in an article that you control. Sometimes it's called native advertising, actually. You still have to write within the parameters. It's 1,000 words, it's 1,200 words. You pay for the opportunity, you get to control the messaging within the confines of what the media outlet or association or partner is asking you to do. You pay for the privilege and then you can also control where folks go.
We were talking earlier about the call to action for demo versus click here to learn more. Each of those pieces that you're creating based on when it's going to appear in the school year in the buying cycle, those can focus more on where someone is in their buyer's journey. That landing page that you take them to your website, it's not your homepage, that's the way an earned media opportunity would work.
The paid media piece is going to be a lot more about dropping someone onto a page to learn them more, to push them along that continuum. Those that click through will likely be at such and such of a spot because you've done that research and that next step will be very clear to them. They're going to do either this or that. You don't have to give them all 27 calls to action that are on your website. You're very clearly directing them along that path.
Elana:
For those are going, "Okay, I get the difference, but where do I start? It's not what is better, but how do I prioritize?"
Charlene:
Where to start?
Elana:
Can I even do it myself? For someone who's tried to do it and I've been slightly trained and I've worked with PR agencies, I was like, "Oh, Lord, no. This is a lot and I need to have relationships with people and I just don't have time." Can you talk about what is involved in getting earned versus paid media, and how do they prioritize the two?
Charlene:
It is really hard to have a favorite child in this conversation. I would say that I think that the two complement each other really well. If you have the internal capabilities to do one versus the other, that might answer that might your initial question. On the earned media front, you have to come up with an idea it has to have some hook to it.
Here's a story about how grade four students in our school had a reading improvement from here to here. We'd love to tell you about what the secret was in their sauce. That's a great earned media pitch. Then, you have to have the educator who had that experience ready to share that. You have to know that they have permission from their school or from their district to have conversations with the media, because some districts are a little tighter about controlling that than others. Others are just glad to have people say happy things to the media and they're a little bit less fussy about who talks to whom.
Having not just that idea, that story, that theme, if you're looking at a media outlet that's about EdTech pitch an EdTech story, if you're looking at a media outlet that's about things that administrators use, you want to tighten in to that point. Your first pitch may not be your best pitch. Sometimes you have to take the story and tweak it and use different ways to do that. A framework, think of it as a matrix of here's all the ideas of the things that we want to talk about. Here are the educators and the members of our executive team who can talk about that. Here's the media outlets that cover these kinds of stories. You can start to put that into a decision-making framework and checklist that I think would work well on the earned front.
Similarly, once you get in the door on the earned front, you can probably guarantee that there's going to be an assertive business-focused person on the paid front who's going to reach out to you and say, "Let's have a conversation." If you start pitching for the one you are likely to hear from the other, which is again why I encourage people to think about those in tandem in some kind.
Elana:
I know we could talk about this topic a lot, but we're doing some quick hits. We hit branding, we went into a little bit of PR, and we're going to go into content marketing. I will say that PR, just like social media, this is a long journey. This is a marriage, this is a commitment. This isn't like, "I'm just going to try once or twice to get a Forbes article and I'm done." Sometimes you have to really build those all the time, you have to build those relationships. That's why I admire you and your focus and just being in education because that also operates differently the world of education.
Charlene:
Absolutely, I think the other thing [crosstalk]
Elana:
The differences there.
Charlene:
You talk a lot about strategy and development and planning, and one of the things is what happens next. I think that you mentioned misconceptions, and I think a misconception that we run into occasionally is we got a great article in name the printer, digital outlet, it doesn't matter. We got this great article and then the phone never rang. Why were you expecting the phone to ring? Is that really what the next step is? Is that people call you up and say, "I'm ready to give you my credit card or however that would work. Here's the purchase order." It's a relationship. The traffic to your website that follows from that makes sense, and what happens when people get there, but it's up to you. Take that wonderful earned media piece that you've secured, congratulations, by the way. Now, what do you do with it? You give it to your sales reps and they share it in their community.
You share it inside the building, it's on the bulletin board in the break room. If you have an actual live office, it's in Slack. If you're a virtual group, take that, and share that and turn that into that next piece of coverage. Here's something that we're really excited about. I have to say one last thing, if you've included an educator in that piece of coverage, if you were able to successfully find someone who is willing to say, "This is a great product, let me tell you about it." Make sure that everybody on your team reaches out and says thank you to that educator for volunteering their time and energy and making that win happen, because that's how you're going to get your next and your series of wins.
Elana:
Yes, I love that. The appreciation for the educator because their time is so valuable and it's something they can be proud of as well, so help them celebrate it.
Let's move to the wonderful huge world of content marketing. I know a little bit about this space, and it is a passion of mine because you can't really do social media well if you don't have content. A content can be a way for you to really get into that why. To show you not just talking about your topic, this isn't product marketing, this is content marketing. Can you just explain what it is and why it's specifically important in EdTech?
Charlene:
I think it's important in many markets, EdTech I think in particular here because it gets back to the ability for you as part of your brand to talk about the successes that you've had in certain kinds of places to share information into a market that has such complex decision-making that you are sharing case studies and stories about yourself that include the different kinds of voices that we're describing, the administrator voice and not.
Content marketing is really about identifying, creating, and then sharing assets that help address problems, hit the hit on those needs that the marketplace has, and then creates interest in your company's product. It's not over promotional, it's not about your product. It's similar to some of the things I've heard you say on the social media front. It has to be about providing background information to an educator. Sometimes you have to simply state here's why something is important.
A piece of content can help you direct instructional materials, if you will, at your audience to help them understand why they should be paying attention to a certain kind of a trend. It can be done in several different ways. There's blogs, there's videos, short and long videos. The short form for the social particularly well. Case studies, infographics, it can be any kind of a piece like that. Some of it is to drive content to your website. Some of it is about providing information and pushing people, again, along a continuum.
Trust comes up for me every single time we talk about content. How can you develop that trust? How can you demonstrate that your brand, your company knows how to work with educators and solve their important needs? I think that's really particularly key part of it. The last but not least is of course it's got to be engaging, it's got to be well-written.
Elana:
What you said was so good there. I would say the one thing I'd love to add is that with content marketing, I feel like this is a way for you to build trust, like you were saying, and there's all these different mediums that you were talking about, but don't ruin it by then going and asking for marriage in every piece of content.
Charlene:
It's not always the demo.
Elana:
You feel like desperate, and it feels that way. Don't at the end of content that you've spent a long time and it's valuable and you've talked to educators and potentially even elevated educator voices, at the end say, "Sign up here or blah blah blah." You do it for all your content, no.
Charlene:
No, I have to say I agree with you a hundred percent there. I think part of it is just to be cognizant of the buyer's journey. Again, this is a piece of research for you with your company, what information are they seeking at the awareness stage? If you don't know, ask your customers, they'll tell you. Ask your prospects, they'll tell you.
When they're at consideration stage, we're now down to maybe two or three different options. We're trying to figure out which one, well now they're going to need a little bit more. They're going to want to know about your implementation and your pricing and some things like that. Then there's the final decision stage. What information do they need to take a presentation perhaps to their committee to say, "Here's what we've picked and why." If you can figure out how to serve up and you're not going to do it in day one, this is something as a piece of library you build up over time.
Content really is king, and there's just always going to be more opportunities to do more content and a shelf life for that content. Your shelf life for your decision-makers could be six months, it could be 18 months. Make sure that you've got a tickler to yourself to review and update that each time on a regular basis. I'll take it one more level actually, and I would suggest that big pieces of content, we call that cornerstone content. The thing to consider there is to break that up into smaller pieces.
I used the example when we started earlier about a case study. Sometimes your case study is focused to the teachers who are part of that buying cycle. Sometimes it's to the administrator, sometimes you can put both together to see how seamlessly something might work, but think about taking your content asset and diving that drive, chopping it up into smaller pieces. You would know how to take a piece of content across social.
I know I can hear you in my head saying make sure it's not the same social post on every social channel, and that there are different lengths for your various videos for example. I can give you a couple. We just did a piece recently for the safeguarding company and we started with a cornerstone piece of content that was a blog post. That doesn't sound hugely complicated, but how that came about was we pulled information from a webinar that they had done, a very good webinar. The idea was to encourage people to view the webinars replay because of course only so many people can attend the live event, but your long tail for some content that can be quite long. We created a white paper out of that, we did that in conjunction with education week, again focused on the webinar itself. We broke that bigger piece of content up into many shorter blog posts that was all part of a longer campaign to make sure that we were, again, reaching different audiences at different places inside that buying cycle. That one turned out incredibly brilliantly. I was very pleased with the results there.
Elana:
So many great tips here. One thing you said that people should put a pin in is aligning content to the purchasing cycle, and then thinking about the different personas within it.
Charlene:
Absolutely.
Elana:
Content design with the influencer or the user or the buyer and know who you're talking to, and who you're not talking to, and at what stage in the buying cycle. That can sound complicated, but companies like CB&A and others you can Google too. CB&A, I love how you guys have a bunch of webinars and resources that they can go, Your blogs are really helpful around this, but go ahead and figure out content marketing.
You need a strategy, and it's okay to dip your toe in the beginning, but you need to figure out who you're talking to, who you're not. Then, where do you want to focus in the funnel if you had to prioritize? Are you just focusing on convincing or converting? Are you really going to just talk about the efficacy? All of this has different times in the cycle that you need to talk to people.
Charlene:
Each piece of content and it's derivative what is it supposed to be doing to move people along in that buying continuum? It serves that purpose. I could potentially even connect what we're talking about with marketing on the content side to the PR side. What we talked about earlier. We had another recent one with display note. We pitched a blog that had a teacher voice in it. We are always thankful to have that teacher voice.
Then we were able to secure a contributed article with her byline on it that was about the experiences that she had shared in the blog post. It's not the same content. Media outlets frown on having the content you submit to them being the content that's on your website. It's got to be unique and different to them. It really worked out really quite brilliantly. It was about how in this particular case, it was a great topic and timely about how the pandemic had changed indeed how that educator had done teaching. Which is something that I know that all the educators are right now trying to struggle with and figure out. We learned a lot during the pandemic and how much of that are we using in our classrooms today.
Elana:
I think I want to ask a tactical question around because PR and content marketing, these are both long tail. In the beginning you're really building up relationships and PR. You might get a couple of wins, but you're really building a foundation and it takes time. Content marketing, I tell people it takes at least six months of consistent high-quality content for you to start seeing some wins. People are like, "That's crazy. That's a lot of money." It will pay back tenfold afterwards. You just need to have faith and you need to do it right with high-quality and potentially elevating educator voices as much as possible. With those two real long-tail investments, if I'm a company, how do I start with investment? Is this should I budget? Should I not even try to do PR in house? What's the general budget? I don't even know where to start if I'm a small company.
Charlene:
I agree with you it's really hard, and I have to do one quick caveat before I launch into that the answer. I think that one of the things to consider, I'm describing again the business to education cycle, which we focus on a lot. If you're selling direct to teachers, you've got a different process, a different cycle, a different throughput on that, and you use different channels to make that happen. The longer piece is going to require that much more content, if that's making sense.
What I think I might suggest is take your school year, take your buying cycle. Lead acquisition of course happens in the fall. Decision-making is happening more in January through February. Budgeting is happening along there as well. Then, break it out in your content. I would think of at least hopefully three pieces, preferably six that you can create. If you do one a month, you're not putting too terribly much of a task on your team.
The other thing that I would say is to get started, make the cornerstone piece and then make your sub pieces that follow in the next couple of months be the sub-asset of all of that. Definitely, think about who it is that you're most trying to influence. If the buyer is, I'm going to say a superintendent is that the person who signs off on the decision made by others, or is that truly the person who's making the decision? Which superintendent are you targeting, that kind of thing. Your buyer persona would be, I think actually where to start and then try to have some kind of content that's lined up to serve all of those.
I would encourage people to think in the PESO model and that would be paid and earned, as we've already discussed. Then, there's owned media and shared media. I'll do that actually in alphabetical order to the PESO examples. It would be paid, earned, shared, and owned. Think about having some content that you can parse out into the various sets of channels. Sometimes the content's on your site, and you're going to create that anyway. You've got part of your team to set up to do that sometime the content is to earn is to use in another channel. Where to start? Start at the beginning, start with one piece at a time, work toward a strategy and a plan over time.
It's like I've heard you say, on social media you're not going to do it in the day, you got to build it out over time. Start with that first piece of content that it starts addressing the kinds of questions that you think that your audience is going to ask you. Again, turn to your educator friends and educators, please respond to these queries from the vendors. They really want to know what your needs and pain points are, and then that's going to help create that content.
Elana:
Yes, and educators listening, when EdTech brands approach you to create content for them, please don't do that for free. Please make sure that you're worth and your time. Even if that makes you feel uncomfortable and you know think it's a good opportunity, know that it's important that you value your time and that you say, "Yes, I can do that. Let's talk about a fee." When they say, "Can I pick your brain, educator?" "Yes, we can do that. We can set up a time. Here's my hourly rate." Even if you're not a crazy entrepreneur, blogging, authoring, whatever you think that people charge, do know that your time is valuable. For EdTech brands, please respect educators and assume that they're going to ask you that.
Charlene:
Well, in fact, we talked about focus groups a little bit ago. I would say that's a good example, an honorarium. It should be being paid to the people who are participating to thank them and honor them for the time and effort that they are giving you to help you do a bigger, better job. I'm glad you mentioned that actually.
Elana:
Well, we talked now about content marketing, branding, and PR. We've got all these levers in play where we're trying to really gain the attention of our buyers. We're trying to say, "Yes, we have this product, here's how it aligns with what you're doing and your initiatives, and your curriculum. How do I know what I'm doing is working?" You specifically talk about KPIs, key performance indicators. For some other people, they might call it OKRs, they might call it jobs to be done. There's lots of jargon out there in this world, but the fact of the matter is we need to figure out how do we know we're moving the needle by doing these things? That is an incredibly nuanced and hard topic that we're always probably collaborating. I'd love to hear yours because it is challenging to figure this out.
You talk about three ways that you look at KPIs in business-to-education marketing. I'd love to be on a fly on a wall to hear what you do, because this is a hard topic.
Charlene:
Well, and I think it's a necessary topic. I'm actually glad that we're diving into this today, because KPIs, that's how we tend to talk about it at CB&A. I think all vendors are out there are have some key performance indicator that they're looking at. I'm going to say and honor educators, they have KPIs out there too, did or didn't someone learn the grade format? I think we just need to honor and recognize that we're both working toward different kinds of KPIs, and they're going to vary from industry to industry. We've been talking a lot about PR and content so I wanted to focus in on a couple of different examples of that.
You mentioned the three ways that we measure, and I'll go through each of these in turn. The first is just simply an output. That's the work that you produce that generates what comes next, which is second, the outcomes, what your outputs produce, what outcomes. Then the third is obviously a business result. A KPI is to measure that there's been a needle moved at some point inside your organization. Let me take each of those and talk a little bit about what that could be.
An output on a PR program could simply be how many pitches went out the door? Did you send out 4 or 104. Were they personalized? Please tell me that they were personalized. If you can get 10 to 12 to 15 out in a month, you're probably doing really good. Those are incredibly highly targeted. Sending out 100 pitches just to fly on the wall, to spit it out to people is not going to yield the results you want. Your output put could be a news release, it could be a statement about something that's happening in the industry. This is what we're seeing on social-emotional learning, for example. Here's our point of view on that, you can do that. How many journalists did you engage?
Could be another output because sometimes you just simply engage somebody to say thank you for something. Sometimes you say, "You mentioned this in your article. The next time you write about that, may I suggest that'd be another way to do an output." The last one would just simply be how many interviews were completed as a number that you're counting, and it's from the C-suite, it's from your exec team, it's from how many educators you included.
Those would be examples of the outputs. The second is the outcome. Here it's not just quantity of coverage, it's also the quality of the coverage. Is there a key message alignment? Do you have something inside your brand that you want to have inside that that article? Have you media trained your executives so that when they do the interviews they are delivering the key message? Then, did that get picked up in the article?
Sometimes it's about the relevancy to your audience. You can have a great interview with an administrator, but it misses and it's in some outlet that's more about parents, and that's a mismatch. You want to make sure you've got relevancy to your audience. It could be about SEO impact, whether or not it's driving traffic. If you've got really good tools to monitor for your successes on the media front more than glad to have a conversation with anybody about that. That's one of my favorite things. Did it have an SEO impact? How many leads did you get out of it? Does it have an influence over time on your net promoter score if you're also monitoring for that, that one might be a little bit harder for some of the newer companies, but more established companies should definitely be looking for net promoter scores.
Then, I'll quickly wrap with the third piece on the business results that's pretty simple stuff in the end. It's about leads that have been converted. It's about satisfaction, it's about retention, it's about renewal, and it's about money. How much of what did you sell to whom? We all have goals that we're trying to meet, and how did the brand awareness of the public relations channel push people into the next piece of their decision-making pie to know that in the end we got the actual revenue? Those are some of the examples of how we look at, again, outputs, outcomes, and business results.
Elana:
While you were talking it reminded me, because I'm not like a typical marketer, but I tend to think in the funnel a little bit more than I should. I like the way that you go what did we put into it? What were the inputs and what did we actually create? Then, what were the results? I think it's important for the business to understand what are you prioritizing for results, too? What is really truly expected? Come on, let's match expectations.
If you're doing one thing, it's not going to fundamentally change teacher retention. Come up with some dotted lines that are actually going to happen, but this work really reminds me of the evaluation work we do. I'm feeling it because we talk about what are your inputs, what are your outputs, what do you ultimately want to change in a theory of action, and it feels a lot like that. It gets you very focused on what did we do, what did we not do? How could we make it better? I don't know, we get so lost in all the data available. I think what you provided is quite simple, but nuanced at the same time.
Charlene:
One of the things that I just heard you say is what results did we get? It really gets back to what are we looking for. I know that for younger companies, there's a KPI that has to do immediately with revenue. I appreciate that because they're young companies and they need revenue. It's really hard though to convince someone to make a purchase for an entire district in October. There's just not a whole lot of decision making and budgeting processes that happen. You've got a time what you're looking forward to that.
There are KPIs for almost every marketing piece. It can be based on how much traffic you're getting to your website. I know for you, engagement in social media is really critical, there's all sorts of different ways to slice that. Again, if you look at it, I liked your analogy a lot of the funnel, because if we can figure that out from the strategic front, you could know what to turn on. If you measure what comes out at the back, whether or not it's going to work, or whether or not you need to tweak it. Testing I think is another part of that. Test your subject lines, test your pitches, what's resonating with educators? What are we doing? We're listening and we're asking our educators, we're honoring them by learning what they want to know more about.
Elana:
I love collaborating with people like you because you work in a different space. When sometimes tech companies come to me and they say, "I don't know what to do, but social media sounds like it could help." I'm like, "No, let's back up. Let's make sure you have a plan in place." Each element, whether it be PR, content marketing, social media, they all can't just live alone. You can't just have a marketing strategy that's just PR.
Charlene:
I would agree, you can't do it on just –
Elana:
When you put all of your focus on PR and then you become that horrible person that's like, "Oh my God, we didn't get these. I was riding on this," you have to have a marketing mix, and each marketing mix is designed to do different things from different time horizons as well. For marketing managers and folks that maybe you're just running an entire company and sales and growth are part of your strategy. Think of all the levers within the marketing mix and don't just rely on one. All of these need time to grow. If you don't have that, you need to hire outside when you have budget to do so, or at least create a budget so when you get funding, you can say, yes, here's my plan. Here's what I expect to do when I hire this or hire internally or externally.
Charlene:
Agreed, 100%. I think that the thing that I would say is something you said a little bit ago, you were asking the why question. Why do you think this needs to happen, because that's an opportunity to jump into what's missing inside the strategy is the strategy is the right mix of channels included. Sometimes just simply asking that why question, I think, can yield some really fun updates and information to why someone reaches out to say, "We need to turn on social media." It's like, "Why? We need to turn on PR. Terrific, why? What are you trying to solve for?" I think those are really critical conversations.
Elana:
It's like a multifaceted why, because it's like you always want to ask yourself why to what end, but also hone into your own why as a company and your purpose to check it all because, I don't know, sometimes we just tend to go with bells and whistles and whatnot, but educators are attracted to authenticity. Also, this is a passion. This is something that they are clearly devoted to. It's not just, "We saw a need, we're jumping in, too." Whatever you do, lead with your authentic self and try to find some mediums to show your humanity as well and connect with educators on a personal level.
Charlene:
Agreed, 100%. I am eager to hear follow-on conversations after people hear, listen to this podcast, just what did they learn from it? Just that example of, and I reached out to an educator to validate my reality, and I reached out to an educator to learn more about needs. I would love to have anybody who's hearing that come back to us both and say, "This is what we learned as a result. The why question we demonstrated at our company today by doing these things." I love hearing from people how they've evolved that over time.
Elana:
I don't know one EdTech company that didn't start from somewhere and actually end completely somewhere else. What we assume what educators needs, even if you were a previous educator, does not mean that you're a current educator in this timeframe, too. What you assume educators needs is really actually sometimes not what they need at all, and your product ends up pivoting almost 360 at times, too.
Charlene:
Absolutely, who is your decision-maker? All of those things all influence the path that folks are on. That's 100% accurate.
Elana:
Well, I know we're just ebbing and flowing here. I'm like, let's do this all day. This is fun. I would say that for people listening, start thinking about the points around, "Do I understand what branding is? Am I doing it in the way that is receptive to the K-12 environment?" Charlene talks specifically around, gosh, let's align it to what you're actually doing in the pedagogy within education and the best practices and also the subject matters. Let's not get so product-centered, but what do you actually do? What's the efficacy around that?
We talked a little bit about branding. PR is a wonderful but sometimes scary world for me because I don't know it as well, but I hope you all got the fundamental terms. What's earned and paid media? What does this endeavor take? If you rewind her a little bit, she showed you some best practices, personalization, all of those things.
Then content marketing, we'll probably do lots of podcasts around that. It's such a huge thing. To do it well, you need to invest in it. I think you gave some great ways that you can say let's start with that what you call cornerstone content and break it up. It doesn't need to be this big machine if you can do it strategically and slice and dice it, and align it to that buyer cycle, which is genius.
Charlene:
Agreed. That's a lot, that is a lot.
Elana:
I didn't even get into the KPIs we just talked about. That for me is a really fundamental shift that you don't need to be super scientific with it. You can just say, "What are we doing? What are the inputs, the outputs, and what were some of the key results afterwards?" Then, that is great as you add reflection in and you keep optimizing the process.
I think right now, Charlene, I'd love to know right now, we're in the midst of school. Our educators are in the thick of it, and our EdTech folks are trying to figure out their life in the midst of this crazy school year that every single year is fundamentally different. We always open up the doors going, "How different is it going to be?" Sadly, it ends up being the most challenging year. You think the last year was the most challenging and you're seeing teacher exodus, admin exodus. Do you have any maybe just parting thoughts to people in the trenches right now? I know that's a hard thing.
Charlene:
It is a hard thing, and I think what I'm going to add in here is that the first thing I want to say to educators is just thank you. You're doing great things in your classrooms every single day in your school buildings, in your admin offices. I've spent the bulk of my career trying to find ways to help you, to help your kids. We're on a mission to reach every kid in the U.S., I know we can do this. The data points that you're describing on are painful.
The incredibly high percentage of educators who considered leaving the classroom this year. I heard a great interview recently from somebody who was involved in Uvalde schools. As an educator was fried, was burnt out, was exhausted, and came to the realization that so were the kids in the school. She made the decision to go back because how would you explain to the kids that you didn't show up, but the kids still had to show up? I really have to say, I can see the fabulous red cape flying behind her every single day. She's a superhero teacher for going back amidst all that pain.
Just basically my message to educators right now is to hang in. There are people out there who appreciate the hard work that you're doing. You're not alone. These are tough days, hang in. I see things changing. I want to also say to parents, trust your teachers. Trust is really key here. Ask how you can support them. The teachers know your kids in ways different than you do and work together to help grow the adults that you really want those kids to all become. I just have to say thank you one last time to all the educators out there. It's a rough patch right now, I agree with you on that front.
Elana:
Thank you for that. There is no good way to segue way to this last question because I was getting chills. It's hard right now, and I do want to echo everything you said to fundamentally thank educators every day, and I feel at the same time inspired and drained all the time by listening and uplifting educator voices. Know that you're not alone, that we see you, and we appreciate you.
The last question we tend to ask us is around inspiration. We just talked about how challenging it is and whether you're in the classroom or not, the world of EdTech, and you run a very successful agency for now, what, 30 years?
Charlene:
Yeah.
Elana:
That's amazing. Your days must be hard. There might be days that you're just like, "Oh my gosh, I just can't breathe. I can't focus. I'm down." How do you go and recharge and say, "Tomorrow's another day." What replenishes you?
Charlene:
You're so sweet to ask that, and I have to do a quick shout-out to the amazing team at CB&A. I really am blessed with the hard work that we do, and I know that we are recently recognized as a best place to work, and those awards, those notifications really mean really a lot to us. We care a lot about each other, and have each other's backs internally as well.
To answer your question, I'm going to go to a science fiction place, actually. I am currently enjoying an amazing fun series that's on Apple TV+. It's called For All Mankind. It's an alternate reality world. I hope you're familiar with it, it's really cool. It's about what would happen if in the space race, the Russians got to the moon before we did. They landed women on the moon before we did. It's our universe with this slight tweak. It's absolutely fascinating to me as a strategist to see how the decision, it's a caldron. They're throwing different ingredients in, they're changing things ever so slightly, and this is the result that comes from it. I find it an absolute fascinating study in human interaction. I'm learning a ton about science. I'm finding an absolutely fascinating view. I couldn't recommend it enough. Again, it's on Apple TV+, For All Mankind. It's completely brilliant because it's our world, but not. I find the things that they're doing on that show how men and women work together, how schools are impacted by what's going on in the world. It's a world that's like ours, but not. It's super, super awesome.
Professional reading if you haven't seen it yet, the current issue of the Harvard Business Review is all about leading in turbulent times, some really interesting articles in there about how to think strategically, how to work with teams, whether or not you're working in a school or for an EdTech vendor. We are not in it alone. We've got to find ways to work together and collaborate better together. I have found that to be an absolutely fascinating read. I'm rereading pretty much every one of the nice deep articles in HBR as we go.
Lastly, I just want to do a quick shout out, by the time this is posted, I will have had a chance to read through Dr. Julie Evans's new book, it's called Free Agent Learning. It's about how kids have learned new skills as students. They're very resilient, and how they're taking learning into their own hands. I am completely fascinated about how kids have evolved. We've spent a lot of time talking about how schools have evolved. I'm going to take a nice deep dive into Julie's book. It's going to be here in my hands on October 11th, fingers crossed.
Elana:
Nice. For those of you that are listening on the go, we will put all of these recommendations in the show notes, and then if Charlene has any extra resources to complement what we were talking about in content marketing, branding, or PR, we'll also put that in, and they'll be ways for you to be able to sign up for their email list, because like I said, they do a lot of free professional development events. Charlene, how can people get in touch with you if they want to sign up and get resources and learn more?
Charlene:
I'll give two different ways. Find me on LinkedIn, I'm pretty easy to find. It's under C Blohm. C as in Charlene, Blohm as B-L-O-H-M. My email is quite simply charlene@cblohm.com. Those are two easy ways to reach me. We'll give you for the show notes, we've got a couple of pieces on how business education companies can stand out in a crowded market. I'll give you that link and some content marketing checklist, and we talked a lot about content. I'll make sure that you have those links for the show notes as well.
Elana:
Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Charlene. I really appreciate it.
Charlene:
My pleasure.
Elana:
In 30-plus years in the industry, I can't imagine everything you've seen in the trends. You should really write a book. I know that always seems intimidating, but I would read it. I think we would all benefit from you coming on the show again periodically. We can dive deep into certain areas as well maybe for next back to school or something. For those of you that are listening, you can also access the written version of this. We'll highlight key concepts, terms. Say, "What was that great quote Charlene said?" We'll have that there along with all of the resources that she just talked about at leoniconsultinggroup.com. That's two Gs, leoniconsultinggroup.com/33. We will see you all next time on All Things Marketing and Education. We appreciate your time in listening and we hope that you took away either one thing or one mindset shift.
Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcasts for all show notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. We always love friends, so please connect with us on Twitter at Leoni Group. 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.
Charlene Blohm, Guest
Charlene Blohm, CEO of Charlene Blohm & Associates (CBA) knows how to take businesses to the next level. Since founding CB&A in 1991, she has partnered with organizations of every stripe to deliver bottom-line value. From early-stage Davids to multinational Goliaths, she has a knack for seeing what others often overlook. Charlene has earned accolades individually and on behalf of the agency, and she’s a frequent guest speaker on all things marketing, PR, and sales in the business-to-education (B2E) arena. Her know-how in journalism, public relations, strategy, and content development established strong networks that she continues to cultivate. Charlene and the CB&A team host the monthly Expert Series of webinars to share B2E knowledge and insights with the education industry at large. In addition, she operates the monthly Ed Industry Chat and is a founding member of the Education Technology Advisory Group. She’s written, contributed to, or published more than a dozen books for the EdTech market. On summer weekends, you’ll find Charlene paddling a canoe or peddling a bike.
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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