From Reactive to Strategic: How to Lead an Effective EdTech Marketing Team
- Kristen Johnson
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Key Takeaways:
Effective edtech marketing leadership means aligning people, partners, and processes around clear business goals, not just managing daily tasks.
A strong marketing team blends collaboration, clarity, and accountability to stay consistent through long education sales cycles.
Moving from reactive to strategic marketing requires intentional leadership, continuous learning, and space for reflection and growth.
As marketing teams expand and expectations increase, leading a marketing team can become time-consuming when it’s not your primary responsibility or your area of expertise. Marketing is a function that is based on an understanding of foundational marketing strategies, plus specialized skills that evolve as the education market changes and technology advances. A successful marketing leader has enough knowledge in both areas.
Marketers can keep themselves very busy with the constant execution, research, and detail needed. A marketing leader needs to ensure that the team is focused on initiatives that are aligned with the company’s goals. In this article, we’ll provide you with an insider’s view into what keeps marketing teams motivated and what they need to be successful.
The Modern Edtech Marketing Team Structure
First, let’s start off by covering what a typical edtech marketing team looks like. For most companies, the marketing team includes full-time employees, plus external partners, like contractors or agencies. This mix of internal and external resources is common among edtech companies of all sizes. For smaller companies, additional help is needed to provide extra bandwidth to the full-time team. For larger companies, agencies and consultants provide specialized expertise.
When you’re leading marketing, the entire ecosystem should be treated as part of the marketing team. An agency will need direction and feedback, and so will a new full-time employee, in order to make sure they understand what’s unique to your business. Effective marketing is contingent upon a cohesive marketing team, no matter where the help is coming from.
9 Tips for Leading an Effective Edtech Marketing Team
If you feel like your marketing team is not producing in the way you expect, consider these tips for how to keep marketers working in the right direction.
Establish Goals
Marketers like to know the bigger picture. Even if their role is focused on a specific area, it helps them understand how they fit into the organization and why certain projects are prioritized over others. If you’re working with external partners, they should also be aware of the goals. You’re one team!
Embrace Collaboration
Marketers enjoy working with others, and good ideas can come from anywhere. Marketing in the education sector is always shifting. What worked last year might not work this year, so being open to hearing different opinions helps, whether it’s from within the marketing team or across other departments, such as product, sales, or customer success. A good marketing leader then knows how to foster collaboration in a way that brings everyone’s efforts together without being distracting.
Be Transparent
Marketers value having insight into what’s important to leadership and what’s going on across the company. It helps them feel like they are not working away in a silo and that their role is contributing to the larger organization. Establish a process to provide regular updates from leadership to the marketing team and vendors when necessary.
Clarify Roles
As your team grows, you will have team members who are accustomed to working on everything, but not anymore. You might also find that your team lacks skills that are needed as your marketing becomes more sophisticated. As the marketing team evolves, regularly review job descriptions and scopes of work to clarify what each person or partner is working on.
Create Accountability with a Project Management System
One of the keys to marketing in the education space is to remain consistent throughout the lengthy sales cycle and to plan around the education buying cycle. That is only accomplished if the marketing team is organized and has the time to execute on an ongoing basis. There are many pieces that go into getting something out the door, which becomes more complex as the team grows and the quantity and depth of the marketing assets increase. A project management system helps the marketing team stay on track, and leaders have insight into what people are working on.
Support a Strategic Mindset
One of the (many) things that makes marketing an edtech product so tricky is the nuances among education buyers. What people care about in different job titles, across states, or institutions varies, and marketing needs to find a way to relate. That means that for your marketing to capture the attention of your buyers, research and planning must take place. And as a leader, you will need to give time to your team for this, which means being mindful of meetings and last-minute changes and requests that throw off their days.
Encourage Professional Development
What makes marketing exciting for those of us who work in it is that there is always something new to learn. There are new technologies (like AI) or platforms (like social media) that come out, as well as policies that shift marketing approaches (like privacy regulations). On top of that, the education market is quickly changing with budget fluctuations, market shifts, and new ways that students are learning. It’s in your best interest to support full-time marketing team members’ participation in professional development. This can include free webinars, online communities, conferences, or courses related to marketing or the edtech industry.
Reflect and Celebrate
It’s really easy to keep moving on to the next thing, but it’s important to occasionally take a step back to reflect on what has been accomplished by the marketing team. It can take a long time to see the effects of marketing efforts, so reviewing progress every 6 to 12 months helps the team see how their work has made a difference for the company. In some cases, you might learn that something new you tried didn’t work out, and that’s ok. If you take the time to evaluate your marketing, then you will know how to improve.
Make Decisions
There are a lot of decisions to make within marketing. They could entail everything from what one word should say in an email to which markets the company should advertise in. It’s important to support team members in making decisions on their own and, as a leader, demonstrate how to make informed decisions.
Guide Your Team from Reactive to Strategic
Leading an effective edtech marketing team isn’t about doing more; it’s about keeping the team focused, motivated, and aligned towards what will make an impact for the company. If you’re stretched thin and struggling to connect the marketing team’s day-to-day work with what your edtech company needs to grow, we can help. Wise Marketing Strategy provides fractional marketing leadership for edtech companies that need senior-level strategy, guidance, and coaching, without the overhead of a full-time CMO. Contact us for a free consultation.
