If you're ready to take your edtech company to the next step and grow it, congrats! Your years of creating your product, building relationships, and getting traction were worth it. As you determine how to grow your edtech company, the marketing team will grow too—not just in size but in how they help the company. Marketing becomes more strategic and sophisticated as your business grows. Here are some considerations for your marketing as your edtech company grows.
How to Grow an Edtech Company with Marketing
As your edtech company grows, marketing will become more critical. Marketing will shift from solely focused on the fundamental day-to-day activities to becoming a strategic partner to company leadership that contributes to business planning with a systematic approach. This might mean that you will need to shift your mindset about marketing's role and bring on senior marketing team members or collaborate with external partners.
One way marketing can contribute in a higher-level strategic way is to help identify opportunities for growth in the market. Marketing can research what competitors are doing, trends in the education sector that will impact your company, and customer needs and pain points you might not currently address. This research can give you ideas for new markets, products, or target audiences to pursue to grow your edtech company.
After determining how your edtech company will grow, marketing will be vital for your go-to-market plan. They will no longer run on day-to-day priorities. Instead, they will be focused on an integrated strategic marketing plan that outlines:
Marketing goals mapped to business growth goals
How to reach new customers
Ways to get the word out about your new product offerings
With that plan, the marketing team will be able to execute marketing holistically to make an impact over the long term and to continually optimize campaigns.
Evolving from a marketing team focused on getting work out the door to becoming a strategic partner that plans ahead is a transition. However, to contribute to business growth, marketing will need to get out of constant day-to-day short-term activities. If your team is small and you need a leader with marketing expertise, you might benefit from bringing in external help (like Wise Marketing Strategy) or hiring a VP of Marketing or CMO. You will need a partner focused on planning for growth while also building the marketing team to sustain a more systematic, strategic marketing approach.
3 Marketing Strategies to Grow an Edtech Company
There are multiple ways to grow an edtech company, and marketing has a different role depending on the direction you take with your company. Let's explore at a high level how marketing can contribute to business growth for edtech companies.
Focus Your Marketing to Grow
As you dive into your growth plan, one of the most effective ways to grow in edtech marketing might seem counterintuitive: to focus your marketing. There are so many nuances when marketing to a college or K-12 school/school district, whether it's figuring out the right people to involve in the buying process for your product, identifying how to relate your edtech product to customer priorities, finding local grants that institutions might use to buy from you, or incorporating language and phrases that educators use.
When you identify what target markets you want to focus on, your marketing will be stronger. By researching how best to reach them instead of a broad group of educators, you can relate better to the people you are marketing to, increasing engagement and conversions.
Grow With Your Existing Clients
Expanding within your existing client base is another path to growth that marketing can contribute to. For example, if you have a strong foothold with universities or K-12 schools, your marketing can help promote your products to other departments on a campus or other schools within a district. With this growth strategy, marketing collaborates closely with sales to develop targeted account-based content and campaigns that leverage your existing relationships within those institutions to expand.
Find More Ideal Customers
Another way to grow is for your marketing to go deeper with what's working for you already. With this strategy, marketing can analyze your sales data to determine which types of institutions and roles spend the most with your company and have strong product adoption. Find similarities in the profiles of these institutions and then create marketing campaigns focused on them.
For example, you may market to universities across the United States, but when looking at your data you find that community colleges are your best customers. You can then create marketing campaigns targeting community colleges, using case studies and quotes from your existing community college customers to fuel your marketing.
Expand to New Markets
The final growth strategy marketing can help with is entering new markets. This strategy could involve launching a new product or finding a new type of audience. For example, you may market an existing product sold to technical schools to companies for upskilling initiatives.
This growth strategy is more challenging because it involves entering an entirely new space where your company might not have an established reputation. You will need to invest more time and money in marketing with this strategy, but it can be worthwhile, especially if the market is less saturated with competition.
As you determine how to grow your edtech company, effective marketing will be critical to sustainable growth. Marketing will no longer be solely focused on the day-to-day work. It will evolve in complexity alongside the growth of your business. By investing in a holistic, strategic marketing approach, your marketing will evolve into contributing to continual growth and meaningful impact in education.
