It can be frustrating for a company leader investing in marketing not to see marketing efforts contributing to business goals. Unfortunately, this is common for small marketing teams that are stretched thin and lack a senior leader with deep marketing expertise.
If your marketing results are not what you want them to be, it's time to dig deeper. As expectations for marketing performance increase, the need for more complex, strategic marketing goes up. Posting on social media or sending emails aren't always enough to see true business results.
Impactful edtech marketing aligned to business goals relies on a data-driven integrated marketing strategy, a team and agency partners with the right skills to execute the strategy, and efficient use of technology to help.
We'll review some elements of strategic marketing to help you find the right opportunities for improving marketing for your edtech product.
Components of an Edtech Marketing Strategy
Goals and Measurement
How do you know your marketing isn't working? You can feel like your marketing team is busy and not producing results, but without an agreement on goals and a system for tracking and reporting results, you don't know what is happening to judge if marketing is contributing to the business. Establishing agreed-upon goals and creating dashboards to track progress is the first step.
Market Landscape
The next thing to do is look at the broader market landscape. In edtech especially, there have been many shifts in consumer behavior since the pandemic. There have also been more government mandates regarding data and privacy that impact edtech companies.
You might have new competitors, either from the mergers and acquisitions happening in the edtech space or from new start-ups.
One reason why marketing might not be working as you expect could be because the world isn't the same as it was when you last saw success from marketing. If this is the case, you may need to reassess your business and product strategy, working in collaboration with marketing.
Target Audience
The next step is to evaluate your target audience. This is especially critical if the market landscape has shifted; your buyers may have, too. Talk to your best customers to get a sense for what's going on in their worlds. Be open to shifting your target audience focus. Your marketing efforts may be better spent targeting different groups of people than you have in the past.
Messaging
Take a look at the headlines and selling points on your website and across your marketing materials. Are you consistently expressing the same message? Unifying what you want to get across to potential buyers can work wonders for your marketing to avoid confusing people about what you sell and how you can help them.
In addition to unifying your messaging, you also want messaging to get the attention of your target audience. Does your marketing talk about what your company does or how you help your customers? If people can immediately relate to what you're saying and see how they would benefit from your solution, they will be more likely to continue exploring your company. Dig into how your edtech product is different and what pain points it helps with to create a value proposition that is consistently communicated in your marketing.
Channel Mix
After you've conducted research to get up to date on the market and your target audience, it's time to assess the marketing activities you've been focused on. Related to your goals and target audiences, how is each channel performing? And how are they working together?
Keep in mind that only some channels will directly result in a customer or a lead. People go through a journey before buying an edtech product, so you want to have an organized, integrated collection of marketing activities that are measured accurately.
Let's say your edtech marketing goal is to get people to sign up for a demo of your product. You will need marketing activities that let people know you exist, that show them how you're different from other options, and drive them to request.
For example, suppose your marketing team is mostly focused on social media. In that case, they will have a hard time getting people off of the platforms to request a demo because social media algorithms don't favor content that shares links. Social media's role is more for building awareness about what you offer and why you're different and should be measured based on engagement, not demo requests.
Ensure you have a marketing program that uses a variety of channels centered around one goal so you are reaching people at each stage of the buying process. To complement awareness-building efforts, you need to also use other channels to reach people when they are in research mode, like retargeting ads and SEO (search engine optimized) videos. Then you need to have a focused landing page that drives them to request a demo.
Resources
You can have the best marketing strategy, but then it flops because you don't have the right resources to implement the strategy. Review the strengths of your internal team members and how they collaborate with other groups within your company (like customer success and sales) and external agencies and partners.
You may find that you have overlapping skills across team members or agencies or that your team could benefit from professional development. Marketing is rapidly changing, especially with technological advances like AI, and you may find that you need new resources or training to ensure everyone is set up for success in executing the strategy.
Marketing Technology
The technology your marketing team uses is often an overlooked part of what makes marketing successful. When used at full capacity, marketing technologies can be powerful in helping your team be more efficient and gaining better insights into how marketing is performing so you can make improvements.
But marketing technologies are expensive! Review the technology you're using to ensure the team is using it to its full capacity. You may find that you no longer need something or can switch to a plan with fewer features. You may also uncover that your team is missing technology to help them perform better.
It can be frustrating when your company invests in marketing, and you don't see results that positively impact the company. In these situations, there are usually multiple factors causing edtech marketing efforts to underperform. Use the list here to review each marketing component and identify what needs to be changed so you can see the results you expect from marketing.
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