August 12, 2024  |  Peter Long

Back to School Marketing: Effective Selling Strategies

Part 3 in our latest series on Back to School Marketing

MCH Strategic Data is already well into updating our Fall 2024 educational marketing database. In next week's Monday Marketing Moment, we will share exciting updates about our innovative compilation technology, which has given us the unprecedented ability to already update and validate millions of educator names, emails, and job roles for the Fall 2024 school year. However, today's focus is on how to effectively sell to schools and educators in 2024.

We all know how busy educators are and how schools have tightened physical access to buildings and heightened digital security. Protecting against scammers is as important as protecting against physical intruders. The increased technology screening of communications and computer access makes our job as educational marketing and sales professionals much harder. So, what are we supposed to do to effectively inform, educate, and promote our educational products and services? What marketing and sales approaches work best in today's high-tech digital world?

The new marketing channels and services available today seem endless. Should a marketer build an army of influencers, leverage social media, write blog posts, produce YouTube videos, invest in email marketing, create product catalogs, stick with direct mail, use teacher professional development as a marketing tool, or invest more in SEO? The options are endless. If we're being completely honest, fantastic success stories exist for each of these different marketing channels. Modern marketing technology has lowered costs and expanded reach, creating incredible opportunities for even smaller scale educational marketers to succeed. This is truly one of the most exciting times to be in the educational products and services industry.

So, are there some universal advice elements that can help guide a modern-day educational marketer? The answer is yes.

Tip 1: Target, Target, Target

Let's take a trip back to before 2010, when direct mail and educational product catalog marketing reigned supreme. Back then, educational product and service companies had marketing professionals dedicated to the art of precision targeting. Catalog printing and mailing were expensive undertakings, and companies spent months preparing targeted lists for the big promotion drop. They modeled their customer files, fine-tuned prospecting audiences, and meticulously cleaned data to find the best prospects. MCH Strategic Data had customers that required an entire months’ worth of work on list cleaning, merge purge and quantity refinement before the final list printing job would go out.

Then email and other low cost or free messaging channels emerged, leading educational product and service companies to slash in-house marketing staff and outsource to experts who could navigate these new channels. Initially, this new cheaper approach worked just fine, and MCH Strategic Data sold lots of data for mass messaging. But that was then, and this is now. Today's marketing channels come with new challenges: engagement rules, blacklisting traps, increased costs, easier unsubscribe methods, privacy concerns, blocked content, AI classification processes, and openings for potential hacker pathways. Modern marketing is more like navigating a maze than driving on an open road.

Regardless of the marketing channels you choose, targeting your messages and audience more precisely is essential to avoid common pitfalls. Start by cleaning and updating your contact data, ensuring your customer data is pristine. Curate a list that is most likely to engage with your message and avoid over-messaging or targeting the wrong audience.

You will find that this approach leads to higher engagement metrics, fewer unsubscribes, and reduced spam reports. Schools and educators can block more content than ever, so using clean and targeted contact information is crucial. Pay close attention to engagement metrics and be ready to adjust your strategy if things aren’t going as expected. Test and target before you blast. The art of target marketing is back, and it is crucial for effective educational marketing and selling to schools.

Tip 2: Nurture vs. Sell

Educators are inundated with promotional messages, making it more difficult than ever to capture their attention. The typical educational marketer follows a common pattern of pushing a lot of promotions during key times: new school budget cycles, back-to-school efforts, the new year (or new semester), and the end of the year (use-it-or-lose-it spending push). While these efforts are not wrong and it can make sense to reach educators when they have a new budget or are looking for things prior to the start of a new school year, it is not enough in today's crowded educational product and service world.

Educators need solutions to problems and help with their daily challenges. The marketers who are truly winning the sales races are those that carefully nurture their educational customer and prospect contacts all year long. Nurturing is not about trying to directly sell educators something (although those types of messages can still be part of the process). Nurturing is about offering educators value, ideas, and help at no cost as part of the marketing process. This can be integrated into any type of new marketing technology or channel. It's not about the marketing method of communication; it's about making a true connection with an educator. When done correctly, educators will gravitate toward companies that have proven their value and knowledge when it comes time to buy.

So, didn't we just talk about targeting and warn everyone not to over-message an audience? Yes, we did, and if done correctly, nurturing by design will not inundate the audience. Over-messaging is about regularly blasting out pure sales material that people don't need or want. How do you encourage educators to engage with your messaging and content, regardless of the channel or method of delivery? Offer free advice, helpful lesson plans, great use case stories, guest experts, etc. Create a marketing process that has educators waiting for and engaging with your content. This approach will reinforce your organization as a knowledge source, making your promotional messages more effective when delivered.

Incorporating these strategies into your educational marketing efforts will help you build stronger relationships with educators, ultimately leading to more successful campaigns and better results when selling to schools.

Tip 3: Building a Recognizable Brand

For decades, establishing a recognizable brand in the educational products and services market has been challenging. Dominated by a few huge brand names, it can take new entrants nearly a decade or more and significant investment to become recognizable to educators. However, new marketing technologies and educational marketing channels are making this easier for smaller and mid-sized companies. With platforms like YouTube, teacher professional development sites like edWeb.net, and new programmatic digital advertising opportunities, reasonable marketing investments can now lead to substantial audience reach and improved brand recognition.

One of the most promising avenues for branding is Programmatic Digital Advertising. Educational products and services companies targeting specific areas within the educational system can now reach broader audiences with branding messages in a privacy-compliant and affordable way ($10/M to $15/M for delivered advertisements). Programmatic ads, which are banner ads that run across thousands of digital publications and social media sites, can be targeted to specific educator audiences, allowing your company’s brand to be repeatedly shown to this selected audience over extended periods.

While not a replacement for direct sales efforts or other marketing channels, programmatic ads are an effective way to make your brand recognizable. They complement other educational marketing efforts by helping educators take notice of your outreach and build the subconscious trust necessary for engagement. Combined with other channels, these ads can enhance the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. For more information on this topic, MCH has a comprehensive white paper available for download here.

Tip 4: Well-Established Channels Still Work Just Fine

We frequently get asked if traditional marketing channels like email and direct mail still work. The answer is absolutely, but tips one through three are critical to their success. Proper targeting, nurturing engagement, and brand awareness are all essential to boosting ROI in these channels. When executed correctly, traditional channels actually perform better today than a few years ago. Schools used to be cluttered with direct mail pieces and tossed many out as soon as they arrived. However, the volume of direct mail has steadily declined, and this once-overlooked marketing channel now garners more attention and achieves greater mind share due to reduced competition.

However, when done incorrectly, these mature marketing channels can cause significant issues. The old motto of "The Customer Is Always Right" is simply not correct in today's marketing landscape. For example, we've had customers demand we send out their email campaigns that saturate the educational marketplace, ignoring our warnings about the risks of low engagement. As a result, their email channels have ended up blacklisted, which is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to fix. Rebuilding a company's entire marketing deployment environment from scratch can take months.

So, should your company avoid these channels? Absolutely not. Targeted messaging with useful information sent to clean contact lists works best. MCH Strategic Data has helped numerous customers target their messages to the best possible audience, significantly cutting down their email sends. Surprisingly, most customers see an increase in total response and a significant bump in ROI (less sends = big savings). This is because as your promotional message engagement scores increase, school and district email servers are more likely to deliver your messages to the inbox instead of directing them to spam or junk. Therefore, a more targeted email message with a good engagement score will outperform a larger blast that ends up in the spam folder.

Incorporating these strategies into your educational marketing efforts ensures that traditional channels like email and direct mail remain effective when selling to schools and executing educational marketing campaigns. For more information, MCH has a comprehensive white paper on email improvement ideas available here.

Tip 5: The Importance of Data Quality

In the competitive world of educational marketing, the success of your campaigns heavily depends on the quality of your contact data. Ensuring data accuracy, recency, and coverage is key to reaching the right audience effectively. High-quality data isn't just a nice-to-have; it's essential for driving impactful marketing strategies, especially when selling to schools.

Accurate data ensures that your messages reach the right people, minimizing wasted efforts and maximizing engagement. Recent data reflects the latest changes at schools and districts, keeping your outreach relevant and timely. Using outdated data with personnel who are no longer at the school or district can lead to automated security software downgrading your sending IP’s reputation and eventually blocking it altogether. This happens when the software detects that you are sending a large number of messages to people who are no longer there. Ensuring your data is current and verified for active personnel at the school or district makes a huge difference in your campaign's success.

At MCH Strategic Data, we understand the critical role data quality plays in educational marketing. That's why we invest in a multi-faceted approach to data compilation, combining government data, regular school website visits, phone verification, and integration of external sources. This rigorous process guarantees that our data is current, precise, and extensive.

Whether you're planning a direct mail campaign, launching an email marketing initiative, or enhancing your sales strategies with CRM tools, the quality of your data can make or break your success. Remember, 'garbage in, garbage out' holds true—using top-tier data from MCH Strategic Data or a similarly reputable educational database compiler will ensure your campaigns are built on a foundation of accuracy and reliability, empowering you to navigate the educational market with confidence and precision when selling to schools.

A Few Final Words

At MCH Strategic Data, we’ve adapted to the times and technology just like everyone else. We work hard to stay on top of what matters most. We offer comprehensive services in several key marketing technologies and channels, but we make no apologies for not trying to cover them all. We believe in the very same advice we give our customers: it’s better to be an expert in a few areas rather than try to offer everything and do none of them well.

The educational marketing world offers dozens of exciting and effective channels for marketers. When done correctly, any one of them can produce successful results. However, all of them require comprehensive, updated, and accessible contact data to work effectively. New marketing channels that amplify your message will continue to expand, but regardless of the channels you choose, your company will need data to ensure they work properly. That is our core offering and commitment.

We understand how crucial comprehensive, updated, and accessible marketing data is to the success of all marketing efforts. Getting that data in the right formats and integrating it into your marketing workflows or CRM is where it all starts. It’s the foundation on which successful marketing campaigns are built, using any number of channels. Whether we can assist you with the channels we support or provide the data and integrations your company needs to feed your educational marketing solutions, we would be honored to help.

Let’s have a conversation about how we can support your educational marketing needs and help you succeed in selling to schools.

Use our free ListBuilder tool to explore our education data, or Contact Us to strategize as a team.

More Insight from MCH

• Read Part 1 in our Back to School Marketing Mini-Series.
• Read Part 2 in our Back to School Marketing Mini-Series.
• Download our School Calendar Reference Guide for the 2024/2025 school year and get key insights from over 80,000 school calendars across the U.S.
• Download our Email Marketing to Educators 2024 whitepaper.