Guide to Education Marketing Success. A digital strategy to connect with educators & convert them to customers faster

Transcription

1 Guide to Education Marketing Success A digital strategy to connect with educators & convert them to customers faster w w w. a g i l e - e d. c o m / c a m p u s

2 So, you have something awesome to sell to educators. Now what? Dear Education Marketer, Selling to schools is a little different than sales and marketing in any other market. Decision-making and purchasing is highly collaborative. The sales cycle can be long, from initial demo to signed PO and implementation. Buyers are often not your users. And the list goes on You may be asking, What s the best way to communicate with educators? And how do I get them to engage with my company? Agile Education Marketing has the answer. Based on our experience working with hundreds of education businesses that sell everything from apps and enterprise systems to curriculum and classroom supplies, we ve developed a proven strategy to connect with, nurture and convert educators to customers. This playbook outlines that strategy and introduces you to an amazing tool called Campus that makes implementing the strategy painless. I m excited to share this strategy with you and how Campus education marketing software can simplify and streamline your education sales and marketing efforts. Prepare to totally rethink how you're selling to schools! Scott Brooks Vice President, Corporate Development Agile Education Marketing 1 Call: Visit:

3 In a nutshell, what s the strategy for education marketing success? 1. Attract people to your web site with compelling content. 2. Send your compelling content to a targeted group of educators. Inbound Marketing & Outbound Marketing 3. Nurture all of the educators who take you up on your content offer. 4. Move educators from warm leads to a sales call or demo. 5. Convert interested educators to customers. 6. Nurture your customers so they remain loyal and continue to purchase. Ready to see how it all works? 2 Call: Visit:

4 Day 1 Post gated content to your website The first step to attracting educators is to provide them with something of value, interest or use. 1. Think about what problems or challenges your product solves. 2. Think about what type of content would be useful to your target audience. Need help creating your buyer personas? We ve got a worksheet for that! Buyer personas encapsulate all of the details that make your prospects tick. By defining personas, you re better able to address the specific needs of individual educators in your sales and marketing communications. Our Educator Persona Worksheet guides you through the questions to ask to create defined personas for each or your audience segments (most companies have more than one). Get the Worksheet Hint: Teachers love graphic organizers, anchor charts, worksheets and other materials they can use with their students. Administrators are looking for strategic guidance so content like infographics, whitepapers, how-to guides, and case studies are good options. 3. Develop your content. 4. Create a lead generation form in Campus and host it on your website. Hint: Make sure the form captures buyer persona information, in addition to basic contact information. Buyer persona details will help you target your sales and marketing follow-up to these new prospects. Full Name Organization Name Address Phone Job Title Your 3 Biggest Challenges: p Teacher Retention p Teacher Effectiveness p School Climate & Culture p Student Achievement p Student Behavior p Family Involvement Do you have an SEL program in place? Annual spend on professional development SUBMIT 3 Call: Visit:

5 Day 2 Invite educators to get your content 1. Leverage SEO and SEM to drive educators to your website to download your amazing content. 2. Send an to educators that sends them to your website to access the content. Both inbound (SEO & SEM) and outbound ( ) approaches will get educators to your new landing page where they can complete the lead generation form and download the content. New contacts are scored & prioritized Once a lead is converted to a Contact in the Campus CRM Module, sales funnel points are assigned which helps determine how hot the prospect is. Sales funnel points will be unique to your business and your sales cycle. Campus lets you set up your own rules and points system. Assign points for visiting various web pages, clicking on links in marketing s, completing web forms, and taking a demo. Educators are happy with this useful piece of content and you ve got new prospects! The leads captured are automatically fed into Campus where they are ready to be converted into contacts in the Campus CRM Module. Contacts You ll also set up funnel point thresholds so that leads are moved through the sales funnel based on how many points they accumulate. Organizations Pending Contacts Contact Lists Contact Settings 4 Call: Visit:

6 Day 3 Give educators a chance to get acquainted The majority of response to campaigns comes within the first 24-hours so day 3 of this process gives educators a chance to respond to your , read the content you ve provided, and start to explore your website. Campus will automatically track Contacts interactions with your website so you can see what pages they re visiting and therefore what they re most interested in. Website visits will accumulate sales funnel points in Campus for your prospects. 5 Call: Visit:

7 Day 4 Touch base with your new leads Your inbound and outbound marketing efforts have gotten educators interested. They ve made contact. Now it s time to reach back out to them. Send a follow-up campaign through Campus to all the educators that downloaded your content. Depending on your sales cycle, offer educators a free trial, invite them to take a demo, or send them additional resources. The engagement from this follow-up will accumulate more sales funnel points for your prospects, moving them further down the sales funnel. Your follow-up should include personalization based on the buyer persona data collected on the lead generation form. You can include this hyper-personalization in your content with just one click in the Campus Module. 6 Call: Visit:

8 Day 5 Get your sales team in action Sales can send one-to-one messages through Campus as well as log their phone calls. Your follow-up on day 4 will move many of your original prospects through the sales funnel. Those educators that have expressed the most interest, i.e. those with the most sales funnel points, are the best Contacts for your sales team to begin developing relationships with. This is where the funnel point scoring and funnel point thresholds that you set up earlier in Campus come into play. A quick glance at your sales funnel (above) will show how many educators have accumulated enough funnel points to indicate that they are ready to buy. These are the Contacts where your sales team s effort will really pay off. Reaching out to ready to buy Contacts as soon as they reach that threshold with a limited time offer or incentive to purchase will improve your lead to sale conversion rates. 7 Call: Visit:

9 Day 6 Refill the pipeline While your sales team is hard at work converting your ready to buy Contacts to sales, marketing can get to work getting more leads into your pipeline. Day 7-12 Keep on nurturing Your second will bring in a fresh batch of leads to start nurturing through your sales funnel in the next few days, using a similar set of methods that you used following outbound one. Send a second to all of the educators who received your first but did not complete the lead generation form. Contacts Dashboard Contacts Organizations Contact Lists Contact Settings Now your sales funnel is full at every stage. That s what makes this strategy and Campus so amazing for any education business. Instead of trying to spread your energy across every educator that clicked on your initial or clicked on an online ad, your sales team can focus on just those educators who are actually in a position to buy. The result is almost like a ripple effect, with the number of inquiries steadily building over time instead of dying away to nothing a few days after an or ad launches. 8 Call: Visit:

10 Day 13+ Reach out, nurture, repeat At this stage, you ve got a lot of balls in the air 1. Sales outreach to ready to buy Contacts Feed the funnel If at any time you see that you need more leads in the sales funnel, ramp up your SEM and send another outbound campaign to any of the more than 4.4 million K-12 educators in the Campus Education Data Module. 2. A nurture campaign to Contacts at the early stage of your sales funnel Hint: Continue to reach out periodically to these lukewarm leads in an effort to move them up the funnel. After your initial follow-up , drip communications out to them every two weeks for about six weeks then reduce your drip to once a month or every six weeks. Send these Contacts newsletters, offers for additional content, and invitations to informational webinars. 3. A nurture campaign to Contacts mid-funnel Hint: These educators are getting close to being ready to purchase so keep in close touch, sending communications every week for a month and then reducing to every two to three weeks. Invitations to webinars, case studies and implementation information are all great content to send to these highly interested educators. Nurture campaigns don t bombard Contacts with sales information, they drip-feed them relevant, useful information and resources that build trust while encouraging them to see your products as a solution to their challenges. 9 Call: Visit:

11 Days 13+ Nurturing isn t just good for leads take care of your customers too Your customers are your best prospects. You want them to renew, upgrade or re-purchase year after year. Key to that is keeping in close communication with them after the PO is signed. Use Campus to set up drip campaigns for customers. Campus will also help you provide exceptional customer service. Any member of your team can instantly view a history of all interactions with a contact (via their live feed), enabling them to go into every conversation at the customer s point of interest and where their needs lie. Thank them for their purchase Provide useful getting started information and resources Touch base to make sure all is well and offer support resources Invite them to product webinars to ensure they re getting the most out of their purchase Share stories about how other customers are using the product Start to lead them toward renewal or upgrade with special offers and incentives 10 Call: Visit:

12 Want to put this plan into action? While you re on the website, be sure to look at Campus plans and pricing information. Campus starts at just $299 per month and includes access to Agile s database of 149,000 K-12 public, private and Catholic and schools and more than 4.4 million educators. Why Campus? Visit to learn more about Campus and to request a demo. (And be sure to watch the Campus overview video while you re there!) 1. Campus eliminates the need for a bunch of different software systems that don t work well together so you ll automatically start saving money. 2. Plus, Campus will improve the effectiveness of your marketing, reduce the amount of time spent setting up and following up with marketing campaigns, and make your sales team more efficient. 3. Finally, Campus will help you generate more leads and convert those leads to sales faster. And isn t that what you want at the end of the day? Check it out at info@agile-ed.com 11