on in Education PR
It’s no surprise to hear that teachers are time poor. In fact, a recent study by the Department for Education (DfE) found that a quarter of teachers in England are working 12-hour days.
So, if you want to sell to schools, a marketing campaign which includes a bank of resources that helps teachers do their job more effectively or saves them time, will stand you apart from competitors.
The first thing you need to do is find the right topics that appeal to teachers or school leaders, which means you need to do your research.
Job one is to accurately identify your audience’s pain points (you can read our Three ways to understand what teachers want from marketing teams post if you need to know how to do this). Then you can showcase your understanding of how to solve some of them with a great piece of content.
If you plan this bit right, you can create what we call a cornerstone piece of content. Something so good that you can use the content again and again to build trust in your brand and drive teachers and school leaders to your site to find out what you do.
Cornerstone content is a high-value piece of content and is often in the form of an e-book, a report or a white paper packed with insight.
It should either solve problems or provide valuable insight that the reader cannot get from elsewhere. This way it helps you raise brand awareness by showing people what you know about schools, education and what goes on in the classroom.
How-to guides are particularly well received because they get to the source of the problem, right from the get-go. They are instructive and educational – without all the fluff. Research and data reports work well too.
Let’s say your audience research has shown that teachers are struggling to build basic phonics skills in Key Stage 1. By creating a guide entitled 7 proven tactics to build phonics learning in the Key Stage 1 classroom, you would undoubtedly go down well with your target audience.
Or is there an issue that is particularly topical among your target audience right now?
Perhaps you’ve identified that changes in policy and increased workloads have resulted in higher stress levels for teachers.
Commissioning some research into this topic, with expert insight and tangible tips on how to manage stress (and avoid burn-out) might just get teachers to stop scrolling and hand over their email addresses to download a copy.
If you’re an established business, you may already have some unused data on how teachers or students use your products that would create some good source material for your cornerstone content too. If you could show that English teachers rarely use texts from Chaucer anymore, or that students struggle with statistics more than any other topic in maths in Year 10, you would provide some useful bench-marking information that schools can judge themselves against.
Once you’ve created this content, the next step is to make it really work for you, re-purposing it in numerous ways to bring in a steady stream of site visitors who are likely to be interested in your products or services.
The first step is to promote the content itself. Put some money behind social ads to drive teachers or school leaders to hand over their email address and get their hands on the content you’ve created.
Then it’s time to flood the market with free content.
The amazing e-book, report or white paper that demonstrates your knowledge of a particular topic, now needs to be chopped up into smaller, bite-sized pieces.
A great piece of cornerstone content lends itself well to being broken down into short social posts, blogs, videos, infographics and podcasts.
You can pitch articles to the press on the subjects you have covered and contact education conference organisers to see if they want you to speak about the topic at their next event too.
Flooding the market with eye-catching, attention-grabbing, bite-size information, in various forms, means you’ll quickly become associated with that topic.
Here are some clever ways to break up your content:
Do this for 6 to 12 weeks before moving on to your next topic. The result is you have a steady stream of really helpful information going to schools at all times.
This builds trust with your audience so when you intersperse these campaigns with your normal product sales campaigns, your audience is more likely to respond positively and ask for the demo.
You’ve also solved the dreaded ‘What shall we post next on our social feed/blog’ dilemma many marketers face.
Download our How to Sell to Schools guide for more insight on how to create impactful cornerstone content when marketing to schools, or contact us if you’d like our help to deliver success for your organisation.
*Photo by Getty Images at Unsplash
Teachers aren’t just in the classroom anymore, they’re on TikTok, sharing their highs and lows of classroom life, swapping tips and entertaining their peers.
If you want to connect with UK educators through effective collaborations with influencers, then our free ‘Top UK Teacher Influencers on TikTok’ guide is perfect for you.
