Content development Archives - The Influence Crowd

How to reach teachers on TikTok

on 22nd August 2023 Posted by Rebecca Bremner

Since its global launch in 2017, TikTok has expanded exponentially and the number of users in the UK is predicted to reach a staggering 15 million by 2025.

This seismic growth has seen TikTok morph from being the go-to platform used by under 25s to create lipsync music videos to becoming the increasingly popular tool used by influencers and businesses to grow their brands.

But can edtech firms reach teachers on TikTok?

Absolutely.

Find teachers on TikTok

With billions of views of #learnontiktok, #teacher and #teachersoftiktok, the education community is alive and well on TikTok.

Growing numbers of teachers are using the platform to share and look for new lesson ideas or ‘how-to’ style content to support their classroom teaching.

Teachers have become popular content creators too, such as Mrs J Primary, a primary teacher in Wales who regularly posts videos offering lesson tips and recommendations for teaching resources. There’s also mrsreandpsheteacher whose thousands of followers tune in to find teaching advice and lesson ideas for their students.

Partnering with influencers on TikTok is one sure fire way to gain traction on the platform (see @kjbr0wn’s partnership with the Premier League for inspiration), but there are a number of other methods too.

So how can education brands use TikTok to raise awareness of their products and services in the teaching community?

What content does well on TikTok?

What makes TikTok different from other social media platforms is that the algorithm does not consider the number of followers an account has when distributing content. This means that all video clips created have equal potential to go viral – whether the account posting them has a million followers, or none.

This offers brands a good opportunity to engage with teachers beyond their existing loyal customers and followers on social media.

One of the main advantages of TikTok is that alongside the paid advertising route, content can also be created relatively quickly and with little or no budget.

But corporate language and imagery won’t work well on this platform, so limit your branding and marketing content to the company profile page.

TikTok users love content that is:

Authentic
Informal
Helpful
Fun

Experimenting with different content types will help you to see what works best for the target audience you want to reach.

If you want to include TikTok in your organisation’s marketing strategy, get started with these four ideas for creating content that gets your brand noticed.

Create content that teachers need

The first and last rule for success on any social media platform is to create content that resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.

Whether your products and services help teachers to manage workload, tackle classroom behaviour or make lesson planning easier, creating content that helps them address the issues that matter to them is always the most effective way to encourage meaningful engagement, rather than just views or likes on your posts. So, stay clear of focusing on your products. Instead focus on tips or advice.

While the organic reach of TikTok can be huge, the greater the engagement with teachers on your brand’s posts, the more likely they will be seen by other teachers so relevance is everything.

Make use of hashtags

You can quickly start getting traction for your content by using trending hashtags that are relevant to your brand. These might include #ukteacher, #primaryteacheruk, #eyfs or #ect to name but a few.

Hashtags not only make it easier for teachers to find the content they are searching for. They also help the algorithm to more accurately understand what sort of content you have created and who will want to see it. But don’t overdo it. Three to five hashtags per post works best for TikTok but you can use more.

You can also create your own hashtags to include as part of a new campaign. If it’s attached to a regular activity, such as the monthly release of free resources for teaching maths, the repeated use of a relevant hashtag will help direct teachers viewing a post to the wider series. This will help to increase recognition of the hashtag along with awareness of the brand over time.

Trend jacking

Trend jacking – which incorporates a popular meme, song or challenge that’s already trending – can be a great way to boost a brand’s presence on TikTok.

Take the ‘TeachTok’ trend, which encourages discussion on TikTok about many aspects of teaching. A teacher might record a ‘point of view’ style clip as part of the trend to show how they deal with different situations such as managing a noisy classroom or encouraging quiet students to contribute to a class debate. Teachers might also jump on trending events, such as the global release of the Barbie movie, to share their thoughts on planning lessons around inspiring women and girls in history or create content for teaching PSHE in schools. As the trend grows, more teachers join in and add their content and perspectives to build a vibrant community where people can find valuable resources.

Edtech companies can tap into the active teaching communities on TikTok by creating content around trending themes that add value to teaching, such as how to reduce workload or make classrooms more inclusive. Companies could gift their resources to teachers on the platform too or invite teachers to speak at or attend events they are hosting by commenting on relevant posts.

Embrace challenges

TikTok is renowned for fun challenges that can go viral. They are often dance related or add humour and many teachers embrace the challenges, much to the delight of their pupils.

But there are other types of challenge brands can jump on the back of too. One example is the #madepossiblewithadidas challenge created by the sportswear brand.

The challenge encouraged users to post videos beginning with the question, “show me something you thought was impossible before you did it”. Each clip users posted in response told its own story of triumph, from overcoming illness to running a marathon, and the hashtag #madepossiblewithadidas was included. The campaign generated a plethora of content which went viral with many thousands of views and shares, which raised the profile of the brand.

Education brands could adopt a similar strategy to start a challenge such as the best lesson of the year or most creative use of technology in the classroom. Adding a relevant hashtag will galvanise the teaching community to engage with the brand and share their own experiences.

Respond to comments

TikTokers are active when it comes to commenting on the content they see on the platform and brands that are happy to respond will get the best engagement.

Answer questions about your product or service, or even respond to a funny comment with a witty reply. This can be a great way to engage teachers and encourage them to follow your brand.

Download our white paper for more guidance on how to influence schools or contact us to find out how we can help you get results like these, which we’ve achieved for other clients.

Image by antonbe from Pixabay

How do you measure PR campaign success?

on 8th December 2022 Posted by Rebecca Bremner

So, you’ve had a great idea for a PR campaign to launch a new edtech offering, raise awareness of your brand in schools or get headteachers to watch a product demo.

But now you need to put some KPIs in place to make sure you can measure and report on how the campaign is performing both during its roll out and post campaign too.

What are the best metrics to use in PR?

That all depends on the type of campaign and what you are trying to achieve.

So let’s say you want to raise headteachers’ awareness of your brand. You might think the number of items of positive coverage secured in the press and on the websites your target audience consumes would be a good goal to measure.

You may want to track the number of speaker slots you secure for your spokespeople or customers on podcasts and at events aimed at senior leaders in schools too.

But does this really get to the heart of what you are trying to achieve for your business?

Focus on actions

Ultimately, you want the brand awareness you are generating with PR to lead to an action.

When school leaders hear about you on a podcast or blog, you may want them to:

Come to a specific page on your website
View a video on your product
Sign up for a free trial of your software
Download a white paper

So, the KPIs you put in place need to reflect the end goals.

KPIs for PR

Let’s say you’ve created a guide on improving student engagement to raise awareness of your brand.

Some KPIs you might want to set for this scenario could be:

Spikes in traffic to your website following the publication of opinion pieces or podcast guest slots secured by your PR team as part of the campaign
Direct traffic coming from any links which media outlets or websites have included in published content
Engagement on the site – the number of pages people look at, the average time spent on the page and if they are new or returning visitors
An increase in new user activity on your web site over a 3 month period, before, during and after the campaign. You can compare this with data from the same time period in previous years to get a good idea of the impact.

You can measure these using a data analytics platform such as Google Analytics.

If your goal is to capture teachers’ email addresses by placing the student engagement report behind a gated page on your web site, your KPIs will be slightly different.

They should also include x number of downloads of the content from your target audience.

It’s worth adding ‘uplift in traffic to the content landing page’ as a KPI too. An increase in traffic to, and engagement on, your website over the course of the campaign can be a good indication that the content and activity has resonated with people and they’ve made the decision to take the next step.

The benefits of the correct measures

One of the most powerful things about having the right measures in place is that it starts to influence the content and management of the campaign as it progresses.

Success can be measured against the specific KPIs you have set and if you’re not seeing an impact, you can tweak the activity over time and check the changes are making a difference.

The ultimate aim is to achieve your business goals, whether that’s more teachers talking about you online, more signups for a free trial of your software or increased sales.

Measure PR and marketing against KPIs

So before you start measuring anything, define the business objectives you are trying to achieve with the planned activity. Set specific KPIs around these to help you choose the right measurement tools and put you on track to get the results you’re after.

Below are 12 measures you can choose from to help you get the results you want from PR.

Type of measure	What it is	How to do it
Back links	Links from quality external websites that send visitors directly to your site from coverage secured by your PR team, such as opinion pieces, case studies or product reviews	Backlinks are a powerful tool for increasing SEO ranking on search engines like Google. You can monitor web traffic coming from your backlinks by looking at referral traffic in Google Analytics to see which coverage from what outlets have encouraged visitors to you site. There are also tools such as the Ahrefs back link checker which can provide a list of all the websites that have a link to your site.
Site traffic	General traffic to your web site, or visits to specific pages	Monitoring visits to your site, where they come from and how the data compares to that of previous years will help you measure the success of a timed PR campaign. Again, you can use a data analytics tool of your choice ie Google Analytics.
Time on site, bounce rate and pages visited	Useful measures to check the right kind of traffic is being driven to the site	Uplifts in time on site and page visits can indicate that the prospects being directed to your content are already pre-qualified by what they have read or heard about you. Aim to keep bounce rates as low as possible by providing content that is of value to your target audience. You can use Google Analytics to measure these metrics or an alternative tool such as Hubspot .
Search	Direct searches of your brand or product	You can monitor the number of searches for your brand using a tool like Google Search Console. An uplift in the number of searches would suggest PR activity is resulting in more people becoming aware of your brand. Check search data for before and during a specific campaign to help you demonstrate the impact of life with and without the activity.
Reach/impressions	There is a subtle difference between social media reach and impressions, as explained below. Reach – the total number of people who have received or interacted with your social media content. Impressions – the number of times the algorithm has served your content onscreen, whether or not it has been clicked on	Large brands often track these metrics as a measure of increasing brand awareness. While they might be a useful gauge of how social media algorithms are responding to your content, in isolation, they won’t give you any information about what actions people have taken as a result. Generally, unless increasing reach/impressions is your ultimate goal, don’t limit your analysis to these vanity measures alone.
Engagement	The number of likes, retweets/shares and positive comments your content receives on social media platforms	These engagement measures are critical for helping you to see how well your content is being received by your target audience. You can find these kinds of metrics by using a social media management tool such as Hootsuite to view all your social content in one place. Alternatively, get the data directly from the individual platforms.
Connections/followers	These are the people who follow you on platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or connect with you on LinkedIn	Monitor these if you are trying to grow your audience or reach education influencers with a piece of online content. An increase in followers/connections can indicate the activity you are engaging in is successfully raising your profile. But remember to check the connections you are gaining are relevant and match the audience you are trying to reach.
Downloads/goal conversion/email addresses	These metrics are useful for measuring specific goals you want to achieve with your PR and social media activity	Whether your aim is to capture email addresses with a webinar sign up campaign or encourage downloads of a piece of content on your web site, make sure you are clear on the goal so that you can measure success towards it. It's important to track progress towards goals as a campaign develops and make adjustments to the activity and/or social media audiences and ad spend to ensure you get the best possible outcome.
Cost per click (CPC)	Data relating to the cost per click, click through rate and goal conversion measures on social media platforms	Keeping an eye on the CPC rate of your campaign will help you to optimise your budget to get the results you’re after for the best return on investment. You want to keep the CPC as low as possible, but bear in mind that if the audience you are trying to reach is small or niche multi-academy trust leaders, for example, the CPC may be higher. If your CPC is high but a lot of the people you are trying to reach are taking the action you want them to, you may make the judgement that the result is a price worth paying.
Click through rate (CTR)	The percentage of people who click on your content when they see it	A high CTR, combined with high numbers of people doing whatever it is you want them to, indicates that you are delivering the right content to the right audience and as a result, they are being encouraged to act.
Coverage	Published articles, news items and speaking opportunities secured by your PR team	Quality media coverage can boost the credibility of your brand and enables you to build relationships with your target audience by demonstrating that you understand the challenges they face and can help. Secure the right coverage for spokespeople and customers in the media your target audience reads. We tier all coverage based on a client’s objectives and the readership and quality of editorial.
Sentiment of coverage	The positive or negative tone of coverage	Measuring the tone of coverage over time is useful, particularly for brands that want to counter past negative coverage or change market perceptions. You could score the sentiment of individual coverage using a scale such as positive, negative, neutral, or balanced, or a numbered system to keep track of the overall tone of the coverage received.

Click here to find out more about generating leads for your education product or read more about how measuring PR and marketing can support your wider business strategy in our Guide to Good PR Planning.

Also, read our blog to find out how you can prepare for the changes to Google Analytics coming up in 2023 as they will affect the way you analyse the activity on your website.

Photo by Ann H at Pexels

What is keyword research?

on 25th January 2021 Posted by Alesha Allen

Keyword research is finding out the exact phrases people use to search for services and products, find answers to questions or solutions to problems, using search engines.

Keyword research gives you a better understanding of your target market so you can then offer them helpful and relevant information in return.

This is useful in so many areas of content development for your education business, from website copy to articles, email campaigns, blogs, video content and social media posts.

Creating content that people are searching for also has a positive impact on your search rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find you online.

But how can you find out what terms your target audience is using to search for the content they need?

1. Brainstorm your keyword list

Start by listing all of the possible keywords and phrases potential customers are likely to put into Google. These will be your ‘seed’ keywords as they will help you find more relevant words and phrases.

Think about long-tail keywords too. These are phrases that are more specific than single words. They get less traffic, but they have a higher clickthrough rate because if someone is very specific about what they are searching for, it is more likely that they will click through to your site when they see your content.

Say you’re an education business that provides fun and engaging science lesson plans to schools. Your list might start with keywords like ‘science lesson plans’, ‘science teaching resources’, ‘science lessons for primary schools’ and you’d keep building on this list.

Then when it comes to long-tail keywords, you’d consider phrases like ‘how to make science lessons more interesting’ or ‘how to make science fun in the classroom’.

Once you’ve done some initial brainstorming, there are some tools that can help you expand and prioritise your list. We find Google Trends is a good place to start.

2. Use Google Trends for keyword research

a) Enter key terms into Google Trends to see levels of interest in specific search terms set out by region and date. This will also show you similar topics these same users have searched for. For example, when you type ‘science lesson plan’ into Google Trends, you can see that those who searched for this term also searched for ‘biological life cycle’ and ‘butterflies’. The tool can help you understand more about what teachers are looking for online and develop the right content for them.

b) Google Trends also lets you compare search wording to see what is the most searched for term. For instance, people have searched for ‘Biology lesson plan’ three times more often than for ‘Physics lesson plan’. Insight like this helps you to better focus your content according to what your target audience is searching for online.

c) You can also use your own Google search bar to check what other searches automatically come up. By typing in ‘science lesson’, you can see that the most popular searches are ‘science lessons online’, ‘science lessons for kids’ and ‘science lesson plan template’. This makes it easier for you to find out what your potential customers are searching for and give them the right content.

3. Expand your research

Take your research a step further by entering key search terms, like ‘science lesson plan’, into a free content insight tool like AnswerThePublic.

This will pull up more granular detail on the types of questions people are asking Google and give you more ideas on how to target them. The tool breaks up the data into questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical lists and other related searched-for topics.

For example, when you type ‘science lesson plan’ into the search bar in AnswerThePublic, you can see frequent searches like ‘science lesson plan with experiments’, and ‘science lesson plan with technology’. You can also see that the most searched for format is a pdf. See example results from AnswerThePublic here:

From a strategic perspective, you could also use an SEO analysis tool, like Ahrefs or Moz to check out your competitors and see what keywords they’re ranking highly in to help you build and define your own list. You may want to target the same keywords or look at building a list of less popular search terms that are still relevant to your business, where there is less competition.

All of these steps should help lead you to a strong keyword search list you’ll be able to use to plan and develop your content.

4. Decide on the best type of content

Once you have a targeted and comprehensive list of keywords, go through the list and think about the best types of content for each topic.

Taking our example of a science lesson provider and the research we have carried out, we might propose these four content ideas:

A video for teachers on how to make science engaging online
A series of science lesson plan pdfs with the top experiments to carry out in a science class
A blog post on how to prepare the ideal plan for a biology lesson

Once you’ve got a strong list of keywords that are right for your education business, you can be as creative as you like in using them to shape your content, developing blogs, videos, webinars or lesson plans.

5. Monitor progress with Google Search Console

Keep an eye on your keyword list and make a note to review it every quarter.

When you start to create content using your keywords, regularly monitoring engagement levels will help you to make adjustments where needed to keep you climbing the search rankings. This means more people will discover your content, visit your site and potentially convert into customers.

Google Search Console is useful for monitoring content posted on your website. You can use this tool to find out how often your site appears in Google search results and which pages have the highest, and lowest, click through rates from Google search results.

You can see how your search traffic changes over time too, where it’s coming from and what search queries are most likely to show your website. And you’ll get a clear idea of what keyword searches come from mobile devices so you can optimise specific content for people searching on their phones.

Being able to see which keywords and types of content are performing well will give you greater insight into the topics and formats your audience prefers on an ongoing basis.

If you’d like to find out more about how to get the attention of school leaders, read our white paper, Influence Schools.

Photo by fotografierende from Pexels

Tag: Content development