Continue to market through the summer
Make your marketing and sales outreach efforts even more effective, fine tune your targeting and segmentation, and leverage the work you’ve been doing to support teachers and students. Don’t lose momentum now – schools have funds and are spending to create the new normal for learning environments. Now is your chance to be a part of the future of education. Here’s how.
Clean it up.
Good data hygiene is the foundation of high performing, cost effective programs and campaigns. Annually, we see 20% turnover in our education personnel information. This means that even the people that make up your house list and current account contact information is inaccurate. This makes updates something you need to task your customer service, account management and sales teams with, or you can automatically, frequently update your data using a third party at a fraction of the cost.
Summer is the perfect time to address outdated data – get it clean! Then develop and implement ongoing data hygiene rules to keep the data clean.
Enhance it.
Now that your data is clean, enhance it for better segmentation/targeting by filling in missing information like school/district name, job title, direct dial phone number, or other relevant demographic data points. Many companies that have offered free access to services to help teachers, parents, and schools get through the virtual learning transition are now looking for ways to prioritize the free account/subscription leads and reach the school & district decision-makers to convert to paid customers for the 2020-21 school year. When your data is matched to the Agile database, we can select those key decision-makers for your sales and marketing teams to focus on for back to school season and beyond. If you are looking to increase adoption of your offering in a specific school or district, Agile can help you by matching your data and providing personnel in those specific institutions.
Focus on Virtual Readiness.
Where is a school in their journey to be ready to provide online learning for all students? In order to respond to a school’s needs it’s important to understand current initiatives, budget priorities, and the state of distance learning. You could spend time digging through school board meeting notes, reading school websites and seeking information from your contacts. Or, you can skip to the front of the line by adding the Virtual Readiness Score from Agile Education Marketing to your data.
Now you can focus on targeting, segmentation and tailored messaging so that you can support learning in ways unique to your organization that match to schools needs and priorities. Maximize your time and educators time when you fast track the selling process.
Follow up.
Decisions in education are a group effort. This means the meeting with your champion you’ve worked so hard for is just the beginning. Being concise and providing additional materials will support your champion as the entire stakeholder team considers options. Take a three-pronged approach – contacts, the human component and information.
Use your CRM and available data to complete the contact picture and begin including all stakeholders in the communication program as soon as possible. This gives everyone an accurate source of information and turns your champion into a more effective force multiplier.
Demonstrate your value as a partner, not just a vendor by introducing people from all support teams- training, implementation, customer service. A firsthand experience with great people will assure educators that the day to day success of their program is in good hands.
Share information, even from third-party sources and external experts, gives all stakeholders confidence and lets them communicate their support in an intelligent, knowledgeable way with the entire school staff. Answer questions fully and completely and focus on the next step to keep momentum. This will also help you uncover a school or district that might not be such a great fit much sooner – saving you and the school a lot of time and energy.
Starting your conversations now will get you connected to the right people in a school or district, so be smart about it. Now, more than ever time is of the essence and the right data and information can help you make the most of your organizations limited resources.
Reach out to get started on your next season of strategy.
