Education Marketing

I wrote last week about background advertising; the approach to keeping your company’s name in front of teachers, even when they are not thinking of buying. The aim of course is to make sure that they think of you when they do come to buy. (In case you missed it, there’s a full report on background advertising to schools on our blog – see the link below).

Background advertising is helpful – but you will also need to market your product or service very positively to teachers from time to time – and that’s what I want to turn to today – foreground advertising.

Perhaps the most powerful approach to foreground advertising that there is, is known as EPE – which is short for Email / Postal / Email.

EPE starts by sending an email to the teacher that you want to reach in which you highlight the benefits of your product and give a link to your web site. At the end of the piece you also say that you will shortly be sending out some more information in the post.

Part two of EPE involves sending out that postal campaign – normally a letter and a brochure or a leaflet.

Finally you send a second email which says that the brochure has been sent, but that if the teacher didn’t get the letter then you will happily send another one. You also give the link to the web site again.

The EPE process is especially powerful when the emails and letters are addressed to teachers by name. The service works because it allows you to reach teachers three times, without the teachers feeling that they are being swamped by promotions, and encourages those who normally only read emails to look for your postal promotion, and vice versa.

Best of all you don’t have to invest a fortune in EPE, because it can be tested with a small trial mailing at the start.

A trial run of 500 schools including two sets of emails (where ever possible to the personal email addresses of the teachers you want to reach), followed by a postal campaign and then a second email, costs just 59p per school.

If, once you have seen the sales generated by the 500 school trial, you decide to go ahead and undertake an EPE campaign to a further 4500 schools the price per school for this promotion drops to 49p.

You can of course select the types of school that you want to mail by age range, funding, location etc, as well as the role in the school of the teacher you want to reach.

The prices include email transmission, use of the relevant lists, postage and packing. In fact the only thing not included is the printing – although we can of course quote for that if you wish.

The full report on background marketing to schools is on…
http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2012/01/03/how-some-did-well-in-school-marketing-last-year/ For more information on that, or on EPE please call 01536 399 000.

It is a sad but true fact that not all marketing works as well as we would like. Some adverts go with a bang, others just fizzle. A few do nothing at all.

But there are three techniques available for getting far more out of your marketing than you might imagine. Sadly, not everyone uses these techniques, but when they do, most people find they can raise response rates dramatically.

The first approach is to devise a campaign, rather than a one off promotion. This might involve creating five or six adverts that will run over a period of time, each linked but with a different approach or style.

The point about such a campaign is that it tends to have a central theme that holds all the adverts together. So your campaign might be price orientated but in each advert you focus on one totally different product or service, rather than trying to suggest you do everything.

You will quickly find which products or services you can sell directly, and then in future you can use those products as the lead-in to your full range.

Another approach involves changing the medium, rather than developing the message. If, like many firms, you have been focussing on email marketing to schools, colleges or universities for some time, you might find that a change to postal mailing can bring in terrific results.

Curiously postal marketing used to be known as junk mail, and derided everywhere. Now a lot of people look down on email, and postal marketing is held in higher esteem. Of course postal marketing is more expensive – but since the results can be many orders of magnitude higher, it can be worthwhile.

Thirdly there is the possibility of changing your selling point. If you have been selling on price for a long time, you could try selling by asking an interesting question or promoting a benefit. You might even try a quirky or humorous campaign.

The point in all cases is that only by running a series of adverts over time can you find out which adverts work best for you.

Of course if you are bringing in huge responses to each advert already you won’t want to change, but if you feel that response rates are not all they might be, you might well want to look at running a series of alternatives to see just what might be achieved.

If you would like to find out once and for all which advertising approach is right for you, one way of doing this is through our Velocity service. Not only will we devise the campaign with you, but we can help write it, and will also offer to run it at much lower costs than apply to one-off campaigns.

There are details on www.velocity.ac – or call us on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

We regularly email teachers asking to tell us of their wants and needs in terms of products and services.

Here’s an email that came in this morning…

“I was forwarded an email from you to my line manager this morning.

“My department currently has a surplus of approximately £5000 which we must spend before the end of the financial year. I would like to explore the possibility of purchasing a set of i-pads or a suitable Android Tablet which could be used by students…”

This request is interesting – first it confirms my point that schools do have money to spend before the end of term.

Second it confirms that emails of interest (such as the one we send out offering the Product Finder service) do read and do get forwarded around the school. All one has to do is get the text right.

Third, it shows that the “product finder” service works (which we know because we get requests in all the time).

To become a company that gets forwarded details of requests like this from schools, you need to be listed on the School Procurement Site at www.top5.org.uk The basic cost is £25 per year, although you can have an enhanced listing for more (see http://www.top5.org.uk/Suppliers.html) The site along with the free product finder service is promoted regularly to schools).

For details on this or any of these low cost marketing approaches please do call 01536 399 000 or see http://www.educationmarketing.org.uk/Services.html where there is a broader summary of our services.

Also to book into the School Procurement Service again call 01536 999 000.

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

I have been having a bit of a rant recently about certain marketing adverts which give details of ways of reaching teachers in schools.

Obviously since HHM sells marketing services focussed on education, I am biased in this regard, but over the years I have managed to look at a few schemes that are not quite what they are cracked up to be.

The world of marketing to schools has been quite quiet of late, but suddenly we are getting a little flurry of adverts that seem to be a little close to the edge. I mention each of them as they arrive, but of course it is up to you if you take note or not.

The latest one suggests that marketing to schools via fax is a good idea. In fact a huge number of schools are listed on the Fax Preference Service, which means that you should not fax them without their express permission.

Worse, schools in general are very savvy about the FPS, and they know full well that they are listed. So if you do fax these schools you can expect some fairly hearty replies.

Of course some schools are not FPS registered, but they tend to be schools that don’t take much notice of faxes anyway. I would say, be cautious.

Tony
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced he is scrapping the existing ICT curriculum.

In its place, he will introduce new courses of study in Computer Science.

The move, which has been pushed by the gaming industry is aimed at giving schools the freedom to create their own ICT and Computer Science curricula that equip pupils with the skills employers want.

The British Computer Society and ICT professional association Naace, confirm the current National Curriculum Programme of Study is dull and unsatisfactory. Some respondents to a 2008 e-Skills study said that GCSE ICT was “so harmful, boring and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped”.

The Education Secretary also said he was keen for high-quality qualifications in Computer Science to be developed, and welcomed industry-giant IBM’s involvement.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said in his speech:

Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. Millions have left school over the past decade without even the basics they need for a decent job. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change.

The best degrees in Computer Science are among the most rigorous and respected qualifications in the world… and prepare students for immensely rewarding careers and world-changing innovations. But you’d never know that from the current ICT curriculum.

This is why we are withdrawing it from September. Technology in schools will no longer be micro-managed by Whitehall. By withdrawing the Programme of Study, we’re giving teachers freedom over what and how to teach, revolutionising ICT as we know it.

Universities, businesses and others will have the opportunity to devise new courses and exams. In particular, we want to see universities and businesses create new high-quality Computer Science GCSEs, and develop curricula encouraging schools to make use of the brilliant Computer Science content available on the web.

ICT will remain a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, pending the National Curriculum review.

He added:

Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones.

This is not an airy promise from an MP – this is the prediction of people like Ian Livingstone who have built world-class companies from Computer Science.

You can follow all the news on schooling on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

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Every day a select number of news stories concerning schooling appears on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk The stories come from the national media such as the Guardian, Telegraph etc, and come from schools which report their own triumphs and achievements.

These stories are supplemented by a number of advertisements from companies, advertising to schools.

An advertisement on the site costs just £25, and lasts about five days on line. However the advertisement also appears in full on www.blog.schools.co.uk where it remains available for search engines to find, for at least a year.

If you would like advertise on UK Education News just send an email to Chris@hamilton-house.com with a Word file attachment, with your selected headline and the text of your announcement – exactly as you wish it to appear. We will copy that directly into www.blog.schools.co.uk and copy the headline into UK Education News.

Just add a note to the effect that you want to be listed and agree the fee of £25 plus VAT. We’ll drop you a note to let you know your advert will appear.

Tony Attwood
PS: You can also follow us on www.blog.educationmarketing@yahoogroups and on Twitter @HHMailings

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

Last week I received an email advertising a school mailing list that said,

This database is being sold a maximum of ten times to avoid data saturation

which struck me as rather odd, since a database of school addresses is hardly unique to one company. So even if they only sold it once, that would hardly reduce the number of items each of the schools on their list receives.

This is, I think, just part of the everyday goobledegook that is increasingly being put into adverts for educational marketing processes. It is perhaps a modern version of the old mouse mat adverts that claimed that at any moment now the government was only going to allow schools to access certain internet sites, and that somehow this decision was linked to a mouse mat (on which you should advertise).

The mouse mat was irrelevant, but it was introduced to distract you, so you didn’t think, “hang on, is this really true – is the government restricting school access?”

In fact it doesn’t matter how often this company sells their database, because there are a lot of people in the wider world with a schools database. The reason they have written this into the advert is to encourage the reader to accept the fact that the database is at a very low price, but not ask “why is the database sold at a low price?”

Another variant on this involves people who advertise the fact that they have got vast numbers of teachers to opt in to their database – all said amidst other claims about how and when the database was updated. In this case it tries to stop you thinking “how on earth did they get 95% of all teachers to opt in?”

The approach is clever – but mischievous – in my opinion. All I can say is that if you are faced with an offer that looks remarkably cheap, or amazing in terms of the number of “opt in” email addresses you have, watch out. They might be using this technique in the advert which distracts you through a bit of meaningless flim-flam to stop you thinking “is this possible?” or “so what?”

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

20 years ago, many companies that sold into schools made PR a significant part of their promotional work. But over the years the rise of digital media, has resulted in many firms finding that PR simply is no longer worthwhile.

And that is true – where one follows the old approach of sending out press releases to educational magazines and the national media.

This is not to say that sending out press releases doesn’t work. I personally got huge exposure on BBC Breakfast TV, Radio 4, Radio 5, the World Service, and a series of local radio programmes on the subject of dyscalculia a while back. But it is now considerably harder to get such coverage than it used to be.

So what is to be done?

Some approaches do still work. For example if you are selling fairly expensive items and you sell one to a school in (say) Dorset for the first time, it is worth trying to set up an arrangement in which the local paper will interview members of the school to talk about this purchase.

The school gets positive coverage in the local paper, and you get your product mentioned. This can be followed up by a mail shot to the schools in the area, and the combination of PR and direct mail can work well.

Another approach involves developing a newsletter aimed at teachers in a specific subject area. So if you sell maths products you write a weekly news email about maths education. Sometimes you talk about your product or service, but other times you write about different topics that have nothing to do with you but will be of interest to maths teachers.

Other on line media is worth considering too. To give my company’s services a plug for the moment, you certainly ought to have your press release included on UK Education News (www.ukeducationnews.co.uk) and if there is a suitable edition, you should get a review in Education Management News (please call for more details). You have to pay, but the results can be well worthwhile.

Next you should see your blog as a part of your PR work – and you should also ensure that you gather in other people’s news (to feed your own news machine) by using Google Alerts.

Hamilton House runs its own PR service (www.voom.org.uk) which covers these and many other aspects of PR work, and we also include PR within our Velocity programme for some of our clients (www.velocity.ac)

If you would like to talk any of this through, please do get in touch on 01536 399 000.

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

If you can’t sell on benefits, then what do you sell on?

One of the big problems that a lot of companies in the education sector have is that of differentiating their advert from everyone else.

The old adage that one should sell on benefits rather than features is as true today as it has ever been. However it is vital to offer benefits that other firms don’t offer. And this can be a problem.

There are however several alternatives.

One approach is to write an interesting question by way of a headline. For example, if you sell computers to schools that are at the more expensive end of the market, you might say,

What is the most effective way of reducing school computer costs?

A headline like that will draw the reader in, because all of us want to reduce costs. Then in the email or sales letter, or indeed on your blog, you can state that buying a cheap computer is often a false economy because programs are developing all the time, and you are likely to find that even though the machine will not break down, it might slow down dramatically as you upgrade your software. Especially with the changes to the curriculum that the secretary of state has just announced.

Or I might write in a headline

What is the simplest way of doubling the number of responses you will get from your direct marketing?

Again such headlines draw people in and get them interested in your advert and what you have to offer.

Writing such adverts does take a bit of time, and quite a bit of experience (which is why people often come to us for help), but it is worth getting right because they certainly can work.

We undertake this type of copy writing as individual projects, but we can also do them as part of the Velocity work – which is especially helpful where a series of letters and/or emails and/or blogs are required.

There is more on copywriting at www.copy.ac – just click on “How much difference” on the left side. Velocity is on www.velocity.ac Or you can call us on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

Which is the best way to market to schools: – by paying the marketing company according to the results that they get, or by paying them a monthly fee?

Hamilton House does run a “payment by results” service for companies that want to market to schools. We also invite companies to undertake mailings and pay as they go, and there is the Velocity service, in which companies get all their marketing to schools for a monthly fee.

So what’s the benefit of each?

Payment by results does mean that you pay a commission on each sale we achieve for you. But it only works where you can readily identify which sales come from our advertising.

The problem with PbR is that quite often it does take several attempts to get the advertising absolutely right and get good results. But with PbR we take your advertising, run it, and then if it doesn’t work, that’s it. Since with many adverts, the issue is the way the advert is written, rather than the product or service itself, this can mean that there’s no chance to find out how to make the sales work. It is very much a case of get it right first time, or else nothing.

One off mailings can suffer from a similar problem. We certainly do recommend that trial runs are organised first, and we do offer everyone the chance to submit their proposed or past ads to us so that we can make suggestions for changes, based on what we know about how to write adverts.

But of course, if you know your advert works, and you just want to hit the market once, then the one-off approach can work.

Finally there is the contract approach. The great benefit of this is that as we see the results of the advertising come in we work intently on campaign to change the advert, change the headline, change the landing page, or anything else, in order to maximise results.

There is also the benefit that email marketing done through the Velocity programme is priced at about one third of the cost of one-off mailings, so even if you didn’t want any of our advice, if you are planning regular emailing, the Velocity programme offers it at a huge saving.

There is more information on at

Payment by Results – www.educationmarketing.org.uk/PaymentByResults.html

Email marketing – www.emails.gs

Velocity – www.velocity.ac

Postal direct marketing – www.educationmarketing.org.uk/directmail.html

Or call 01536 399 000

Tony
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.