Education Marketing

What is the most effective way of developing a reputation of being a quality supplier to schools?

Here’s a conundrum: teachers often like to buy the cheapest products and services.  But teachers also hate it when a product breaks down, or a service fails.

One response to this is to advertise oneself as not only offering a good price but also giving the teachers some reason to believe that you offer a quality, reliable product or service as well.

So, how does one build up a reputation for reliability with teachers who have never used your product or service?

Unfortunately just claiming that you have the highest quality doesn’t really help much. Instead the answer is to use a two pronged attack. 

The first part of this approach involves selecting elements of your product or service which you know offer good quality and which differentiate you from the competition.  This might relate to the be speed of delivery, the guarantee, the average reliability within the market place, and so on.

The second part involves getting your customers and potential customers to change their perception of you as an individual.

When you start out you will have a reputation that is little more than, “I’ve never heard of them” which in effect equates to meaning, “I know a lot about buying supplies for this school, and if I have never heard of them, they can’t be any good.”

To overcome this one needs to communicate with teachers regularly by varying your adverts so that while you always mention the product, you also sometimes talk around the product, while taking in other issues and factors that may be of interest to those in schools.

This approach avoids the shorthand of phrases such as “Developed by teachers for teachers” which have been overplayed so much that many teachers now disregard them – not least because some of the products developed by teachers for teachers have turned out to be a load of tosh.

The other point to make here is that one must address teachers in a conversational way which accepts them as the experts but which also offers some support and help with what they do.

If you would like to explore this approach further, please do call 01536 399 000.   We are always happy to share our ideas, and also work with you either on a one off basis or through a continual campaign.

The impression that Mr Gove, secretary of state for education, sometimes gives, is of a man who walks around with an old envelope and a pen. He has an idea and writes it down. Out it pops.

In the past week one of his ventures (the new SPAG) test has been undergone for the first time by primary school children. But the dust has hardly settled on that (or his plan to eliminate most of the GCSE exam boards – a plan now acknowledged to be anti-competitive and thus illegal) and we have a new one.

This time it is the plan to change the grading system for GCSEs, and you can read the full story at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-michael-gove-reveals-radical-rethink-on-grades-in-new-gcse-revolution-8617827.html

This just one of over 100 education stories that appears each day on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

Leaving aside the fact that the site does keep you fully informed about current education issues, it is also a place where you can advertise, with your advert appearing as one of the rolling stories in the central screen. If you want to see what happens to an advert look for a story that comes from “Schools News” on the right hand column.

You can advertise on this and four other education web sites for two months for £49.99. Details are on http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2012/11/29/advertise-on-major-teacher-websites-49-99/

Tony Attwood

Shared emails are a low cost way of seeing if your product or service is of interest to teachers, and as a way of keeping your company details in front of teachers.

Each email contains detailed announcements from a maximum of five companies They go directly to the relevant teacher’s personal email address and not via the school administrator.

There’s a standard format for each email (see the link below) and the information includes your address, phone, fax, email and website link, plus up to 100 words about your company. The base price for all this is just £49.95 plus VAT.

If you want to appear as the top company in a list, you can guarantee this by paying an extra £40. If no one pays the extra £40 for the shared emailing that you are in, then we will place the first company to book in the first place.

Also, you will get one link included with the email. If you want to have a second link, that will be an extra £15.

The dates below show the earliest date on which we will start transmission. You can book in now, and the final date for receipt of material is one week before that date.

There’s an example of how a shared email looks at http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html

To book a place in a mailing please call: 01536 399 000 or Email: Sales@hamilton-house.com

E-shared Dates for the coming weeks. Please note that copy is required no later than one week before the despatch date.

Tony Attwood

Is it possible to generate a set of procedures that virtually guarantees that an advertising campaign aimed at teachers will get the best possible results?

It is an interesting notion that there might be a set of procedures which if followed will aid every company that is selling to schools. 

The belief that there is such a list of factors has emerged from the work Hamilton House has done with companies that have joined the Velocity programme in which the company and Hamilton House work closely together developing advertising campaigns, and analysing the results. 

By looking for patterns in the way companies have sold, and noting where problems have arisen and what solutions are available, we have discovered a range of activities which really do make a difference in terms of sales.

What we found was that the work of generating the best approach to marketing a particular product or service divides into four different areas of activity.  It doesn’t seem to matter what the company sells, these four factors are invariably the factors that determine whether the company makes a profit or not.

So without more ado, here are the four points:

1. 1.       The product or service

If you are selling something that is irrelevant to teachers then (fairly obviously) no one will buy it no matter what you do.  So if you produce a new on-line approach to teaching reading to seven year olds who have no interest in books, you might find no one wants it, because everyone who needs such a program already has one.  But if your approach has a feature that no other approach includes, then you might be back in business, but getting a sale still depends on the remaining three factors.     

1. 2.       The Offer

All products and services are offered in a particular way.  They might be offered as being the cheapest, the best solution to a particular problem, the easiest to use, or the most reliable, or in any one of 100 other ways.  But the point is, if the offer does not ring true with teachers, then the offer will fail, no matter how good the product.  So if you offer something as a unique solution to a problem, and the teacher looks at the advert and thinks, “but I have seen several other solutions to this problem” you won’t be believed and your promotion will not work.  The offer has to be good within the context of what teachers already know and believe.

1. 3.       The creative

You might have the best product and you might be offering it in a way that is attractive to teachers, but if no one reads your advert, your campaign dies.  So you have to generate a creative approach that really grabs and holds teachers’ attention.  Unfortunately most companies that create their own advertisements simply copy the style and approach of other companies, and as a result most firms get their creative horribly wrong.

Writing and designing an advertisement (be it a postal, email or web based campaign) is not common sense.  For example, the phrase “a picture is worth 10,000 words” suggests that every advertisement  needs an illustration – but that is not so.  Illustrations can on occasion harm pictures.  You might think that colour is always a good idea – but in some circumstances colour can seriously reduce response rates. 

The creative approach has to gain and hold attention for teachers will not read your advert just because you have sent it to them.  Gaining and holding attention is the hardest part of creating an advertisement.

1. 4.       The mechanisms of sale

This final part of the process is the most complex and most commonly ignored part of gaining sales from teachers. 

Over the 30 years in which we have been operating our services we have identified 12 major mechanisms that relate to getting a sale.  It is also our conclusion that 95% of companies that advertise to schools fail to appreciate what these mechanisms are, and how they should be used. 

I can’t readily describe all 12 mechanisms here not least because many of them only apply to certain companies, but I will give an example.

Imagine you sell to primary schools and you promote your goods to all primary schools each year.  You might argue that it is important to promote to every school because there is no telling where the next order will come from.  It might be from a school that purchased from you last year, or from a school that has never purchased before.  It might be from a rural school or an urban school, a big school or a small village school…  They all buy, so there is no telling.

However it is often possible to produce an analysis that shows that promoting to certain schools will always cost more than the income you generate from them.  In short, the company would be better off not promoting to them at all and instead using the money elsewhere.

Here’s one other very common observation.   A company advertises by email, and its emails get large readership and good click throughs to the web site.  But the number of orders is small.  It is fairly obvious that the problem is with the page that teachers are directed to after reading the email.  And yet few companies actually change their “landing page” and fewer still experiment with different landing pages.  Yet to do so can radically raise the number of orders received. 

As I have said there are 12 mechanisms, alongside the issues of product, offer and creative, and it is rare to find a company that is able to pay attention to all of these factors at once.

But it is possible, and if you would like to know more about how Hamilton House might apply its four phase approach to your work, please do call 01536 399 000.  There is more information on velocity at www.velocity.ac

If I ask you, “how do people find your company?” then you will probably answer – by advertising.

When you undertake a trial postal mailing to schools, if you don’t reach the desired sales level, we won’t charge for writing the sales letter.

Postal mailing continues to bring in the highest response rates of any form of marketing to schools – but it is of course also the most expensive approach.

Companies generally overcome this problem by doing trial mailings – usually involving mailing around 300 schools selected at random from the target list, to see if the response rate reaches the desired level.

The cost of such a trial mailing to 300 schools is generally around £145 (although it does depend on the number and size of the items enclosed).    Most companies find that even if they don’t hit their response rate target, they do get some sales, which generally pays off much of the cost of the trial.

Companies that are particularly successful in this field are constantly undertaking trial mailings, always looking for exactly the right sales letter that will bring in the percentage response rate that they require.

Obviously if you pay a proven copywriter to write a sales letter and then only send out your item to 300 schools that can make the cost of the trial very expensive.  Which is why we offer the copywriting on a payment by results basis.

If you do a trial postal campaign with Hamilton House we’ll help you work out the percentage response rate needed, and the cost of the trial.   Then, if you wish we will write the sales letter for you.  There will be no charge unless you get the desired response rate.

Next, if you get that response rate required you can do the full mailing.  Because the cost of promotion comes down so much when moving from a trial mailing to a bulk mailing you will still be charged less per school than for the trial mailing – even though you’ll now pay for the letter.

Every promotion is different, so the best way to see how you could bring in significant sales through a postal campaign, and have access to a payment-by-results sales letter, the best idea is to call 01536 399 000 and talk through the campaign as it could work for you.

We’ll work out the number of schools you need to mail in your trial mailing, the number of sales you need to make, and then if you agree to go ahead, we will also write the sales letter for you, without any charge.

To find out more and see how this could apply to your business, please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood