Continuing with my efforts to establish exactly what it is that firms that are successfully selling to schools do, I’ve come up with a simple seven-step analysis. I believe this is what a lot of firms that are selling well to schools do.
STEP 1: Gathering data on teachers’ attitudes to the product, and the way in which the competition is promoting its products.
STEP 2: Understanding teacher attitudes towards the product, pricing, and the competition
STEP 3: The first round of advertising – trying out some new ideas via email.
STEP 4: Building the lists of people who have expressed an interest or just enquired for a catalogue
STEP 5: Defining the market – marking up the database with which schools are likely to buy and which not
STEP 6: Transferring the lessons learned to direct mail and testing this with a range of mail shots
STEP 7: Taking the knowledge gained and utilising it for other products.
There’s nothing too radical there – but we’ve now gone a step further by devising a programme that will achieve all this for our clients. We will do the analyses and research, write the adverts, send out the adverts via email, display the adverts on our www.schools.co.uk web site, and give analyses and advice throughout – all for £350 per month.
That’s everything from steps 1 to 5. The only extras in the project are direct mail and any web site work needed. Everything else (from copywriting to supplying the email lists and sending out the emails) is paid for in the monthly fee.
I’ve set this programme up because I do believe this is the quickest, simplest and most cost effective way of discovering if your product will sell effectively into schools, and if so, to whom and how the advert should be written.
There’s no long term contract – you can leave with just one month’s notice.
If you are interested, please do call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000. I’m not in on Monday, but my colleagues Stephen and Laura will be there, able to answer any questions.
