Education Marketing

According to an article in last week’s New Scientist, there’s a lot of discussion going on around the timing of the school day, after one school changed from a 9am to a 10am start.  The school reports that it has reduced absenteeism and behavioural problems dramatically, and shown a huge increase in GCSE passes.

In a wholly different development, some schools are dropping the old idea of having all the GCSE students study their GCSE subjects across years 10 and 11.  Instead subjects which tend to recruit smaller numbers of students (music, art, RE, business studies, media studies, dance, drama, sociology etc) are being taken in one year with both year 10 and year 11 students sitting in the same class getting double the number of lessons.

So a typical student might do English, maths, and the double science across two years, but then in year 10 do an intense one year course in GCSE French, plus perhaps music, media studies etc etc.  In year 11 the student continues with the two year courses, but also takes perhaps German, business studies, drama etc etc.

In this way teachers avoid having GCSE classes of just a dozen children who have opted for the subject, and instead get double the number.   The result can be the saving of £30k a year as the music department is reduced from three staff to two.

Here’s another change that is going on.  According to the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), the average primary school budget for ICT for 2011/12 is £12,710, while the average secondary school budget for the subject is £56,670 – an increase on what schools had before.

Of course this doesn’t mean that teachers feel better off either in ICT or in other subject areas, quite often because many of the things that they used to get extra funding for (such as the Harnessing Technology Grant) have come to an end.

But ICT teachers are buying in new equipment, because they are aware of the way the purchases can save money.  A typical issue involves bringing in servers that get less hot, in order to reduce the reliance on air conditioning.

It is against this background of change that adverts aimed at teachers have to be written.   What this certainly means is that traditional advertising that focuses on the product or service, rather than benefits relating to current changes in schools, is less likely to work.  Teachers are concerned with prices, but they also want to know about the impact any particular approach will have on their work overall in relation to the changes they are making.

That’s why we focus not so much on getting your advert into schools for the lowest prices, but in terms of developing advertising campaigns with our clients that work in the current climate.

If you would like to discuss how we could develop and change the way in which your advertising is written, and the way in which your product or service is marketed, please do call 01536 399 000 and ask for a member of the Velocity team.

If you would like to read more about our services first, do have a look at our Velocity service page on www.velocity.ac

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

The key concept in getting a response to a postal sales letter, leaflet, web site or email is “engagement”.  It is a measure quite simply of how much the reader interacts with your message, and through that, with you.

100% engagement occurs when a person meanders around a news agents shop, sees a magazine that he/she previously had no interest in buying, and buys it because of the cover and what is revealed via a brief flip through the pages.

Similarly with an email if the reader opens, clicks through to your web site and then orders the goods (or picks up the phone to you, if that is what you wish) you have 100% engagement.

Of course not everyone interacts with you first time around, and you can get a good reaction over time.  This can be done by getting an individual to subscribe to a newsletter, knowing that he/she will skim through some of your contributions, and then respond.

What you are doing here is building up a positive image of your product or service, and then asking them to interact.

These subscribers are engaged because they have subscribed, and so the relationship is already there.  But if you prefer to work with those who receive your message out of the cold, that’s fine too – providing you really grab their attention.

Which takes us back to the most fundamental of all – you need to have people’s attention.  Simply telling people what you do is never enough, unless they are chaffing at the bit, desperate to buy your product (in which case you’ve already made your millions!)  For most of us where we have to work at selling you have to go through the routine:

1: Grab attention

2: Hold attention and drive the reader towards action.

That’s engagement.
If you would like to know more please do call 01536 399 000 or follow this blog on www.blog.hamilton-house.com (or on Twitter @HHMailings)

Tony Attwood

We still have one space left for the secondary shared postal mailing on 9th November which gets the free email service with it.  But please call quickly if you want to grab that slot.

After the school half term this week we are going to try an experiment regarding a different way to approach schools.

What we are doing is writing to teachers on a subject by subject basis to see if they have any particular products or services that they are looking for, and for which they would like to receive information from various suppliers.

At the moment we have no idea what sort of response such communication from ourselves will get, but whatever enquiries we do get, we’ll forward to companies listed on the School Procurement Site (www.top5.org.uk) and invite them to give details of what they can do, phone numbers, emails, websites etc.   We’ll then send these back to the enquiring school.

For this experiment there is no charge to the companies involved – the only restriction is that the companies in question will be selected from the School Procurement Site.

Listing therein costs £25 a year plus VAT, and of course there’s the added benefit that many teachers use the site in order to find suppliers regularly, aside from this experiment.

If you would like to join the site, and thus be part of the experiment just call 01536 399 000 or drop us a line to Chris@hamilton-house.com There are optional extras like having a logo included, or being listed in more than one section – all the details are on the site in the “Suppliers” section near the bottom of the topics list on the left side.

Tony Attwood

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

We have got a few email slots left this week which are available at half price, it being half term week.

But there’s an extra bonus – in that of course it is not half term week everywhere.  Not in Scotland, not in Leicestershire, to name but a few.

So for those locations you get straight to the teacher in the normal way.

Unfortunately all our web sites went down at the weekend so I can’t refer you to the normal list of sites where details of all our personal email lists are residing but if you would like a half price email (which means personal lists from 4.5p an address upwards) do call 01536 399 000.

Tony

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

As usual we are offering to do some emailing at half price during the half term week.  That means emails from 4.5p each.

With the subscription and personal email lists that we run, we have a strict limit of only one marketing email to each teacher each week (something that helps keep response rates up).   We have a number of slots that have yet to be taken – but of course they are on the usual first come first serve basis.

I can’t put out a list of what is available, because obviously the phone can ring with a booking at any moment, but if you do want a half price email campaign just have a look at the lists of personal email addresses and subscription email lists and choose the ones of interest, and then call 01536 399 000.

For secondary heads of department the email lists are shown on http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html

For primary teachers the email lists are on

http://www.emails.gs/Primarynamedlist.html

For subscription lists, details are on

http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

Tony

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

There are a number of directories of suppliers of educational products and services both in print and on line.  It is often hard to know whether it is worth being listed in them.

Trying to decide exactly whether you should be in one directory or another is difficult, and of late we’ve been debating how anyone can tell if a directory is worth while or not.

In the end we felt that the key question is how the directory is advertised – that is, is it just left for teachers to find through searching on Google etc, or is it advertised in some way?

Our own on line directory of suppliers (The School Procurement Site at www.top5.org.uk ) is advertised regularly to teachers using our own email lists as well

As a result about half of our readers see a link on one of our adverts and go straight to the page that interests them.   The other half find us on Google, helped by the page ranking we have achieved.

If you offer a product or service that is free (not a free sample, but a genuinely free complete product or service) the listing is free.

Otherwise it only costs £25 plus VAT per year to be listed on the site, so if you find you are not listed, and would like to be, please send an email to Chris@hamilton-house.com with the phrase School Procurement in the subject line.   Just send in your entry in the format you’ll find on the site, plus a note that you agree to the fee (or that you want the listing free because it advertises a free product), and we’ll put it up and drop you an invoice.

Any questions, please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

There was a really fascinating article in New Scientist (8 October) in which the experiment at Monkseaton High School in Tyneside was reported.

In the past year absenteeism is down, punctuality is up and exam results have gone through the roof.

When the head was asked why and how this happened he said it was nothing to do with changes in discipline approaches nor in terms of methods of teaching.  It was to do with starting the school day at 10am and not 9am.

There are details of how this single change might have affected teaching and learning in the magazine (in fcat most of the 8 October issue deals with the topic of time), and I won’t bore you with them now, but this story is an example of a really interesting story about education, and one that will fascinate most teachers.

The question is simply: how do you use it?

That of course is the art of PR (the topic that I touched on at the end of last week).  Finding an interesting news story and somehow linking it with your own product or service.

In a sense you might call it backwards PR.  The obvious forwards approach is to start by thinking of your product and work on from there.  In this approach one finds the story and works back to one’s product.

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and on www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk

Tony Attwood

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