By: Kristen Plemon
With students and teachers on summer vacation, education business seemingly slows down. School is a faraway thought for many educators as they bask in the summer sun and take a break from bell schedules, daily lessons, grading, and snotty noses.
However, the lazy days of summer provide education marketers with an opportune time to reach customers who might have money left over from the previous year’s budget and then focus on planning and development. Now is the time to prepare for the hectic school year when you’ll be in the midst of conducting campaigns and product releases.
The back-to-school and fall season is one of the most critical stages in the school district buying cycle, and it will be here before you know it. In the fall, educators either have some budget remaining from the previous year to spend on filling gaps, or are beginning their search for new tools to and evaluate and possibly purchase the following year.
Marketers can take advantage of the quiet atmosphere in their company’s offices half-emptied by vacations to plot ways to reach potential buyers during the school year and bring them into their marketing funnel. The most cost-effective activities to pursue over the summer focus on campaign planning and creation, so that work during the school year can focus on deployment and analysis.
Concentrate on these three areas of work to get a jumpstart on the back-to-school season:
- Research and Strategy: Summer is a useful time to conduct a content audit as well as audits of your company’s website, public relations, and social media engagement. Look for gaps and areas for improvement. Discard what didn’t work, and look to repeat what did.
Conduct online focus groups with educators to glean information that can inform new campaigns. Reach out to customers to gather testimonials and stories that can be used to place articles in fall issues of education publications. Oftentimes, educators make themselves available for conversations in the summer because they’re unburdened by daily schoolwork, or they’re willing to connect during conferences, such as the ISTE and NAESP annual conferences. Make sure to have personal email addresses and mobile phone numbers for educator customers so you can reach them when they’re away from school.
Use the insights to develop a strategy for building brand awareness, supporting lead generation and nurturing, and updating your buyer personas. With this information in hand, you can plan for the desired outcomes instead of outputs.
- Content Development: Use the downtime of summer to write and design new content, such as infographics, checklists, ebooks, blogs, and articles, so it’s ready for prime time when needed. Build a content calendar for the upcoming school year to save time and headaches later.
Following strategic planning, marketers are able to create content that better aligns with their goals and needs. Give yourself the time to fully formulate ideas in ways that support the bottom line. This proactive approach keeps everyone from the marketing team to the executive team focused, rather than chasing opportunities that pop up during the year and don’t meet agreed-upon priorities.
- Email/social campaign development: Taking the time to frontload a marketing campaign, whether email, social media, or an integrated mix, allows marketers to readily deploy when needed and begin analyzing results. Frontloading helps you avoid the trap marketers often fall into of creating emails and posts on the fly to fill immediate needs, leaving inadequate time for thorough planning and resulting in various mistakes that damper the impact of their efforts.
Marketing and communications work over the summer break doesn’t have to fizzle out like a faulty firework. With a little ingenuity, the warm season can be a time of productive planning and progress toward business objectives.
Thanks for sharing!
