By: Benjamin Bachman
As a marketer, one of the things that gets me really excited is uncovering information to solve new problems. When PRP’s CEO Jacob Hanson and I started talking about bringing me on to head up the PRP marketing team, I was immediately excited about the buying cycle in the edtech market. To someone who is new to the field, that cycle sometimes it seems like it’s all over the place! But that just means it’s an interesting problem to solve and, because we’re all focused on education as an agency, it’s an opportunity to provide a valuable service to our clients.
As a HubSpot agency, we’re in a particularly good position to deliver that service as well, because HubSpot allows us to track client interactions with all of our customers. We have a great team of folks who understand the edtech sales cycle as well as anyone else in the world, but HubSpot can help us demystify it even further by clarifying trends as they occur throughout the year. The opportunity to bring some clarity to an issue that hasn’t been explored in great detail is really exciting to me.
I remember a client in the past who I was working with. They had a huge need to drive their sales numbers up in order to stay viable as well as prove to their investors that they should continue pouring funds into their business. How many of us can relate to this direct need in some way or another? With HubSpot, we were able to provide the trends of folks who were already right in front of them, in their database, and wake up already existing contacts. This is why I am so pumped about the edtech space. HubSpot provides a clear way for us to look at the actual behaviors of educators and then respond to them with great storytelling and selling.
Education also happens to be a great area in which to look for this kind of information. Given the tight budgets educators are working under, they tend not to be on the cutting edge of communications technology, so they’re still living with email marketing and we have the ability to track more traditional metrics as well as pay attention to the many social channels that are in play.
We also find a lot of people in the education space behaving as decision-makers who are not necessarily actually in a position to make purchasing decisions. It’s another fascinating puzzle I’m looking forward to solving, because those “influencers but not quite decision-makers” can provide us information that points to those decision-makers and gives us some clues along the way about how to best approach them.
How can we (and you) turn these big ideas into reality? Check back next week for a new post about one of my favorite tools for uncovering the clues to solve these puzzles: content offers.
Thanks for sharing!