By Jacob Hanson
EdNet Insight recently published a post that I wrote addressing the need to build trust with education decision makers, to say the response to the post was positive is an understatement. We saw responses to the content from leaders in edtech marketing, sales, product development as well as the decision makers themselves.
Below are a few actionable tips that we gleaned from these responses that you can put in to your marketing toolkit and use immediately.
- Focus your efforts on building trust: be authentic & educate them
- Education decision makers are savvy consumers. Just like all of us they want and need to purchase but don’t want to be sold to
- Every touch is an opportunity to build trust, utilize these valuable opportunities to educate your buyer on what matters to them, not just what matters to you
- Is your message more than marketing hype? Personalize your approach
- Marketing for education can be tricky, and understanding your buyer’s unique challenges is key to effectively reaching your audience with the right message. Do they need to know more about what your product does right now or would it more effective to provide some quick tips to help them through a tough situation (ie keeping students engaged over the holidays)
- Sending authentic messages like these builds your credibility and earns your decision maker’s trust
- Reach your buyer on their terms, not yours
- Timing is key, remember your end of fiscal year or holiday promotions may not align with their decision to purchase
- Disseminate content appropriately- where do your buyers get their information? Email? Twitter? LinkedIn? Somewhere else? Don’t let great content go unseen; you work too hard to create it!
Many of the folks that contacted me about this recent article wanted to know more about tracking a purchase back to a tweet…yes, it all can start with a single tweet! One more piece of advice to make everything above a bit more palatable is to ensure you have the right platforms in place to track the data you need to learn about and continually improve your efforts.
Go out and build relationships, earn trust and then get the sale.
Thank you for sharing!
