10 Common Edtech Marketing Mistakes: What Tech Companies Get Wrong About Selling in Education

Finding the balance between best practice and innovation is essential for marketers: after all, if you follow the same playbook as last year or that your competitors use, your message will likely be forgotten. At the same time, there are some strategic frameworks that can provide structure to the experiments and brand you’re trying to build, and should be leveraged.

This is especially true in emerging industries and those that are changing particularly rapidly. Fintech (finance technology) and edtech (education technology) are two such examples, but for this article, we’ll focus on edtech.

In the rapidly-evolving space of education technology, it’s easy to overlook nuances that define the space. The biggest mistake I see marketing teams make is relying on experience from other industries, and defining their funnel as strictly B2B or B2C depending on the target buyer, without understanding the differences between those models and the funding and buying cycles in education.

Before you develop a marketing strategy, be mindful of these common mistakes.

1.Defining the sales funnel by standard process, not market research

This is simply not so. If you’re selling at the district level, a B2B funnel is directionally accurate as a starting point, but faces numerous regulatory, budgetary, and stakeholder dynamics that are not common in enterprise B2B. Without sufficient market research, it may sound good to say you want to take an Account Based Marketing approach targeting Superintendents – who are the ultimate budget decision makers– but will likely fall completely flat without awareness and buy-in from other educators. There is an entire ecosystem at play, which varies by state and district, and is beholden to more facets of public interest than exist in enterprise or consumer spaces. After all, the Superintendent’s boss is the taxpayers, who are also the students’ parents – and thus often the ultimate end users. This cyclical loop of influence, where students and parents who don’t have budget, are also the ones the ultimate buyer reports to, is unique. Ignore it, and you’re likely to spend a lot of time and money focusing on a persona that won’t convert without grassroots buy-in.

Fuente de la Información: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccasadwick/2019/10/21/10-common-edtech-marketing-mistakes-what-tech-companies-get-wrong-about-selling-in-education/#1aefe376fad2