The schools market is flooded with marketing messages as suppliers compete for the hearts and minds of teachers, principals and other decision makers.

Schools are bombarded daily with emails, letters, faxes, ads in magazines and phone calls. It’s a wonder teachers actually get any work done! The end goal is to capture “share of mind” of the prospects who matter and make your product a synonym for the product or service being offered. But this takes time and tenacity – getting started is the first step.

So how do you cut through all this noise and get your products and services the attention they deserve? The answer is to develop an integrated marketing to schools campaign:

Identify:

• Type, location and size of school you wish to target
• The contacts / positions within a school you need to reach
• A reliable school mailing list you can trust – preferably one that supplies regular updates so the data can be used over and over

Make a plan:

• Consider the ROI (return on investment) and look the most cost effective way to reach the most   schools           you can – after all its a numbers game.
• Generally a combination of fax and email are the best option but bear in mind the opening rate of emails in schools is about 5%. Faxes are a reliable way to get the message into the pigeon hole of the right prospect
• There may be some schools you would prefer to mail a letter to – keep the quantity of a mailing low to keep costs down and only select the best prospect.

The offer:

• Develop an offer that is realistic and deliverable
• Make sure the artwork translates well across email, fax and snail mail
• Test your offers first with small “random” segments of the database and measure the results – see what works and roll out the campaign. Good luck

For more information, please read our marketing to education page.

Michael Bleakley

Michael Bleakley is a journalist, communicator and marketing professional of 25 years. His career began in his early 20’s publishing tech magazines for education. Michael’s career then moved into online and book publishing for a global business publisher, then finally into database publishing and marketing at A-ZGovBIZ.