Market Insights
Top 10 Marketing & Sales Tips to Help You Succeed in 2012
— Friday, January 27, 2012
Top 10 Marketing & Sales Tips to Help You Succeed in 2012
A new year, a new set of goals and aspirations! Whether your business works on a calendar or school year planning cycle, starting off 2012 with a pause to reflect on marketing and sales strategy always makes sense. With a marketplace that continues to be tight on spending—both at schools and in our own businesses—you need to make every part of your plan count. We asked industry colleagues and MDR experts for their tips on how to make the most of the New Year. Read on for more…
Sandy Fivecoat, Founder, WeAreTeachers.com
Know your client.
Today’s solutions in the education industry are hardly ever “one-size-fits-all.” Alignment to need, budget, and implementation plans are often the prerequisites for winning business. A successful marketer in education does research, meets with all relevant stakeholders, and shows empathy for the customer. The result? Not only an efficient sales cycle but also a stronger customer relationship and increased opportunity for customer retention over time.
Chuck Romans, Senior Consultant to MDR
Give your customer file a tune-up.
Did you know that in 2011, 1,100 schools closed and another 493 consolidated other schools? And in this school year alone, over 400,000 educators are no longer teaching? This amount of change can wreak havoc on the performance of your customer file. Keep on top of the high rates of churn in the education market by doing an annual customer file cleansing so that your direct mail and email campaigns are more profitable and less costly.
Jim McVety, Principal at First Step Advisors
Get tough on events.
Despite the rising tide of email and social marketing, I’m always surprised how many companies continue to have significant event budgets with no real data to measure success. Here’s a simple exercise to keep you on your “event toes.” Theoretically cut next year’s event budget in half and build a business case for each event based on expected, measurable outcomes. Besides brand building, how much will each event contribute to sales or the pipeline? If you can’t prioritize quickly, you’ve got important work to do.
Steve Gatland, Leader – Major Accounts, MDR
It’s not who you know, it’s who you don’t know.
Selling to the school market depends on a highly relationship-based model. Here are two things you can do to enhance this model: (1) invest in a CRM or utilize the one you have…connectivity and pipeline metrics are very difficult to lever without engaged use of this tool and (2) develop an A and B lead program with “A” leads driven by outreach (email, web, trade shows, etc.) and “B” leads driven by the use of data and insight about schools, their firmo-graphics, their buying history, grants available to them, and leadership change. Your reps can continue to nurture and engage their current contacts but will also be pushed to open new doors, make new connections, and ultimately build new pipeline…the foundation of growth.
Frank Catalano, Principal, Intrinsic Strategy
Keep your core marketing messages simple, understandable, and straightforward, fully focused on your target audience. The ideal is no more than three clear pairings of important, key features and benefits (the former doesn’t change; the latter may vary based on the audience) to which you can always add secondary messages, but these three are what you always communicate. And avoid trying to hang every detail onto your core messages (what I call the Christmas Tree Effect): after all, if you can’t recite your core messages from memory, then how can you expect a prospect barraged by others’ products and services to remember them?
Charlene Blohm, CEO/President/Owner at C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.
Focus on connections and conversations.
Your customers and prospects are turning to their online networks of friends, fans, and followers to find and filter information. Create content that cultivates a community of followers by providing information around which people want to communicate, collaborate, and share.
Chris Ziemnicki, Senior Product Director, MDR
Align your email, social engagements, and display advertising for better results.
Building a well-coordinated multi-channel campaign can increase your response rates and build your brand. Here’s an example: Build awareness with email messages that drive prospects to a teacher engagement campaign on an educational social platform, such as WeAreTeachers. Once people are on the site, engaged and registered, you can then utilize website traffic retargeting with a banner ad campaign to reinforce the experience and your brand. Creating this consistency across all your digital marketing footprints will increase overall relevancy and conversion rate.
Linda Winter, President, Winter Group
Practical magic—that’s what this spring education selling season demands.
Best advice is to focus messaging on the practical side of the equation…affordable or lower pricing; proven results; and believable connections to standards, achievement, and teacher effectiveness. The magic comes from truly memorable visual treatments; headlines that demand a second look; and smart, consistent use of integrated channels.
Moira McArdle, Vice President of Marketing, MDR
Be in the moment.
There are numerous affordable channels in education marketing today. Make the most of them with a multi-channel program to reach buyers at the right time and place. First, develop an offer, branding message, or new product launch that has a consistent look and feel. Next, deliver it through as many media channels as you can afford and capture the interest generated to build new opportunities. An email click through to a form will deliver great leads, but how many more can be realized through web banner ads, on a web home page, on customer service calls, in sales team signature lines, in conversations on social channels, and beyond?
Matt Martelli and Ryan Mantzel, Co-Founders, FlyWheel360
Your Customer Data Is Rich With Information – Leverage It!
The data you’re already collecting will tell you which direction to head. Take a few minutes at the beginning of the year to understand buying patterns of your current customer. They’ll tell you where you should spend your time for the balance of the year.
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