EdTech Company Solves an Unexpected Marketing Problem

About The Company

An unreachable target

An education technology company—specializing in interactive textbooks for higher education—contacted us for SEO expertise to help reach their audience, after receiving a directive from their board.

As a sales-centric organization that targets the professors or administrative staff who choose materials for the university, they were struggling to reach their target. Up until now their main approach was spamming them and intruding with multiple sales calls. The company believed SEO was the answer. But before we jumped in and promised results from SEO, we took a deep dive into their buyer’s journey and business model.

The Real Challenge

The aha moment that changed their approach

The company’s B2B2C model poses a complex target audience challenge. While individual professors or administrative staff choose materials for the university, students are the ultimate consumer (they are the ones who purchase the books on the syllabus), however, they don’t have much of a say in the short-term.

The company’s biggest challenge was to get in front of professors who, as academics, typically aren’t comfortable with tech or reliant on search engines for information finding.

The First Playbook

Where we started and why

Through our information-gathering step, we discovered the company already had a contact database of their total addressable market. So, in this case, we recommended direct messaging as the most effective way to reach and convert this audience.

Using their contact database, they can tackle the challenge from a different angle by:

Other tactics we recommended:

• Creating problem-aware educational content to complement product-led sales calls. This type of content opens the door to an academic discussion about the problem higher education is facing (students just aren’t reading textbooks), drawing a more comfortable bridge into the solution: interactive textbooks.
• Republishing or guest posting on University blogs reinforces relationships and improves rankings in search through links back from these authoritative websites.
• Learning about their audience through touchpoints, like an interactive study about faculty and their teaching practices. Both encourage their target audience to join in on the larger purpose, and position the company as a SME on the topic with authentic data from the study.

To help make a more compelling case to their CEO and board, we added an educational section in their playbook on the best approach to results-driven SEO.

The Marketing Subscription Plan

An ongoing strategic partnership

Once we developed a course of action through the playbook, the company subscribed to our Evolved marketing subscription plan. This enabled us to work with them on an ongoing basis and take the lead on marketing initiatives, driving them through to completion.

These included building out their email marketing program, providing website management such as improving user experience, as well as conference planning. Our monthly plan of work included the following marketing services:

• Conversion Funnel and Awareness Journey Mapping
• Narrative building and Storytelling
• Demand creation and capture through emails & landing pages
• Website planning, UX, and visual design
• Conversion rate testing and optimization

The Takeaway

The results of our targeted plan in motion

By trusting us to develop key marketing initiatives, the marketing team of two could stay focused on other core aspects of their business. And, simply by investing in progressive marketing tactics, their digital efforts are now aligned with their business model.

Special Project: Event Design and Support

As a strategic ongoing partner, we recognized there was an opportunity for thoughtful conference marketing support at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium conference, the largest computing education conference worldwide for higher education.

While they had been sponsoring the event for 10 years, there were many missed opportunities to maximize ROI.