Why Selling to Schools might be easier than you think

Why Selling to Schools might be easier than you think

Picture the scenario. You have been allocated a marketing budget to promote your products and services to your companies target audience. The key to you making the right choices as to how to spend your budget is the return you will get on your investment, right? This is true, but sometimes it can be very difficult to measure the return one campaign has generated.

If you are running marketing campaigns simultaneously you will never know where results have come from, if you have a long time lag between enquiry and order, then measurement becomes difficult, and if you rely on relationship building and lifetime client worth, then again, you will find it difficult to measure any returns from your campaigns.

So what has this got to do with selling to schools?!

Well, selling to schools is a measurable quantity. It is much easier when running schools marketing campaigns to decipher the returns on investment. The marketplace is relatively niche and so any revenue generated can be easily attributed to your selling to schools campaign.

So how do you go about starting?

There are a small number of ways to get into schools in the UK. Some are more effective than others, some are more expensive than others. We will run the merits of each of them here.

1. Email campaigns – emailing schools is a really effective way to generate both relationships and sales in schools. They are also relatively cheap. When considering email campaigns as a strategy for selling to schools, you must think carefully about how many you will need to send to make a good impact. Sure, sending single campaigns can be effective, but the real power of emailing schools and teachers comes from multiple, timed, targeted campaigns over a period of a few months.
2. Direct mail campaigns – direct mail delivers by far the strongest results for companies selling to schools. There are 2 reasons for this. Firstly, there are not many companies out there sending postal mail due to its relatively high cost compared to email campaigns, so not much mail is landing in schools. The lower the concentration, the greater the attention it receives. Secondly, direct mail is physical. It allows you to put something promoting your products directly into the hands of the recipient. It is much more difficult to ignore an envelope full of information than an email.
3. Directory listings – the third effective method of selling to schools is through the use of directory listings. The main advantage to a directory listing to sell to schools is that you submit the listing once, and the business will come to you. They are also great for SEO as you will have a high PageRank link to your site on the directory site. It can take a little more patience with directories, but in the long term they can actually be the most efficient way of selling to schools.

Going back to our original scenario, our budget decision can now be made with much more confidence. If you have a big budget and a high value product with good margins, then postal mail is a winner. If you have a need to get your brand into schools but can afford the luxury of a couple of weeks as the sales grow, then email campaigns will work perfectly. If you are looking to develop long term relationships with schools you are looking to sell to and you have a solid inbound strategy, then a directory listing is an ideal method of selling to schools.

Of course, this idea would not be right if we didn’t recommend all 3 methods! So, if you are new to the education sector or have been selling to schools for a long time, a combination of email, postal mail and solid directory listings will generate you great results in the long term.

EdProcure brings together buyers and suppliers in education making it easier for buyers to make purchases and suppliers to sell to schools.

EdProcure
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67-68 Hatton Garden
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EC1N 8JY

This release was published on openPR.