Why Busy Education Marketing Teams Often Fail to Drive Results

The amount of work a marketing team can do is endless. It's possible for someone to spend 40+ hours a week on just social media: coming up with ideas, creating the content, editing it, posting, engaging with their community, and evaluating results. Or analytics. You can get lost looking at all of the marketing data available across email platforms, social media, advertising accounts, or the CRM.

It's not hard for a small marketing team to be busy. What is hard is making sure the marketing team is busy with activities that will help your education company.

Are you wondering if your marketing team is effective? 

Here are the top signs that your marketing team might be spending time on the wrong things:

Creating marketing assets last minute

When your marketing team is constantly getting things out the door days before they go live, they are very likely cutting corners to get them done faster. That means the team will make more revisions and errors, which are then caught (or not caught) and fixed. It creates a cycle of constantly being busy but not always having time to plan strategically or fix mistakes. Meanwhile, anything else the team was working on gets put on hold, so those projects get backed up too.

Changing direction too quickly

Marketing activities need time to reach your audience before judging performance. Educators are busy, and they will likely miss or overlook your first few messages. You can't send out one email or run one webinar and pivot. You can learn and evolve, but making significant changes will throw the marketing team off, keeping them busy and creating new items all of the time before knowing if what they just produced is actually working.

Not establishing goals

Without goals, the marketing team will work on what they enjoy or are good at, which might not necessarily connect to your company's needs. For example, you may have people on the team who love writing. They write blog posts, downloadable content pieces, newsletters, etc. But if you don't discuss your goals, your writer could be developing content for the wrong audience or that is driving to the wrong call to action.

Making decisions by committee

Marketing teams are collaborative. Marketing isn't black and white, and people within an organization will have different opinions about what to do. It's good to gather ideas, but if every marketing decision is made by a group, your team will spend a lot of time talking and working together, keeping them busy while they ignore other valuable activities. 

How to get your marketing team on track

Do any of those scenarios sound familiar to what's happening with your marketing team? If so, here are some tips to help you get your marketing team to spend time on what will make a difference for your education company:

Assign one leader

There are a lot of components to marketing and a lot of opinions about what to do. With one point person overseeing all of the marketing, you will have someone to ensure everything aligns with leadership expectations and that the marketing team stays busy on what matters.

P.S. - Don't have someone for this role? Contact us at Wise Marketing Strategy for help!

Define your goals

What are your business goals beyond making money? Every company needs to drive revenue. How are you going to increase your bottom line? Is it by launching a new product? Keeping your existing customers happy? Selling to districts instead of teachers? Getting this specific will then help marketing understand where they should be focused.

Get specific about who you're targeting

There are so many nuances in education marketing related to who you are targeting in your marketing, like the types of educational institutions, job titles, roles people play in the buying cycle, and location. Identify the most critical people your marketing needs to get in front of to contribute to your goals. Then, identify what they care about and how your product relates to their role.

Make a plan

Your marketing plan doesn't need to be for 12 months or 6 months out. At this point in the education sector, that is not realistic. Things are changing way too fast. But be aware of the seasonality of the education industry and plan your marketing around that.

The end of school and back to school are key seasons for marketing. That means you should have a general idea of what you will do for your marketing at least three months ahead so your marketing team has time to create the assets you need without rushing.

Focus

Your marketing team won't have the capacity or skills to run every type of marketing well. Look at your CRM data or talk with the sales team to understand what's making a difference in bringing in quality leads and customers. Is your advertising working? Are webinar attendees converting? Get good at doing what's making the most impact for the business, then expand to trying more.

Have the right resources

Marketing is hard when the team and budgets are small. Balance the marketing team with people who contribute different skills and be open to bringing in freelancers, agencies, or part-time help to get the work done.

If the marketing team for your education company is busy, it's not always a good sign. Make sure the efforts they are putting in are contributing back to your business in some way. If your team is overwhelmed but results aren't improving, it might be time to pause, assess what's working, and refocus your marketing on the initiatives that truly move the needle.