As an educational publisher, your mission is to create engaging content to improve the learning of students in this country. You already create the products to do so – but in today’s busy world, traditional marketing methods often fail to attract attention from those who influence (and make) the buying decisions. 

Fortunately, there is a way to take advantage of new technology and social trends to build more interest in your product. You can add additional context and increased value through launching a corporate blog.

Although educators have used the web for some time to find information about particular products, today they use the web to interact with others who have either used or created the products that interest them.

People want to hear real-world stories from others just like themselves. It helps them feel better about the buying process. They want to talk about the newest educational approaches and the benefits and drawbacks people have experienced. 

Perhaps most importantly, buyers want to feel as if the publishers they trust with their student’s education have a real face and an authentic voice. Buyers need to feel they can relate to publishers and depend on them.

A corporate blog effectively accomplishes those goals. It also gives your company a significant return on the time you invest in the blog’s development. Your corporate blog allows you to build your company’s credibility and create an ever-growing community of customer advocates.

These advocates market your products via word-of-mouth, as they discuss your offerings on your site and on other blogs. A blog gives you the chance to showcase success stories from various schools and districts using your products. A blog can also let you share your research about why your particular products provide students with a distinct learning advantage.

Information transfer on the Internet is no longer a one-way street. The lecture has been replaced with dialogue and interaction. Educational publishers who recognize and harness the power of this new medium will be the ones who grow and expand the most as a result. 

As the web creates new multi-directional communication channels, the number of school or district influencers and buyers who find the information they are seeking online will also increase.  An authentic corporate blog will help keep your educational publishing company in the forefront of the community that is most interested in your products.

Read more about educational publishers and social media here.

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Staying on top of emerging industry trends is critical to staying competitive as an educational publisher.  There are many blogs out there that track the latest news and happenings in the world of education.  By visiting these blogs just once and subscribing to their RSS feed, you can keep track of “what’s new” from one convenient place. 

It’s likely that staying updated will also give you a leg up on competitors who are either visiting blogs one by one (or not visiting at all) because you have faster access to breaking information than they do.

Some industry blogs even collect the best content on the Internet and post links to the most relevant articles.  These “aggregators” are a good addition to your feed reader because you can discover additional blogs you might not have been aware of before.

Use RSS Feeds to Keep Tabs On Your Competitors
Timely information-gathering on the direction your competitors are going can be a valuable strategic advantage.  RSS feeds make it easy to keep current on new developments without having to invest any time searching.  The moment contenders in your industry post new content, you become aware of it.  From a single feed reader page, you can create a virtual research desk that helps you stay one step ahead of the competition, rather than the other way around. 

Most feed readers allow you to categorize or “tag” your individual feeds with keywords of your choosing.  This is useful for classifying your feeds into groups like “industry news” and “competition,” so that you can choose to display your categories separately for easy reading. 

You can also take RSS a step farther by subscribing to the comments section of your competitors’ blog posts.  This is a useful way to keep abreast of any relevant conversations taking place around your competitors’ content.

Use RSS Feeds to Keep Tabs On Relevant Conversations
Many blogs that you encounter will be teacher-centered ones where educators gather to discuss everything under the sun – seminars and workshops, teaching tips, and even reviews of products like yours.  By including these blogs in your RSS feed reader, you’ll stay immersed in a constant stream of invaluable information that you can use to chart the course of your company’s offerings. 

Keeping current on RSS feeds from teacher blogs can help you get the “insider’s view” of how well your products (and those of your competitors) work, what you need to improve, and what teachers and educators really want out of their materials.  This kind of information, once reserved for focus groups, is now yours for the taking.

RSS feeds can (and should) be a powerful part of any educational publisher’s business growth strategy.  By using the power of Really Simple Syndication, you can have incredibly relevant research delivered right to you in a format that’s easy to access at whatever pace works for you.  Start using it now, and discover the benefits for yourself.

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To remain competitive in the educational publishing business, you need to have a great deal of information at your disposal.  Emerging developments from industry associations, news releases from competitors and relevant conversations from teachers, educators and standard setters – all this is information you need, and the landscape of data changes daily.

In the past, keeping current required an enormous investment in research.  But with the advent of RSS feeds on the Internet, you can have all the legwork done for you - absolutely free.

Meet Your Research Team: The RSS Feed
It’s likely that you’ve already heard how popular blogs have become as a means of distributing information, promoting products, and fostering conversation among those who make the buying decisions in schools and districts.  Perhaps you have visited some of these blogs to see if there were any new developments you might have missed.  But you don’t have to revisit blogs anymore to get updates, thanks to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds – these web-based workhorses fetch blog updates for you automatically.

When you visit a blog and click the “Subscribe via RSS” link, you can save a link to that blog’s update feed in your feed reader of choice.  Many email programs have a feed reader built in, but a simple web search can help you find one that runs on its own.  Simply enter the RSS feed address, and you’ll have a one-stop shop where you can see every update on every blog that you’re keeping tabs on. 

Next time: Now that you know what RSS feeds are, in the next article, we’ll look at how educational publishers can use them to their advantage.

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For many educational publishers, terms like “social media” and “Web 2.0 marketing” are foreign concepts.  But these descriptors are more than just buzzwords – they are powerful and easy-to-use tools to get more of your curriculum and supplemental materials into circulation. Because of this, carefully executed social media strategies can give you better traction influencing those who make buying decisions. 

This new type of marketing can even help you make your programs and materials more effective for teaching students, which is critically important to your business.  Any advantage you can capture helps facilitate larger adoption of the products you produce.  Let’s look at a few simple ways social media strategies can help bring you that advantage – for almost no additional investment.

What Is Social Media, And How Does It Work?
Simply put, social media is a new way of marketing ideas and products on the internet.  Gone are the days where you put your information on the web and left it up as a one-way conversation to potential customers.  With the advent of blogs, publishers now have an unprecedented ability to engage in conversation with more people with buying power.  When you post content to a blog (such as information about a new curriculum), teachers and educators can post their comments and reactions to it immediately, creating both a conversation on your website and an opportunity to interact with each other as well – hence the term “social media”.

How to Use A Blog To Get Feedback On Your Programs
When you add a blog to your website, you create articles (called “blog posts”) that describe your programs and materials in detail and invite readers to leave their comments about them.  You could then begin a discussion by asking educators to visit your posts and describe how well your programs are working for them, along with any ideas they have to improve the content.  With a small amount of effort you can foster an ongoing conversation that will give you honest and valuable feedback to improve the effectiveness of your materials.

How to Use a Blog to Influence Schools to Buy More of Your Programs
The primary source of trusted information for teachers and educators has always been the opinions of other teachers and educators.  Whether in schools, at the district level or at meetings, teachers share “social proof” about particular programs with each other that drive the purchases of programs and supplemental materials.  These honest, candid opinions are what educators most trust. If they like something they hear, they will find the information they are looking for.

Most likely, educators will find you on the web. But they want more than your version of your product information. As blog posts attract more comments and conversation from educators who are already using your programs, web searches will increasingly turn up real-world reviews and opinions that will more effectively sell these influential buyers on your materials.  As these potential buyers have a chance to interact with some of “their own,” they don’t feel like they are being sold to, and become more receptive to the positive reviews from their peers.

How to Use a Blog to Increase Your Visibility With Buyers
One of the most powerful features of a blog is the ability to let readers sign up for automatic email updates every time you post a new article.  As readers discover more and more valuable content and conversation on your blog, you can create a steadily growing list of subscribers. This means when you are ready to release a new program, hundreds (or even thousands) of potential buyers can be instantly notified about it in a way that won’t feel like “marketing” to them because the opted in to your online community. The “marketing” just feels like information to them as a result.

Blogs can be set up to allow readers to subscribe to the conversations taking place in the comments, so they can receive new information about the products that matter to them.  This allows you to engage potential buyers who are “on the fence” about purchasing from you and to continually put your products in front of them every time someone comments on them.

Because of the incredible power of social media to create focused communities of people who trust each other’s opinions, you can interact with (and influence) those who make buying decisions more effectively than ever.  It’s up to you to get the conversation rolling.

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Creating a dynamic website with frequent content additions and updates is a strategy that will help you stand out in your specific curriculum or topic area. Prospects are looking for the kinds of solutions that can only be provided by content experts. Carving out a reputation as the content expert in your market niche is smart business. By presenting site visitors with fresh and interactive substantive content, you position your company as focused and aligned with their interests.

Dynamic websites also have other advantages.  As you continue to create useful and timely content for your site, influencers have more opportunity to share news with each other, either in one-on-one conversations on your site, group discussions or via links to your content. 

Additionally, search engines reward websites that regularly update their content and earn inbound links from other websites. When influencers search the web for keywords relevant to your offerings, your site appears closer to the top of the organic search results, which conveys credibility.

How Dynamic Websites Help You Cultivate An Audience
One of the most significant factors about Web 2.0 technology is that it is community-based with participants creating content – not just publishers.  By creating an interactive website, you make it easy for your community to leave comments about the website content. This happens most frequently through comments on blog postings, but you can also solicit feedback with polls, surveys, reviews and even regular email. As you hear from your community, you may want to add short video presentations or podcast interviews with leaders in your topic area. Educators are always interested in sharing information and best practices with each other.

Becoming the center of an online community focused on your topic areas offers many strategic advantages to your company, not the least of which is that you develop an engaged sounding board for existing and new product offerings. Once you have established your online audience through an interactive website, you can turn to them for all kinds of information that will not only help you strengthen your offer or service but position your company or individuals at your company as the experts in your field.

Creating a dynamic, interactive website to speak to and support the entire audience of influencers and stakeholders in your content area is a powerful strategy to position yourself as a thought leader. Individual educators, schools and districts are like any other buyer. They like doing business with people they know and respect. Make your company easy to find and easy to know by creating a dynamic website that uses Web 2.0 tools to attract and educate an interactive audience, position your company as the market leader in your content area and to build a dedicated community of supportive and frequent buyers.

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