Strategic Marketing and Sales for K-12 Publishers
As we’ve discussed previously, one typical response to a challenging marketplace is to decrease the expenditures on advertising, promotion and other marketing tactics. In the new web-based economy, there are compelling reasons to disregard those internal calls to slash your marketing budget.
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Even the financial pundits have admitted they do not know when the market lurching will end and national and international markets will settle down. With the intercession of the government, there is a general belief that things will settle down at some point. It is the consensus view, however, that we will end somewhere higher than we are now, but nowhere near where we began this unprecedented fall.
The general advice financial managers have been giving their clients for the last two weeks is good advice for everyone – hold steady. For business people, it is an opportunity to reexamine your core business, re-identify your strengths, your unique selling proposition, and your key messages. Going back to the basics is smart business in any economy but certainly in a challenged one. Read the rest of this entry »
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Traditional marketing is still very much with us in K-12 publishing. Because of the institutional nature of our market, we still operate in “push” mode with direct mail, outbound sales, either in person or by phone, conferences, etc. For most K-12 publishers, sending occasional customer emails and offering online webinars and demos is as Web 2.0 as it gets. For educational publishers, it is still very much about filling the sales funnel moving prospects to customers through a multi-step process.
But even in educational publishing, this traditional model is giving way to something new. In traditional sales, the company was in charge of moving the process forward, and in the Web 2.0 world, the new driver is the customer. Read the rest of this entry »
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Taking the temperature of your customers or involving your customers in product development has never been easier. Large, expensive research surveys have their place but many research goals can be achieved by quick and easy online surveys.
There are a number of companies that provide this service and most give you an opportunity to test drive the software before making a commitment. Even if you decide to subscribe to their service, the cost is nominal. Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, QuestionPro, and Constant Contact are a few of the better known survey programs. Read the rest of this entry »
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How long do we have to convey our key messages to prospective customers as they cruise through our websites? Not long at all judging from some of the analytics results I’ve seen on various websites. So what are the industry norms for this metric? It’s logical that different industries would have different metrics, don’t you agree?In the magazine business, we used to have the “10-second rule” which was about the time it took a reader to scan a page, determine if there was anything of interest to read and turn the page to the next spread. I’ve heard that we have as little as 7 seconds per web screen to tell our story before the reader is off to the next click.
Michael Firsikov, Director of IT, VerkkoStadi Technologies Inc. has reviewed the metrics for the large social networking site he manages. As he shared this week in the Target Marketing Magazine webinar on email, Michael found that within 30 seconds, 48% of the audience is gone and within 40 seconds 63% are gone.
The thing that made me sit up and take notice was his assertion that often “Your first impression is your last impression.” It’s probably safe to say that educators looking for solutions to their particular problems are willing to spend a bit more time scanning a website for kernels of help. It’s probably true for most professionals in most markets. But since we may be talking about the difference of nano-seconds, we ignore the customer behavior above at our peril. Even though the examples are based on social consumer behavior, educators are consumers too.
So if our first impression is our last impression, what kind of impression are you making with your website?
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