6 Steps to Designing a Comprehensive Marketing Plan in the EdTech Industry

As the new school year approaches, many companies are setting goals and priorities for the 2024-2025 school year. As an EdTech company, whether your goals are set on a calendar or school year basis, it’s important to reassess your marketing plan as you approach the beginning of the school year – in alignment with your customers and their buying cycle.

Step 1. Set Goals and Priorities

Designing a results-oriented marketing program begins with clear goals and priorities. Goals should be outcomes-oriented and able to answer the question “What does success look like?” These goals should be tied back directly to company goals and priorities so that team resources are all working towards a common goal.

Next, once goals are set, a priority order should be given. This, ultimately helps when requests come up throughout the year for your team to be able to make tradeoffs and allocate resources accordingly. For example, priority one may not take the most time or resources, but when presented with tradeoffs we should always do whatever we can to keep priority one on track.

Step 2. Narrow your audience and focus your key messages

While this may not be a new exercise every year, this is something that should be confirmed on at least a yearly basis. Based on your marketing and company goals, you should outline your key audience targets and refine the messages that will help you reach them.

Step 3. Determine the right mix of programs/channels

Now that you’ve outlined your goals, audience, and key messages, you can determine the right mix of programs/channels. The order of these first three steps is critically important because if you try to do this first, you could be out of sync with the right channels to meet your key audience members or you could select a mix of programs with the wrong focus (e.g. brand awareness activities are recommended even though your goals are focused on lead generation).

Step 4. Determine any necessary support/infrastructure

Putting together the right mix of programs and channels is one piece of the puzzle, but assessing the necessary resources needed to accomplish these efforts is critical to successfully executing these efforts. Oftentimes, we skip this step, and then we have to jump over hurdles or get overwhelmed when we start to implement different pieces of the program because they cannot be accomplished without being addressed. Things that would fit into this category are list acquisition or database management, internal resources with the talent/skills to accomplish program recommendations, or the time required to execute elements of the plan.

Step 5. Allocate budget

Steps 4 and 5 will help you right-size the recommendations. Without these two critical steps, you could have a beautiful plan put together that is not feasible. It’s important to take the time to right-size your investment, which includes understanding what is doable with the budget allocated. If you’re a start-up or a growth-stage company increasing your investment in your marketing program, you want to use industry benchmarks to help you right-size your budget, which includes how much you are investing in both headcount and discretionary spend.

Step 6. Be prepared for things to change along the way!

As with any plan, you should plan for changes. There’s a delicate balance of seeing the plan through and being agile and results-oriented. That’s why starting with why – or outlining metrics for each campaign and tactic will be critically important. Looking back at this data will help you determine if you are accomplishing what you set out to do…and then adjusting if it isn’t.

No one said these steps were simple. If you need help thinking through these steps and putting together a strategy that gets results, reach out to me for an introductory conversation.

#marketingstrategy #EdTech #startups