If you’ve been selling to schools for a while, you’ll know the importance of being an all-singing, all-dancing education marketing expert. You’ll have read our blogs, downloaded our learning reports, and spent hours crafting your perfect campaign.

But are you making use of the one key ingredient that could improve your ROI, skyrocket your sales, and make you a household name in schools countrywide? The ingredient that not all of your competitors make use of?

Online surveys are by no means a new research technique, and their value is certainly seeing greater appreciation across the education industry. But there are still plenty of education businesses who’ve never explored this quick, easy, and cheap way of sourcing data directly from their target audience.

Gathering facts, thoughts, and opinions directly from your target audience is crucial to give you valuable insights into what teachers want, need, and expect from your products and services – and ultimately sell more to schools.

It’s this research that’ll not only build the core foundations of your entire school selling strategy for the year, but can also shape your product or service itself.

At Sprint Education, we’ve spent over fifteen years following the education industry, analysing the school calendar, and gathering as many insights as possible to paint an accurate picture of the year ahead, and build a framework of the best way you can support schools and teachers right now and during the year ahead.

But even our insights aren’t complete without direct teacher insights – which is why we run and publish The State of Selling to Schools.

The State of Selling to Schools

Packed full of ground-breaking insights, our annual report is a must-read for any business in the education sector – and this year’s issue is no exception. We interviewed 5,870 leaders and educators and asked them 27 essential questions, covering aspects of education such as:

• Their current views on the state of education in 2023.
• Staff/student wellbeing levels.
• How they’re using EdTech in the school and classroom.
• Their goals and priorities for the year ahead.
• How education businesses can support them to meet these goals.

As hundreds of businesses have discovered over the last couple of years, these insights provide an unparalleled insight into what’s going on in schools right now; far more than you could ever source simply from reading education news publications.

We know a lot of education suppliers, like Sprint Education, have ex-school staff in their teams. No doubt you know how invaluable their input is – so multiply that by 5,000, and you’ll see why every education business should download their free copy of The State of Selling to Schools.

As you’ll discover on pages 5-7, those 5,870 respondents represented a wide range of staff in the teaching industry. Teachers, Leaders, Department Heads, Office Staff, and more completed our survey, all of whom worked across a variety of establishments; not just the standard Primary and Secondary School, but Nurseries, FE, and Pre-Prep Schools, too. All of those staff members also had varying additional responsibilities, with some responsible for student wellbeing initiatives, extra-curricular clubs, and/or staff CPD, amongst others.

While just under 6,000 staff members is only a relatively small population of the teaching industry, the spread of the results, coupled with the high-quality, well-planned questions, has provided us with accurate, scalable research from all corners of the education industry.

Collecting this sheer amount of information whilst ensuring you’ve covered a wide range of the population – and doing so on a minimal marketing budget – would be impossible using any other method of data collection.

This is, of course, just one of the many benefits of using online surveys to conduct your teacher research.

To start you off, we’ve listed four below – as well as four reasons to conduct your own marketing…

Four benefits of running online education studies and surveys

1. Teachers will only take part if they want to. They have to actively choose to participate, meaning you’ll receive higher-quality, well thought-out responses. Whether they’re passionate about driving change, or simply need a sounding board for their feedback, you’ll get thoughtful, useful responses.

2. It’s quick and easy to reward teachers for their time. Completing an online survey, even if it’s just a few minutes long, is still asking teachers to part with their (potentially personal) data, and give up their time to help you. Running surveys online makes it quick and easy to provide incentives, such as vouchers for successful completions, or an entry into a prize draw if your budget can’t quite stretch to an individual reward.

3. Teachers can complete the survey in their own time. As we know from this year’s survey results, after-school is the best time for teachers to connect with education suppliers. But that may throw a spanner in the works if you’re attempting to conduct a phone or video interview, as that may fall outside of your business hours – and regardless, 28% and 31.7% of teachers said they’d never connect with an education supplier via phone or video call respectively. By emailing out a link to an online survey, teachers can save your email ready for whenever they’ve got a few spare minutes, even if you wouldn’t usually be able to reach them at that time – be it those early-birds at 5am, or night owls at 11pm!

4. You’ll maximise your reach and minimise your spends. Promoting your online survey via email means you’ll get the best return on your marketing investment. 46.8% of teachers surveyed said they check their work email more than ten times a day. Applied across the whole UK sector, this equated to nearly 5,387,000 more inbox logins than Facebook views by UK teachers each day. That’s 1.97% billion more across one calendar year! Our UK database gives you the means to contact over 400K teachers, leaders, and other school staff, all with different roles and responsibilities, to give you the widest reach possible.

…. And four reasons to collect direct education insights

1. Tailor your products and services to meet schools’ needs. Collecting data directly from your target education audience is crucial if you want to sell more to schools. This education intelligence will provide you accurate, valuable insights into what schools want, need, and expect from you and your products. By understanding this, you can create and shape your offering into what’s appealing and relevant to them. For example, 54.3% of teachers told us in this year’s study that they’d like education businesses to share more free resources and advice, and 47.6% said they need reduced prices, discounts, or payment plans. If you can offer this, you’ll stand out as a helpful thought-leader, and ultimately secure more education sales.

2. Improve teacher satisfaction. When you collect data directly from your target audience, you can identify areas where you may be falling short in terms of customer satisfaction. By addressing these issues, you can improve the overall teacher experience, customer retention, and customer loyalty, ultimately turning more schools into long-term, repeat customers.

3. Identify market trends and opportunities. By analysing teacher feedback and behaviour, alongside what you already know about cyclical school events, you can identify emerging trends and market gaps that your business can capitalise on. You’ll have that expert, almost secret knowledge to stay ahead of your competitors, and show schools you’re the best in your field!

4. Create a better marketing strategy. In the same way these school insights will help shape your product or service, they’ll help shape your education marketing strategy, too. By using accurate data to inform your marketing strategies, you’ll target your marketing efforts more effectively, create campaigns that resonate with your audience, and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

What next?

Collecting – or simply using – data directly from your target teacher audience is essential to increase your school sales.

Firstly, you’ll want to download The State of Selling to Schools 2023 if you haven’t already, and read all 27 essential insights to build the foundations of your marketing strategy this year.

Then, get in touch with our education strategists about running your own survey to collect industry-specific stats. We can write, design, and send your emails for you – and even manage the creation and prize draw of your survey.

Email info@sprint-education.co.uk, or email 01684 297374, and let us take the guesswork out of your next education marketing strategy.

Tags
Education Marketing Email Marketing Emailing Schools Emailing Teachers Emailing Teachers in Schools

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