The Unique Challenges Inherent in Marketing to Schools
Every industry presents its own unique challenges when it comes to crafting and executing on new marketing strategies. In some industries, barriers to entry mean that insurgent companies have to be creative about finding ways even to get their products to market. In others, customers with distinctive or even peculiar needs and means of acquiring products and services present challenges of a similar sort. Some industries even include a number of such hurdles, making them especially difficult for marketing experts to master.
The education market is almost certainly one of these. Many school districts work with pre-qualified lists of vendors, meaning that even being able to make a proposal can require lots of painstaking preliminary work beforehand. Most schools also have strict requirements regarding the features, costs, and other details of the products and services they buy, with those responsible for signing on the dotted line often having little in the way of discretion when the time comes.
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The field of k-12 school marketing is therefore one of the most challenging of all, but the fact is that it is possible to enjoy consistent success within it. Doing so, however, does take acknowledging the formidable challenges that are inherent in the pursuit and committing to overcoming them at every step of the way.
That means recognizing from the start, for example, that product development will need to be informed by the barriers that schools pose in terms of initial acceptance. While product development in some industries can focus almost solely on aiming at and realizing idealized, product-specific goals, in the education market it must include a fundamental acknowledgment of the realities that prevail there.
This also means that school market research has to go beyond the relatively simple kinds of data-gathering that are typical in, for example, the consumer goods industry. Because school contracting and acquisitions processes are frequently so complicated and fraught with potential pitfalls, research efforts have to focus on fleshing out this side of the equation, as well. While product-centered data gathering will still make plenty of sense in many cases, using market research to better understand school-specific marketing challenges will also inevitably pay off.
