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Marketing Strategy For
Edtech Startups

In today’s world, everything is online, studies are no exception. There are numerous ed-tech startups who want to gain some space in education market.

But many startups failed. One of the main reason is Marketing. They can’t able to reach their potential customers or they can’t be able to generate need for their product.

So we have shared the best marketing strategies for edtech startups. Let’s dive in:

Table Of Content

Unique Selling proposition(USP)
Customer Buyer Journey
Know Your Competitors
Digital Marketing Funnel
Digital Marketing Strategy
Approach To Influencers
Always Always Look After Your Existing Customers

#1 Unique Selling Proposition(USP)

To compete in this highly competitive world, you should have something valuable ie your Unique Selling Proposition(USP) in your business that makes you stand out from the competitors.

Your USP should be highlighted in your website. It can be easily viewed by the visitor within 5-10 seconds(because attention span of human is 8 seconds. Your customers want to know what you can do for them that no one else can do.

Example – Geekster

Geekster is an ed-tech startup (niche on full stack web engineer) provides programming courses.

USP of geekster is that they provide guaranteed job instead of certificates.

The Geekster provides 1:1 career coaching, mock interviews and makes you ready for your dream job.

Your USP helps you to beat your all competitors and make your brand superior to others.

So What is your USP?

If you don’t have your USP, then think hard.

Think about your customer and ask yourself “What they want?”

“Are certificates enough for them?”

Or do they want job guarantee or they want 1:1 live session or 24*7 live support?

After getting the answer, make that your USP.

The more you know your customers, the better your marketing strategy be.

#2 Customer Buyer Journey

In ed-tech startups, the customer buyer journey is different from the others.

Even Foreign language ed-tech startups have different customer journeys than academic related startups.

So research about your customers. Know their pain points, challenges, wants, needs and goals. Create a buyer persona so that you can better target your potential customers.

Collaborate with your team members to determine the customer journey and buyer persona. The members who highly managed and contacted the customers give you correct data.

You can also create by taking feedback from the existing customers.

Knowing your customers helps you to build a good relationship with them and retain them for a long period.

Don’t confuse the end buyer user with your targeted audience.

Let’s say you have an ed-tech startup providing education for K12 students. So who will be your end consumer(users)?

Students(age 5-16 years)

Who will be your targeted audience(buyers)?

Yes, parents(decision makers)

Always focus on your end consumers. If they are happy after using your product/service, they will become your brand advocate and you can expect referrals from them.

#3 Know Your Competitors

It is very crucial to know what strategy your competitors are using to reach their customers. How they are utilizing the digital platforms. Are they collaborating with others or approaching to influencers?

If they are using digital platforms, then social media marketing they are utilizing mostly or through SERP search engine optimization?

If they are doing Search Engine Optimization, then

Which keywords they are ranking on?
How much are they generating the traffic?
How are they promoting themselves on a website?
How are they making their marketing funnel stronger?
How long they take to convert the visitors into customers?
How they are targeting their audience?

After checking your competitor’s strong and weak marketing strategy points, think about

Their strongest point. Can you beat on that platform?
Is there any platform they are not using but have good potential?

These are the basic questions to know about your competitors. It doesn’t mean that you have to copy their ideas or marketing strategy.

It means you should know the potential platforms where your audience can target easily. You get the basic idea how they are working.

Now its your turn to beat them. The things working for them may or may not work for you.

You have to test and analyze the different content, content format, keywords, platforms etc.

You have to keep your eyes on data and metrics to analyze.

#4 Digital Marketing Funnel

Now you have done with customer buyer journey.

Customer buyer journey directly helps you to build a strong marketing funnel. If you know that where your customers ask for information, then you can be able to provide information on their suitable platform.

If your customers need more information related to your product and they go for YouTube, and if you have no content on YouTube, then your competitors can easily convert them into customers.

So that’s how you need customer journey for marketing funnel.

But what is digital marketing funnel?
Digital Marketing funnel is a collection of stages of customer’s buyer journey (from awareness to conversion).
It is used to build different strategies for different stages to capture all the customers from all the stages.

These stages are Top of the funnel, Middle of the funnel and Bottom of the funnel

-Top of the funnel is for Awareness.

-Middle of the funnel is for Consideration.

-Bottom of the funnel is for Conversion.

If you don’t know how to create a digital marketing funnel, then check this article: Digital Marketing Funnel- Know How To Convert Visitors Into Customers.

Note : Always always and always create your marketing funnel by proper market research.

#5 Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing Strategy for edtech contains the Content Marketing, Video Marketing, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing.

CONTENT MARKETING
Build your own content marketing strategy.
First set some achievable goals and objectives. Set timelines for goals. Your goal can be traffic, sales, conversion, SEO success or reduce marketing cost.
After setting the goal and timelines, set some Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) to measure your results and achievements.
Research about your target audience. Use the buyer persona and customer buyer journey to know about the audience.
Do keyword research and competitor analysis with the help of Semrush. Select the content format. Always consider SEO and video marketing in your marketing strategy.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Assess your own website. Check the ranking of your webpages. Make a plan for applying On page SEO and copywriting techniques to your already published articles so that they can rank on SERP.
Create new content according to search intent and keyword research.
You can easily get free organic traffic from the Search Engine Result page(SERP) with the help of SEO. You can turn your traffic into customers by Email marketing and retargeting.
VIDEO MARKETING
Video marketing plays a big role in marketing, the education industry is no exception…And YouTube is the second most popular search engine.
Students, teachers, and parents mostly learn from theYouTube.
So by providing the content on YouTube, you can target directly to your audience.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social Media Marketing is very important for ed-tech startups to create brand awareness and engage with potential customers. But you have to set your goals, target audience, post content before starting social media. Choose the right social media platform. It saves your time, money and resources.
From social media, try to take the audience(followers) to your website and then try to land them on top of the funnel…. And then convert them into customers.
You can also retarget your audience who visited your website by adding pixels on your website
EMAIL MARKETING
Email Marketing helps you to be personalized with the visitors(who are unknown) and send regular newsletter to them so that they can visit your website again.
Email marketing is used to build trust and authenticity with the visitors and make them in your funnel.
These visitors are highly valuable because they are the one who have a high interest in your product or service.
This email list also helps you in targeting facebook advertising as a custom and lookalike audience.
So build your email list and make your visitors closer to the bottom of the marketing funnel.

So build your strategy for each platform. Measure and analyze the result. Learn from the result and Implement again..

It is a time consuming process but worth it. If you don’t have enough time to make a content strategy or work on marketing, then contact our team. We would like to provide you free consultation.

#6 Approach to Influencers

Influencers marketing are now at the booming stage.

For your edtech startup, you can approach the “Education Social Media Influencers” who can advertise your brand and connect your brand to the students, parents, teachers or educators.

These influencers create brand advocacy for your product or service which can easily influence your targeted audience.

If you want to target a new audience, increase your social media followers and engagement or increase brand awareness, then these influencers can easily help you to reach your goals.

Your ultimate goal should not be the sales of your product or service. Clearly define your goal and then approach the influencers.

The words about your brand should look authentic.

You can also create affiliate or partnership program with other brands.

Like Domino’s pizza have partnership with the beverage brand Coca-cola.

Travel industry has partnership with hotels, and airlines.

So in ed-tech domain, you can make partnership with schools, colleges, career coaches/counselor/consultant.