Turn a New Leaf in Educational Technology With Marketo

“Ed-Tech is the next Fintech” – David Bainbridge

Educational technology (Ed-Tech) delivers interactive course content to today’s e-powered students across devices anytime and anywhere with the ease of a few clicks.

The global Ed-Tech market share is expected to grow to $40.9 billion by 2022. It’s gaining popularity because they have made learning fun and interactive. Ed-Tech has huge potential to transform curriculum and revolutionize traditional teaching.

But even the Ed-Tech marketers face challenges similar to their peer marketers across industries. Students are their buyers and just like buyers from other industries, they are demanding and expect unique experiences tailored to their needs and interests. Acing all these at once can seem a little daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Wondering how? We’ll tell you.

In this post, we’ll discuss how Ed-Tech companies can create delightful experiences with Marketo.

What are the challenges faced by the Ed-Tech industry?

The Ed-Tech industry gets complex as you’re either selling self-learning solutions to students or support solutions like an attendance system or progress report software to teachers or schools.

Here are a few challenges that Ed-Tech institutions face at every stage of their funnel depending on their service or solution:

• Target – They find it tricky to understand their target audience which makes it difficult to understand the right customer touchpoints.
• Acquisition – As their end-users differ, it gets difficult to balance consistent relevant communication about their solution across channels which leads to incomplete sign-ups or onboarding.
• Engagement – The lack of relevant information about their end-users gets in the way of creating personalized messages leading to low engagement rates.
• Analytics – With no in-depth insights into their overall marketing campaigns, it becomes difficult to understand which campaigns work and which don’t.
• Retention – Without a comprehensive overview, it’s difficult to map the customer journey and communication flow which often leads to an increased churn rate.

How can Marketo help?

There is, however, one solution that resolves all the aforementioned challenges. Enter – Marketo.

Marketo can overcome these challenges and power your marketing team with the right tools to:

• increase engagement
• manage student journey
• build targeted campaigns
• measure ROI in real-time

Here’s what you can do in Marketo to achieve this:

1. Segment: With Marketo, you can segment your database into the key stages to communicate with your buyers more effectively. You can divide your buyers into the following key stages like:

• unknown visitor
• known
• opportunity
• enrolled
• lost
• future prospect

With segmentation, you can create tailored communication and nurture prospects with informative sessions or educational content towards the next stage. For instance, K-12 education solutions often require you to segment your audience geographically.

2. Target with ease: To target better, you can create buyer personas and amplify them with content marketing, referrals, and events. In EdTech, word-of-mouth is very crucial and your aim should be to capitalize on its impact to build authenticity. For instance, you can ask students to share their stories or get testimonials and in return, you may offer them free demos to exclusive services or discounts on courses.

3. Engage across student lifecycles: Student engagement does not stop at enrollment or after the first point of contact, you need to provide continuity in messaging to keep them interested. For instance, if the last communication with a student was about an upcoming counseling webinar, then you should send reminders through Marketo before the webinar goes live and follow-up after the webinar if they missed it or didn’t register for it.

4. Leverage customer retention programs: Automate retention programs in Marketo triggered by incomplete courses/tests or a defined period of inactivity to bring the student back and re-engage them. You could offer discounts on paid tests or introduce value-added services like one-to-one career counseling, test analysis, free test-prep resources, etc.

5. Personalize communication: Marketo allows real-time tracking, records email opens and clicks, page visits, and so much more with advanced solutions like its real-time personalization tool which allows you to engage even anonymous, first-time visitors by identifying their company or online behavior.
– With clear insights into your buyer personas and attributes like buying intent, behavior, and geo-location, you know what your customers want.
– You can create well-defined workflows in Marketo and automate them to ensure you deliver a consistent and relevant experience to your customers across web and mobile devices.

6. Get clearer insight into ROI: To know what’s working and what’s not, you need definitive data and Marketo provides you with it. You get program performance reports in Marketo with which you can track down the opportunities created or lost in a specified time. You get visual representation in some key reports like email insights or social media influence reports that make it easier to drill-down into sights and measure ROI. Multi-touch attribution is another cool feature that gives you a better understanding of the touchpoints that result in lead-to-sale conversion.

Marketo helps Ed-Tech accelerate its pace to revolutionize and ultimately help students to fling their virtual caps in the air!

Wish to amplify your Marketo operations? Talk to us!