Getting the Attention of Educators through Marketing

“You can send a sales rep, but the teacher is in the classroom all day,” says Kathleen Brantley, leader, channel management for MDR, the educa­tion division of database company D&B. “If you want to talk to him or her, you need to wait until their break.”

That’s why direct mail has traditionally been the most effective channel for education marketing. It allows busy educators to learn about a product or service on their own time, and then contact the selling company for more information.

Proper targeting is essential, however, especially for marketers such as Scholastic, which offers a wide variety of products for many teaching subjects and grade levels.

“We have monthly catalogs that are all really created by talking to teachers,” says Judy Newman, president of Scholastic Book Clubs. “We target catalogs by grade level, ethnicity and subject mat­ter, listening to what teachers need and creating the catalog based on that.”

Teachers appreciate the channel as well. Direct mail ranked highest in teacher preference when educators were asked which marketing channels they use in MDR surveys in 2002 and 2007. How­ever, between those two surveys, another channel gained significant popularity: the Internet.

“That wasn’t even on the list five years ago,” Brantley notes. “But teachers are very used to technology in the school environment, especially compared to some other professions. Many of them have grown up with it at this point.”

The Web’s ability to keep consumers and com­panies up to date with the latest developments is key to its popularity. When the American Recov­ery and Reinvestment Act — commonly known as the economic stimulus plan — was enacted earlier this year, Scholastic immediately introduced a microsite that explained which of its products were covered by the about $90 billion made available for education in the bill.

“We know that our customers need programs aligned to the different types of funding, so we have to make sure all our promotional info is clear as to what this product lines up to,” says Allison Feld­man, VP of marketing for Scholastic’s classroom and library group. “We do a lot of face-to-face events, and we found [that teachers] are having as much trouble as we have sifting through all that information. The Web lets us reach so many teachers, pushing out changing information.”

Scholastic’s heavily integrated approach to Internet marketing leverages its robust catalog initiatives, making sure its print materials contain drivers to the Web. It also sends e-mails that click through to its network of sites. Brantley says that e-mail is growing more popular among many edu­cational marketers due to its ease of targeting.