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Marketing towards schools - how?

by larsjorgenbr
11 replies
I run a data recovery company, and teachers uses usb memory sticks a lot (about half of my customers are teachers). There are a lot of schools in this country so there's gotta be a lot of potential customers.

I want to market my business towards these schools, but there's a problem - I don't want my envelope or whatever to get lost in the crowd.

I don't wanna waste time and money doing this wrong, i.e. sending them info that ends up in the bin. My mother, sister AND brother-in-law are teachers, and they all say I should send letters to the schools and put my business card or something in the envelope with it; and then have the principal put it up on the corkboard for the teachers to see.

My faith in humanity is pretty low when it comes to having people do stuff for free, like hanging a business card on a corkboard, so I fear that my letter/business card will find their way to the bin anyway, even if I make things as simple as possible for the receiver.

So, my question - do any of you have experience with advertising to schools? What do you do to stand out? I was thinking of calling them first and have them agree to putting up my business card before I send it to them, I figured that might increase the change of them actually putting it up there. Or will they get annoyed with me for calling them while they're busy with work? I mean, I don't want them to hate me, I want to offer them a service; save their day, and make a killing doing it.

Edit: Oh, and I should mention - faxing is no good in this country, unless you feel like paying a $12.000 fine for spamming... But if I call them first and then send a fax, perhaps? What do you think?
#marketing #schools
  • Profile picture of the author dougb
    Why don't you make an appointment with the school board rather than approach each school individually and make a presentation.
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  • Profile picture of the author lotsofsnow
    Data recovery for memory sticks???

    Wow, that sounds interesting. How does that work?
    Why would a teacher be interested in this?

    I can help you come up with how to promote that but I would like to understand
    your product first.
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  • Profile picture of the author aarthielumalai
    A friend of mine owns a software company, and a few years back he wanted to sell custom software solutions to schools (mostly database management solutions).

    His main plan of action was to hire people to call schools up, book appointments, and once they agree to a presentation or a meeting, meet with them at the specified time and discuss their problems with them, after which, he'll either give them a solution straightaway or ask for time to formulate one.

    His company had a high 6 figure turn over then, so he was doing pretty well with his marketing methods.

    You're right about letters going to the bin. You'll need a more personal approach, and since schools don't let anyone who's not a student in (the ones in my country don't) phone call is the next best thing.

    There are other ways too. Why don't you ask your current customers (teachers) to tell about your offer to their colleagues. You could offer them a discount, or maybe a commission even, if they are interested. Referrals work better than direct sales any day.

    You could also have some students talk to their teachers? If they are high school students, they must be mature enough to hold a proper conversation with adults. Again, you could offer them a commission; teenagers are always looking for extra money.

    Can college professors use your offer too? If so, target college students. They have a greater need for money than high schoolers.

    I'm just brain storming here. Anyway, try things out to see what works the best for you.
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    • Profile picture of the author larsjorgenbr
      Originally Posted by dougb View Post

      Why don't you make an appointment with the school board rather than approach each school individually and make a presentation.
      Well, there's not a lot to make a presentation of. "Got a broken usb stick? I'll fix it for ya!". :rolleyes: Besides, the roi would be low since it's not often a memory stick breaks. For every 10 school I'd visit I'd get like 2 customers. It would simply not be worth my time. The number is an educated estimate.

      Originally Posted by hpgoodboy View Post

      Data recovery for memory sticks???

      Wow, that sounds interesting. How does that work?
      Why would a teacher be interested in this?

      I can help you come up with how to promote that but I would like to understand
      your product first.
      Memory sticks fail, break, get errors etc. I work with NAND flash medias, so I'm able to recover data from all chips of that kind, and those I cannot fix myself I send to another company to have them look at it.

      The normal and smart thing to do would be to make backups of everything you ever save on a usb stick, but a lot of people don't. So when it fails, because at one point or another it will, the users are desperate to get their data back - "I have 5 years of work on this stick alone, and I have no backup!" I've had people shout with joy when I called them and said I saved their data.. :rolleyes:

      Not sure what the thing is with teachers - everybody else uses Dropbox etc, but a lot of teachers don't. There are loads of schools in this country, so I figured I'd just as well spend my time marketing towards these directly instead of running random ppc campaigns where people click on the ads and waste my money just because they are curious about what I do..

      Originally Posted by aarthielumalai View Post

      A friend of mine owns a software company, and a few years back he wanted to sell custom software solutions to schools (mostly database management solutions).

      His main plan of action was to hire people to call schools up, book appointments, and once they agree to a presentation or a meeting, meet with them at the specified time and discuss their problems with them, after which, he'll either give them a solution straightaway or ask for time to formulate one.

      His company had a high 6 figure turn over then, so he was doing pretty well with his marketing methods.

      You're right about letters going to the bin. You'll need a more personal approach, and since schools don't let anyone who's not a student in (the ones in my country don't) phone call is the next best thing.

      There are other ways too. Why don't you ask your current customers (teachers) to tell about your offer to their colleagues. You could offer them a discount, or maybe a commission even, if they are interested. Referrals work better than direct sales any day.

      You could also have some students talk to their teachers? If they are high school students, they must be mature enough to hold a proper conversation with adults. Again, you could offer them a commission; teenagers are always looking for extra money.

      Can college professors use your offer too? If so, target college students. They have a greater need for money than high schoolers.

      I'm just brain storming here. Anyway, try things out to see what works the best for you.
      Not sure if presentations are applicable for my kind of service since there's not a lot to tell (as I said earlier in this post). It would simply be too time consuming and expensive and have a low ROI. That's why I need to educate a lot of schools in the simplest and fastest way possible about what I do.

      My mom is a teacher, and she said that no one ever wanna admit that they have lost their usb stick content and is in need of help. They will rather sit down 10 nights in a row to do the work over again than tell anyone about it. Word of mouth among teachers, based on their own first hand experience, is therefor pretty close to non-existing. If it came from the principal, on the other hand...

      I tried taking the comission path for students, but people thought I was a scammer. Affiliate marketing is strange and scary to a lot of people, it seems. Besides, everybody in this country is making loads of money anyway, so unless they work with marketing full time and get the volume to make good money they can't be bothered making money this way. They would rather live off of their parents. It's just sad.
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  • Profile picture of the author travlinguy
    Develop a short (15-20 minute) free presentation on data backup complete with a couple of absolute horror stories of people that lost a bunch of important documents. Then contact the decision maker for a school or even an entire district and pitch the idea.

    You could also target service professionals like real estate agents, insurance offices and other businesses with the same pitch. Maybe you could even give a free hour long class once or twice a month at a local community college or church. There are lots of ways to go about it. Create a short PDF with tips on data backup. Good luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sarevok
    I've worked in IT for years...

    I remember once... There was this data recovery company (big ticket) that wanted to get our attention.

    So they invited us to the Capitol Grille for a free lunch.

    It got our attention (and lots others)...

    The company is doing well...



    Is there a marketing lesson in there somewhere? I'm not sure... I was too busy slamming stiff drinks and eating Porterhouse.
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    • Profile picture of the author lotsofsnow
      Originally Posted by Sarevok View Post

      Is there a marketing lesson in there somewhere? I'm not sure... I was too busy slamming stiff drinks and eating Porterhouse.
      Looks like this is not a smart marketing investment...
      at least not for that data recovery company it seems.
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      • Profile picture of the author myob
        Consider placing ads in teachers' union publications similar to American Federation of Teachers, United Federation of Teachers, and state and district union affiliations. In the US, union membership for teachers is quite high (over 90%) at least in the metro areas, the Northeast, and western regions. For best results, articles syndicated to these publications (for example tips on safeguarding data, how to do regular backups, etc) may bring traffic from desperate prospects who have already failed to take these precautions.
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        • Profile picture of the author larsjorgenbr
          Update - I now have a list of all the schools in the country, every single one of them. Email addresses as well. I've been emailing the people responsible for IT support in a number of schools, but I suspect my email is ending up in the spam folder. I did a test with 10 schools just to see if I'd get a response at all, and I haven't even gotten a "no thank you" email in return. I know the number is way to low to see any real results, but it was a test to see if I get responses at all.

          I'm not putting live links in the emails, but I guess their spam filter is looking at the "best regards, [full name], address, mycompany.com" and thinking it's spam. I really think they would have replied if they had seen and read the email at all, since it's not a mass produced email but rather 'customized' for the receiver.

          What do you think? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Any ideas as to how I can reach them?
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  • Profile picture of the author Daones
    I have dealt alot with schools via email, literally 1000s over the last 2 years... The response rates are quite low less than 10% so I would send out more than 10 emails. Keep in mind depending who you email as well. Principals are usually quite busy and may only check their emails ever so often... I usually email the principal and CC to the secretary and always add a follow up email about a week after that goes out automatically... you will be surprised how many responses i get from the follow up.

    And being that its towards the end of the school year they have tests and schools are quite busy around now, then in the summer you probably wont get any response from emails.
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