The fall and winter months are the perfect time to reach, engage, and provide value to your audience. It’s well known in EdTech marketing that the back-to-school season is one of the most competitive times to gain the attention of educators and students. During this time, companies frantically offer discounts, giveaways, and conduct creative and fun campaigns. Even if you do actually end up reaching your audience during this time, it’s usually in a limited capacity. Everyone is just trying to do everything they can to get used to the new school year and they don’t have a ton of time to look at marketing messages. To top this all off, schools around the nation all start their school year at different times and generally with no rhyme or reason to their start dates.
For all of these reasons, I don’t tend to focus on back-to-school. Instead, I love planning a more robust marketing campaign for the following fall and winter months. Most EdTech companies see a big uptick in activity during this time. It’s a time where everyone can collectively sigh and take a moment to find ways to improve their teaching, leading, and/or learning.
In addition, there’s a ton of funding still available during these months. Although the traditional K-12 purchasing cycle typically ends in July, an unprecedented amount of funding for education is currently up for grabs. The house recently approved a budget resolution of $3.5 trillion in spending for education (yes...I said trillion). There is also a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure package up for a House vote in late September. In addition to all of this funding, nearly $200 billion in COVID relief has already been approved for public schools (access each state’s approved spending plan).
To gain the attention of your audience during the fall and winter months of October, November, and December, you’ll need to ensure that whatever you provide is as timely and valuable as possible to your audience. Our free EdTech Marketer’s Planner provides many relevant birthdays, events, conferences, and content ideas in education that you can use as a starting point. To make things easier, we highlighted some of the most popular birthdays and events in education below. Note: Just because these may be the most popular, it does not necessarily mean that these are the things your brand should focus on. Make sure you always focus on what your audience and brand care about most.
Upcoming Birthdays
Celebrating relevant birthdays can be a fun way to gain your audience's attention and provide value. If you’re unsure on how exactly to do this, we wrote about three ways you can create content inspired by birthdays.
I hope this list helps you plan relevant and valuable content for your audience. Don’t forget to download our free EdTech Marketer’s Planner for a more comprehensive list of education events, birthdays, conferences, and even content ideas. Also, once you’ve decided on the events you’d like to focus on, make sure you have a campaign-planning process in place. This four-step campaign-planning process can get you started.
This post was written in collaboration with our Summer Content Marketing Intern, Jordan Moldenhauer.
