How You Can Cost-Effectively Reach, Educate, and Sell More

From the Business Marketing Advice Mailbag:

Hi Issamar,

We’re a small start-up. We’ve created an award-winning new hands-on educational product for the K-12 science classroom. The (product) is highly effective and very well received by students, teachers, and parents. We’ve been blessed with a lot of raving fans!

But most school systems are in a financial shambles right now. So, we have developed some successful partnerships with local companies/organizations/utilities that buy the (product) (off-the-shelf and custom versions) and donate them to their “partner” schools. They’ve seen great results. This not only lets them wear the good corporate citizen halo by providing the school with much needed materials, but also benefits the company by improving the skills/knowledge of their future workforce.

It’s an exciting win-win but it’s not the sort of thing that is top of mind for most companies yet. Any suggestions on how we can cost-effectively reach, educate, and sell to more of these targets?

My Response:

Let’s try to analyze the information that I have gotten from you in your email.

1) You have a product that is a perfect fit for schools, and that has people excited about it.

2) The entity that you consider your ideal client is schools.

3) Since schools have, as of yet, not ponied up the cash to buy them, you have created an alternate way for schools to get it by partnering up with corporations to pay for the products that are then donated to schools.

First of All… Kudos on that approach!

By doing so, you have found alternate ways into your target market and are still getting paid to deliver the product.

Here are some of my thoughts and ideas you can work with:

• Once you are in a school, get good testimonials from the principal and school staff. (a good way to get this done properly is to provide them with a custom written testimonial template that they can use as is or modify as they feel comfortable– the more “work” you do for them, the easier time you will have getting the testimonials themselves.)
• Create an “as used in” page with a list of the many schools using the product… the social proof helps. Alot!
• Sending a targeted mailpiece (not email, the kind of mail that a guy in a blue shirt and a can of pepper spray delivers…) to area principals and educators, and then follow up with them.
• Depending on the way the books are used, you may find that you can give out the books to schools for free and only charge upon re-orders… your model seems like one that I could toy with for hours and come up with alternate forms of getting income from that you may not have realized.
• Getting a “Ford” or “Disney” sponsored book published nationwide… could you get 6 companies to pay you a fee to be on the cover of every single book nationwide for the year 2011?
• Consider public libraries, after school tutoring programs, and custom versions (Tutor Time branded version for a tutoring franchise, McDonald’s version for McDonald’s…)

And two more questions for you to ponder:

1) Do you know who your competition is? (There isn’t any is not the right answer, no matter what business you are in.) How are they getting business? What can you do/are you doing better then they are?

2) Who already has your target clients as a buying audience?