Marketing to Educators? You Need a Teacher to Write for You

Whether you’re an EdTech company with a revolutionary new product or a consultant with a great idea to help teachers improve their practice, it’s harder than you think to reach an audience of educators with content. Teachers have seen loads fads come and go, and they’re highly skeptical of innovations that promise the world. You would be skeptical, too, if you had to upend your working practices every two years to start an initiative that you knew would be replaced before you got your next raise.

The best way to break through teachers’ natural resistance to taking on yet another new “best practice” is to hire a teacher to write for you. Here’s why.

You Need to Get the Voice Right

If you work in EdTech, the emphasis is almost certainly on the tech in your daily experience of your job. For example, you probably work with software engineers or have meeting with sales and marketing pros to fine-tune your product. You have a language all your own, and it’s likely filled with phrases like “ROI” and “churn” and “disruption”.

These are not phrases that resonate with classroom teachers. After all, “disruption” in their world is a negative, not a positive! Teachers also tend to be fiercely protective of individuality — both their own and their students’ — so impersonal language that talks about a school like a business is a big turn-off.

Teachers are often marketed to by brands using a business/startup/entrepreneur voice, but you’ll be more likely to connect — and impress — by hiring a writer with classroom expertise. A teacher-writer will be able to do the following:

• Provide true-to-life anecdotes: Nothing captures a teacher’s attention like a story of classroom success — or an embarrassing failure. Stories from the trenches are an instant rapport-builder, but they can’t be faked. Teachers are used to sniffing out falsehoods from kids, so they can detect inauthenticity a mile away.
• Put data into human terms: Evidence of your product or service’s effectiveness is a crucial selling point for administrator and school boards, but teachers are likely to think of things in terms of their students’ wellbeing. A teacher-writer will help you zero in on how to make kids’ lives and learning better, not just on test scores.
• Focus on the teacher, not the tech: It’s easy to sell EdTech as a panacea, but be careful not to suggest that your product can replace a human educator. Teachers are, not surprisingly, irritated by the idea that their practice could be reduced to a piece of code. Position yourself as a help to teachers, and focus on how to ease the burden of the things they dislike about their job instead of swooping in to make major changes.
• Solicit more honest feedback: When it’s time to hear from your clients, you’ll need to ask the right questions. Teachers are more likely to open up to someone they know has been at the front of a classroom before, and you’ll get more comments and engagement when they trust your writer.

When you need help translating your marketing lingo into a message that really speaks to teachers, hire a writer with real teaching experience. nDash will help you connect to a writer with the expertise you need to reach your audience — and get you that gold star.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Elizabeth Trach, a freelance writer with over 20 years of experience. To learn more about Elizabeth — or to have her to write for your brand — check out her nDash profile page.