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Hey, Marketing Pals!
Our bi-annual Trending Topics in K-12 report just released, and it’s packed with the data you need to do your job better—because guessing what keeps K-12 leaders up at night is not a marketing strategy.
Reply to this email and I’ll send you a copy, lickety-split. It’s a win-win: your engagement helps my email domain reputation (email deliverability is a mysterious beast), and you get a meaty deck full of insights.
Inside Trending Topics, you’ll find what K-12 leaders are:
- Reading: the explainers and special reports guiding their decisions
- Watching: the most-watched videos and best-attended webinars
- Researching: the terms they’re actually searching on edweek.org
Just hit reply, and it’s yours.
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Your WirED Marketer,
—Melissa, Senior Director, Marketing at Education Week
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✨ In this edition you’ll find:
- A hack for analyzing sales reps’ meeting notes
- Quiz yourself: How well do you speak K-12?
- Why “move fast and break things” doesn’t work in K-12 product launches
✨ What’s Trending: ✨
Screen Time Legislation. That’s what.
These 6 states have approved screen-time related legislation this year:
- Alabama
- Iowa
- Maine
- Tennessee
- Utah
- Virginia
If you sell into these states, make sure to brush up on this legislation. Get more details here: The Next Challenge for K-12 Ed-Tech: Proving Classroom Screen Time Is Worth It
DO THIS 👇
If you’re in field marketing, growth marketing, or any role that works closely with sales, you’re going to want in on this hack.
- Step 1: Set up a trip report in Salesforce (or your equivalent CRM) and schedule it to hit your inbox every Monday AM. For the newbies, a trip report is basically the notes a sales rep takes during and after a meeting with a prospect.
- Step 2: Create a project in your enterprise LLM (Team Claude, over here). Friendly reminder: never put private data into a non-enterprise account. Load it up with info on your product offerings (I uploaded our media kit) and your ICP. Then tell the LLM to review the trip reports and identify trends, risks, objections, customer pain points, and opportunities.
Use enough data to actually pull statistically significant trends. Don’t feed it 6 measly trip reports and expect big takeaways. I typically go with a full quarter (3 months).
Voilà. Take those learnings into your next meeting with your sales peers and you’ll look like the smartest person in the room. I’ve found the pain points validating and campaign-worthy, and the opportunities genuinely strategic.
(Weird) Quick Poll 📊
Let’s take a break from KPIs for a second, shall we?
Would you rather:
Every email you send must end with “Sent from my iPhone” (even from your laptop) forever and always
or
Every Zoom background you use is a scene from Little House on the Prairie, in perpetuity
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| SENT FROM MY iPHONE |
| WEIRD ZOOM BACKGROUND |
Pop Quiz ⚡
Quiz Yourself: How Well Do You Speak K-12?
When a district refers to “A-ROI” (Academic ROI) in procurement discussions, what do they mean?
a. The ratio of academic-program cost to district budget impact
b. Ratio of professional development hours to teacher retention
c. The measurable student outcomes (growth, proficiency) relative to cost
d. A savings formula for district technology refresh cycles
What We’re Reading 📚
[Article] We Walked Through ISTE With a Superintendent. Here’s What Vendors Did Right — And Wrong
Get inside a superintendent’s head—what they are looking for when they’re walking the exhibit hall. Pro Tip: When it comes to your conference strategy, make it less about what you (the marketer or sales rep) want, and more about what the customer is looking for. Not rocket science, but an important reminder. Here’s a snippet from this article: 👇
“To Fleming (the superintendent), a successful conference interaction means walking away being able to say, “I know a guy.” In other words, he likes to have a personal connection with one person who he will stay in touch with long after the exhibit floor closes, and who can potentially help him move the conversation forward back in his district.
“Sometimes you’ll meet people, they’ll just want to scan your badge to be able to send you things,” he said. “Well, sending me things doesn’t help me. I want to know who’s over my territory or who can come visit me.”
Four out of the five booths offered a point of contact for their district at their company.
“I’m very personable,” Fleming said. “I want to get to know an individual, create a relationship with that person, and I hope that’s the same for them, too.”
Read the full article here.
Meet an EdMarketer👋
Tucker Austin is the Senior Director of Product and Content Marketing at SchoolAI, the company’s generative AI platform for lesson planning, student workspaces, and teacher insights.
Tucker shared how he thinks about ROI, market rationalization, and cross-team collaboration with my colleague Scott Elliott in the article titled, How Building the Right Sales and Marketing Feedback Loop Can Boost Product Design.
Here’s a snippet:
We asked Tucker Austin, “Once you’ve got a product you feel great about, how do you approach marketing it to schools and districts and educating the market, especially when your work is in the fast-evolving AI space?”
“There are unique aspects of AI that have rewritten the book on going to market. You mentioned speed. There’s an experimentation piece here that’s accelerated with AI. However, the principles of building good software products are still super applicable.
The idea is that your feedback loops need to be as tight and as small as possible, so you’re not doing the waterfall development where you go in a cave for three months, build this giant feature, and then just drop it. You’re building one little module of the feature [and] you’re getting it in front of your customers that are usually trusted. It’s okay to make a mistake in front of these customers and get their feedback.
Then you go build the second module and come get more feedback. There’s just this feedback loop that continuously goes around and around. That’s been pretty popular since SaaS software really took the scene.
With AI, we’ve been able to do it faster. You’re seeing in other industries companies that are just shipping experimental features constantly, and they do A/B tests or A/B/C tests. I don’t think education is the right market for that. We can’t move fast and break things in education. Our top most priority should be student safety, protection, and ensuring that those experiences are well spent with us. We’re trying to keep feedback loops tight … but we are moving those feedback loops faster.”
Read the full article here.
Say What?! 🦜
What we’ve heard at the watercooler, on social, out and about…
“They want guardrails, not handcuffs. This is technology that kids will need to be prepared for the economy and the jobs of the future.”
Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said this when talking about screen time backlash in classrooms. Read the full article here.
That’s all folks. Thanks for reading.
Your WirED Marketer,
Melissa AND team, because every marketer knows, it takes a village.
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We can help you develop a successful campaign tailored to your unique marketing goals. To learn more, contact Advertising & Marketing Solutions Director Mike Bell at mbell@educationweek.org.