The Teich Group, Inc.

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A Practitioner’s Reflections on Education Marketing

Creating Unique K–12 Buyer Personas that Produce Results

Creating customer personas that are linked to the stages of the K–12 product purchasing cycle can be useful in helping to shape marketing, product development, and sales strategies for education companies.
 
What makes some personas “sticky,” meaning that your teams use them as regularly as their favorite coffee mugs?
 
A relationship with your personas is complicated. Understanding buyers is critical, but companies often settle for an incomplete picture based on easily accessible information, such as feedback from the sales team and customer service. There is a lot to learn from analyzing this historical data, but it doesn’t reveal how buyers choose your product or why they purchase at a particular time.
 
So, how do we deepen our understanding of buyers during changing markets?
 
Districts are not all created equal. Size, location, infrastructure, district organization, governance, and available funding all play a role in how districts choose and purchase products. In addition to gathering these data, the best way to construct meaningful K–12 buyer personas is to interview customers one-on-one.
 
It is only in deep conversation with a skilled interviewer that buyers and influencers reveal the goals, challenges, and process of their purchasing journey. Once you really understand who they are as people, you can develop well-rounded personas with insights into their motivations, goals, challenges, and decision criteria. You’ll determine:
 
WHO you need to persuade at the district and school level.
WHAT information they need to make their purchasing decision.
WHEN buyers are most likely to be ready to listen to your message.
WHERE to reach buyers with your marketing content.
HOW to create a persuasive argument for purchasing your solution.
WHY your marketing and sales plan is the best course of action.

Including the Essentials in K–12 Buyer Personas
 Our buyers are real people. The more our teams reach to the personas and can feel the urgency created by lack of time in their day, the joy that motivates them when students grasp science concepts, and the responsibility leaders feel when we provide value in products and services, the more our teams will use personas to enrich their work.
 

Start with the basics below and build out from there:

  • Name, title, and teaching position

  • Educational background

  • Job responsibilities

  • Motivation

  • Priorities/goals

  • Needs/challenges/pain points

  • Level of technology comfort and practice

  • Education journals read

  • Social media usage

  • Decision making authority

 Adding the insights of the in-depth interview to the facts you’ve found gives breath and heart to the persona on the page.

Building Out the Picture with Quantitative Data
This one is for the data geeks. Yes, some of us go all aflutter when we see all those rows of beautiful data.

 The STEM Pulse crew—Catapult X, The Teich Group, and MCH Strategic Data—has worked with dozens of science and STEM companies. What we know for certain is that these teams like hard data rather than fluffy, fairy tale personas. We always recommend using quantitative data as a part of persona development.

Here are four ways to add quantitative data to give your persona some brains.

Add relevant data from your CRM. They key is to not get too detailed and to keep your audience in mind. Use enough data that your team better understands the target customer.

  • Append data to your customer list from MCH Strategic Data to determine which size districts represent your best customer base. Other fields such as state, Title 1 eligibility, urban vs. rural, etc. can be appended to better understand your target personas.

  • Conduct a survey of personas to quantify data from interviews.Personas based on interviews are n=1, and If your product development team or marketeers are comprised of scientists, they will not hesitate to point this out to invalidate the persona. Quantify the data that matters.

  • Use Google Analytics and other programs such as SEOmoz and Spyfuto add data such as competitive products your persona uses. Data from Google Analytics can help quantify prospect personas when paired with email outreach.

Using Empathy Maps to Uncover Customer Needs

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse.’”
 

The challenge of innovation is developing a deep enough understanding of customers to reveal their hopes and dreams. Empathy Maps, developed by visual thinking company XPLANE, help teams understand customer needs at an aspirational level instead of surface level. This deeper level is where companies connect with their customers and build relationships and trust.
 
There are four quadrants to an Empathy Map: how the customer thinks and feels; what they hear; what they see; and what they do. When product developers and marketers understand what drives customers, what keeps them up at night, and what their biggest pain points are, the Empathy Map serves as a critical tool for measuring how significant new products and features will be to customers.
 
We have developed an Empathy Map Template that we use in our persona development. You are welcome to use it under our creative commons license.

This article was first published in the StEM Pulse Newsletter, a collaborative project of The Teich Group and Catapult X. You can sign up to receive the monthly newsletter below.

 STEM Pulse Newsletter SignUp  https://mailchi.mp/stempulse/stem-pulse-newsletter-signup

Annie Teich