Practical examples of marketing growth in educational institutions

Recently, when I was chatting with a young lady who works in community operations at Byte Education, I heard her complain about how parents in third- and fourth-tier cities don’t understand teachers, how difficult it is to communicate with primary and secondary school students, and how the promotion methods of a certain goose are rogue.

I have deeply realized a fact: although the education market in first-tier cities has been divided up, and even needs to use AI and algorithms to optimize personalized services for students, education in third- and fourth-tier cities and even in rural areas is like another world: pure, but full of the future.

Below, the author will use an activity for increasing students in a small town educational institution that he personally planned as an example to discuss practical growth operation methods for educational institutions in my country’s third- and fourth-tier cities.

1. Market Overview

It is a suburban town in a fourth-tier city in northern Sichuan, with a population of more than 20,000. It has only a township middle school and a small number of private tutoring teachers.

Summer vacation is approaching, and a math teacher (also the founder) of a cram school with whom the author has a good relationship is facing a loss of students (primary and junior high school students) from small towns; the main focus is on urban educational institutions, which are close to competing cram schools; in the past, there were roughly 50 students during the summer vacation, but by the end of June, less than 20 students had clearly expressed their willingness to continue their courses.

2. Competitive Product Analysis

Urban educational institutions: They have a wide audience, rich courses and strong credibility; however, parents are worried about the long distance, the fees are high and they cannot provide more personalized services to their children, resulting in weak user stickiness; and there is a gap in the level of users they target, so the competition is not fierce.

Competitors in the same town: Newly emerged tutoring institutions with good decoration and young teachers; but they do not have deep roots and have little influence in the town; and, there is no us.

3. User Profile

Parents aged 35-55 are busy with work and have no time to take care of their children's education during the summer vacation; but due to following the trend or attaching importance to their children's education, they have a certain demand for summer tutoring, have full decision-making power over their children's education, and have weaker payment ability.

Simple guess:

• Parents are less affected by online promotions and prefer tangible educational materials and results.
• They are hesitant about the high fees charged by urban educational institutions and have a certain degree of trust in local tutoring institutions.
• Compared with special price courses (1 yuan), I prefer discounted courses (70%-90% off).

The general situation is as described above. The author will now elaborate on how to achieve a 300% increase in the number of students in this cram school with a total cost of less than 1,500 yuan in just 8 days (A1-A8 is used instead of a timeline). The following techniques and narrative content are relatively simple, and I hope that readers who have experienced similar life situations can understand and experience them.

IV. Pre-preparation (A0)

Through the author's acquaintances, about 100 questionnaires were distributed during parent-teacher meetings in one class in a junior high school and one in an elementary school. The questions were mainly set to verify whether the user's needs are rigid and whether the above three hypotheses are valid.

After the answers are basically affirmative, we start our actual practice (the questionnaire costs 50 yuan).

V. Image Promotion (A1-A2)

Concept: Local parents value real-life examples around them more than data-based concepts such as admission rates and faculty at prestigious schools. Even the fact that the kid next door is admitted to a 985 university can deeply move them and have the effect of selling anxiety.

Practice: After obtaining the student's consent (a 100 yuan red envelope), a large promotional poster was hung at the tutoring address, reading "Congratulations to the 17th class student xxx and three others for scoring more than 600 points in the college entrance examination and successfully being admitted to a 985 university; xxx and three others were admitted to Mianyang Middle School from this town's middle school, and later achieved excellent results in the college entrance examination and are the pride of this town", with a total cost of 300 yuan.

VI. Advertising (A1-A2)

Concept: There is not much flow of people in the town, but the town roads and the intersections with the city roads have the highest flow of people, so it is better to place advertisements in these places.

Make three banners and hang them at the three intersections with the heaviest traffic.

The slogan was "Don't worry about summer tutoring, xx Education will help you" and a contact number was attached (the total cost of hanging it for 7 days was 300 yuan, with a cost of 90 and an ad space of 210 yuan); a self-used small van + borrowed loudspeaker were used to play the slogan 12 times a day around the town road, and the gas cost for two days was about 100 yuan.

7. Ground promotion (A2-A4)

There is an established custom in the town: every two days there is a market, and people from nearby will come to the vegetable market here in the morning to shop; therefore, in the mornings of A2 and A4, 400 flyers were distributed, mainly with content about discounted classes (20% off), group purchase classes (50% off for three people), and package classes (sign up for a 50-day course and get 5 days free).

The flyer announced that A5 would hold a consultation meeting at the tutoring institution at 10 a.m. on the same day. At that time, students could receive a small learning gift worth 20 yuan with the flyer. There were 50 gifts in total, available on a first-come, first-served basis (handwritten copies, signature pens, postcards from famous schools), and the total cost was about 300 yuan.

8. Telephone consultation/Q&A (A5-A7)

We mainly answer questions and doubts from parents over the phone/WeChat, and further collect parents' needs and pain points; for example: 70% hope that teachers can give them regular feedback on their learning status through WeChat or phone; 65% of parents are too busy to take care of their children at work, and they hope that their children can experience the learning atmosphere in the cram school outside of class time, etc. This leaves first-hand data for later improvements and the introduction of more summer learning methods.

IX. Achievements

As of A8, more than 200 parents have communicated with us via phone or WeChat; we have established three WeChat groups for management and message delivery, and placed promotional copy in the group in the form of a link to encourage parents to spread the word (it is estimated that the number of registered students has reached saturation, so we did not use WeChat group fission marketing to further expand the number of students).

By A9, it was calculated that 179 parents had completed the payment of course fees; the conversion rate from initial communication (phone/WeChat) to completed course purchase was 81%; so far, after 8 days of event planning, ground promotion, and marketing plan formulation, we have increased the number of students from 20 to 179; and the target of the delivery was precise and the effect was good, with a payment conversion rate of 81%, and the total investment was only about 1,250 yuan.

The above is a case study of the growth of students in a small educational institution from project planning to implementation. The following three points can be used as a reference:

1) For parents in third- and fourth-tier cities, the effectiveness of user acquisition through traditional methods such as online promotion and channel advertising is worrying. They are more concerned about actual educational materials and educational outcomes.

2) When contacting these parents, it is best to use local schools or students as image benchmarks to penetrate the user base. In fact, due to the deep barriers to educational information in each region and the large income gap among parent groups, it is also necessary to classify parents and formulate different strategies to reach users at different levels.

3) In such an undeveloped virgin land of education, we should not blindly copy the successful experiences of other places. Sometimes we should change the operation strategy according to the time and place, or even do the marketing in person and have detailed face-to-face conversations with parents offline, which can increase our understanding of this business. Our core goal is to conquer this market with practical actions.

I hope that every practitioner in the education industry can gain something in this field.

Author: Protium, Deuterium, Tritium

Source: Protium, Deuterium and Tritium