5 Critical Marketing Mistakes that you are guilty of

1. You don’t know about your audience

Before starting any kind of communication, you ask questions to understand the background of the person talking with you. Like a doctor, treating a patient, asks questions about medical history. Like a teacher, teaching a class of students, asks introduction and background of each student. Like a project manager, managing a team, asks questions about background and qualifications of each employee to effectively manage their strengths, limitations and project deadlines and commitments. Similarly, to promote your institute or particular course, you need first to know about your audience. For that,

•  Conduct a set of surveys,
•  Ask and study what competitors are doing or
•  Ask from different people whose kids are school/college going about:
  1. What they would prefer in an academy,
  2. How their teacher should teach,
  3. What are their, as parents, aspirations and aims for their kids and family,
  4. If they have special requirement that they need institutes to better and with great care take care of.
  5. Or if one of their kids have lagged behind who needs to be catch up with rest of the his/her peers

The information about your potential clients or audience is called as Customer Persona. Customer Persona comprise of many elements that are crucial for a marketing campaign to successfully generate qualified leads thus clients. Several of these elements are as follows:

Location, Distance, Demographics, Social Media Platform Limitations, Decision Power, Interests, Behaviors, Pain Points, Income, Age, Fears and Frustrations, Goals, Values, Psychographics, etc. Knowing about customer persona establishes the relevancy and potential the people.

Or if you have a financial budget but not enough time and energy to effectively promote your institute and bring you sales then you can hire a marketing agency just for educational institutes or marketing agency who have been doing educational marketing for at least 5 clients for 1-3 years.

2. Your Marketing Content is too Salesy and Selfish

There are numerous researches that indicates:

• People do not buy drill machines, they just want to make 1 – 3 inch holes.
• People do not buy washing powder, they just want to clean their clothes.
• They do not buy mattresses, they just want comfortable sleep.
• They do not hire tutors or academies, they just want their kids to acquire grades honestly.
• They do not want universities, they just want their kids to survive progressively in the world.

So, telling them about who you are, what you do and what kind of academy you are running is just a waste of their time and attention. This comes across that your institute is self-centered and just quickly wants to get money out of them.

Rather, if guaranteeing them that your expertise can make their kids educated, ace exams and acquire excellent grade then they will give you attention but just attention.

But to acquire their decision in your favor and their money then you need to give more than just guarantees. You need to tell them EXACTLY how you can help them in their aspirations and goals regarding their kids’ future.

For starters, you need to know about child psychology and how are kids growing up these days and you need to tell the parents how exactly your expertise align with their children’s psychology and academics requirements.

3. You’re Expecting Quick Results

It has been observed that a relevant person takes 4 to 8 weeks and takes 6 to 12 touch points before becoming a potential lead. Touch point is the interaction of the relevant person with your marketing effort. So, it takes 6 to 12 interactions before a person becomes a potential lead.

Moreover, it has been noted that a relevant person takes 2 to 3 months generally to make a decision about changing tuition academy for his kids. Above information and stats can be utilized by considering the marketing funnel.

Marketing funnel is same as sales funnel. Marketing funnel describes and explains a customer’s journey from not knowing you to becoming your customer/client. Generally, a marketing funnel constitutes following stages:

A. Awareness Stage: This is the stage where relevant people get to know about your company. This stage generally takes 4 to 8 weeks before they start considering your offer. This is true considering that the parents have not decided or considered any other academy. It is generally a common practice of expert marketers to give this stage at least 6 to 8 weeks before promoting their offers.

B. Consideration Stage: In this stage, relevant people consider different product/services and also different institutes. This stage generally takes 6 to 8 weeks before they take a decision of sending their kids to your institute.

This is also that stage where they will talk to you about the problems or challenges they are facing. It will be beneficial for the parents and for the institute (explained in next stage) if they will be very gentle in listening to the challenges they are facing and take ample time to thoroughly understand their needs.

Most importantly, let the parents know that you care by thoroughly understanding their needs and challenges by giving them ample time to explain and asking them different questions to better understand them from different angles.

C. Conversions/Sales Stage: In this stage, people choose which institute they will send their kids to. This stage is also very important since they make expectations that we think that we know but in reality we know only some of those expectations. It might seem wrong that they have made expectations outside of our commitments.

When that arises, it is very crucial to understand that everyone is human and they sometimes make mistakes or expectations that they themselves are not aware of. People expect experts to walk through walls or in our case, people expect that their children will suddenly ace academic exams and life exams with flying colors.

Most of these moments can be avoided by thorough communication during consideration stage which also has been discussed above how we can have thorough communication. While, some of these moments can be avoided by asking weekly or bi-weekly feedbacks so to become aware of any expectations mismatch before they decide not to send their kids to your institute.

4. Khhichhri (کھچڑی) Marketing, Designs, Messages, campaigns thus Institute

It is important to note that people can take limited amount of information presented in easy-to-understand format and pleasing visuals with stage-by-stage conversation. For example, teaching 1st year chemistry to a 9th class student would be a terrible mistake since the mind of a 9th class student is not capable enough yet to grasp the information from 1st year chemistry.

Similarly, consider yourself sitting in a branded cafe all the waiters are wearing very dirty and very ripped clothes and their hands are also seem brown and dark with the dirt while their hair are all messed up. They serve you the complementary free tea which looks and smells good and okay. I am guessing 90 out of 100 people, would not drink that complementary free tea and they will also leave the cafe at once.

Consider another example for our case, people use Facebook and Instagram to entertain themselves. They are looking for light, out of the box, relaxed entertainment that keep giving them moments of happiness, fun and pleasures. That is also why short videos or clips, single poetry verse, single image memes go viral. So, showing them long paragraphs of marketing messages in ads give people a feeling of textbooks which repels them like a mosquito-repellant. Why? Because, the least-read books are the textbooks that mostly people read just before exams and once in their academics years unless of course they are teachers, professors and researchers. This way of presenting limited information is called Heuristics.

Heuristics are part of how the human brain evolved and is wired, allowing individuals to quickly reach reasonable conclusions or solutions to complex problems. These solutions may not be optimal ones but are often sufficient given limited time frames and reasoning capacity.

Heuristic is a mental shortcut commonly used to simplify problems and avoid cognitive overload. People employ heuristic naturally due to the evolution of the human brain. The brain can only process so much information at once and therefore must employ various shortcuts or practical rules of thumb. We would not get very far if we had to stop to think about every little detail or collect every piece of available information and integrate it into an analysis.

So, consider marketing heuristics before starting any kind of marketing of your institute.

5. Retarget Marketing

One of the major budget burning mistake businesses do is reaching out to a same lead using money every time. To reach out to a new customer, you need to spend budget. You do not need to spend budget when you need to talk to same lead or customer every single time. You can pick your phone and call him, message him, or email him.

You should devise your marketing campaign in a stage by stage process so that you know where you can ask your customer’s number or email to reach out next time without using budget.