Sort the message before you spend the money
You commission a campaign, maybe something on Facebook/Instagram.
The ads look sharp. Your website is well-built. The targeting is precise.
And it doesn’t work 😬
The instinct is to blame the campaign. The ads underperformed! The page needs a rework! The audience data was off!
More often, in our experience, when these campaign misses are put under the microscope at the agency, the campaign was probably fine.
The message it was carrying wasn’t.
Most school suppliers under-invest in the one thing that decides whether their marketing works: the message itself.
You cannot campaign your way out of a positioning problem. In the school sector, most suppliers try.
A campaign is a distribution system for whatever you already have
If the message is broken, spending more on distribution exacerbates the problem.
But this just means more teachers arrive at your site, fail to work out what you do, and leave.
Campaigns often reveal message problems that suppliers didn’t know they had.
What a message problem actually looks like
Poor positioning shows up in specific patterns. Four of them turn up repeatedly in school-sector marketing.
- The site explains who built the product and why they care, but doesn’t explain what it is or who should buy it. Founders are attached to their origin stories. Buyers rarely are.
- Twelve capabilities in a grid, each with an icon. None of them tied to a decision the buyer is actually making. Feature parity is not a proposition.
- The page talks to teachers, SENCOs, Heads and Trust leaders in the same voice, on the same page, in the same paragraph. It ends up connecting with none of them, because none of them recognise themselves in the writing.
- “Empowering learners.” “Transforming outcomes.” “Innovative solutions for modern classrooms.” Language that has been used by every supplier in the sector for the last ten years and belongs to none of them.
Why edtech suppliers keep spending on distribution instead of message
We think there are broadly three practical reasons for this.
Positioning work is a slow process
Campaigns produce visible activity in a week. Positioning produces something usable in a month, sometimes two. In a business that has to show marketing progress to a board, the slow thing tends to lose.
Positioning work is abstract
There is nothing to look at while it happens. No dashboard, no impressions, no click-through rate. Just conversations, drafts, arguments, and eventually a written proposition. It is genuinely harder to justify internally.
Positioning work forces trade-offs
To sound right for one audience, you have to sound less relevant to another. Most companies resist this. The instinct is always to add another audience, another use case, or another feature to the software. This instinct is nearly always wrong.
The result is a marketing budget that goes to the thing that looks like progress, rather than the thing that would make progress possible.
Four questions we ask before writing a line of campaign copy
Sorting the message is not a mystical process. It is a set of questions. Answer them properly and most campaigns will work.
Who is this for, specifically?
“Schools” is not an answer. Which schools? Which role inside them? Which point in their year? A product aimed at a Year 6 lead in the second half of the autumn term is a different position from one aimed at the same person in April, even if the software is identical.
What decision are they making when they meet you?
Almost no buyer arrives on your site trying to learn about your product for the first time. They often arrive comparing several options, thinking about a budget line, or looking for something they can comfortably put in front of their SLT. Marketing that treats every visitor as if they are meeting the category for the first time is missing what most of them are actually doing.
What are they actually worried about?
The published objection (“does it save time?”) is rarely the real one. The real concern is usually about risk, or about being able to explain the purchase later if it gets challenged. Selling to schools is often selling to people who will have to justify the decision to a governor, a Trust board, or a parent. That shapes what your message needs to do.
What would make them choose you over anyone else?
Your feature list will not tell them. What they need is one non-negotiable reason to pick you over the incumbent, over the free option, or over the closest direct competitor. If you cannot answer that in one sentence, no volume of ad copy will do it for you.
The order that marketing works in
Marketing has an order. Position first. Then message. Then channel. Then creative. Then spend.
Most struggling school suppliers are working through that list in reverse. They are refining creative on ads whose message is undefined, running against a proposition they cannot articulate in a single sentence, distributed through channels chosen before anyone asked who the message was for.
Reversing the order is not slower. It is the only sequence that lets the rest of the money do any work.
The current education market has made this harder to ignore. School and Trust leaders are working with tighter budgets, more scrutiny, and less time. The number of suppliers competing for the same schools has not gone down. With the rise of AI Spin-ups, it’s actually gone up (and up!).
What this looks like in practice
You have two options.
- Spend more on marketing until you find a campaign that finally works.
- Or spend less, earlier, on the harder conversation about what you are actually selling and to whom, and then spend the money afterwards.Â
Sort the message.
Then spend the money.
