Large or small, there will come a point in most education and edtech companies’ journeys when they will ask themselves a question: what’s the best way for us to reach more teachers?
But reaching more teachers is just the destination. A destination that’s determined by a need you’ve identified.
Typically, you have a challenge that needs to be solved (such as wanting higher quality leads), or work that needs to be amplified (such as launching a new product to market).
Whatever it is, it’s an itch you can no longer ignore, because ultimately you want to grow.
You want to grow by selling more product – and you know you have a good product.
So that’s not the problem.
The problem is you need to persuade more teachers to trust you and buy from you.
A perfectly reasonable ambition. It almost sounds easy, eh?
You just need to get better at marketing and selling to schools.
The next logical step is figuring out how on earth to do that.
We have a saying at Bee Digital: “It can’t (or won’t) be done without us”.
Let’s break that down 👇
1) The marketing WON’T be done without an agency’s help AKA “If you could do it then you would do it”.
This is often the case with more established brands.
There’s an internal push to be better at marketing your product to teachers but there’s always a million excuses reasons why that isn’t happening as fast or efficiently as you’d like.
- Growth may be stagnant but you’re too close to the product to come up with fresh thinking and ideas
- You’ve got too much else going on to even think about getting sign off on hiring new staff
- Your team’s attention is focused on day-to-day marketing tactics and the thought of creating and publishing national marketing campaigns or re-building the website gives you the shivers
But often the problem boils down to this: you always find yourself chasing, rather than leading, a marketing strategy.
And it’s super unsatisfying.
The truth is you need to pass the problem on to someone else or it won’t ever happen.
A partner who knows what they’re doing, has proven form, and can execute.
That’s the moment you realise it WON’T happen without an agency.
“It is more cost-effective (to hire an agency) than hiring an employee (benefits, vacation, sick days, etc). Basically, you are hiring a pro at a lower rate than hiring an entry-level person.”
2) The thing CAN’T be done without an agency’s help AKA “You’d love to do the marketing but everything’s against you”
This often effects start up and scale up companies.
Younger companies often lack in-house expertise, capacity, experience, and skills to deliver a cost effective growth marketing strategy.
It’s also common to have little or no access to the right marketing stack.
And, ultimately, that ol’ bug bear: no time.
Maybe you have a great product, which is selling pretty well. Possibly you have budget set aside for spending on advertising. Perhaps you have built up a passionate community on social media.
So far so good. But who’s going to manage growing all that? Stitching it all together under a proper marketing strategy?
The obvious answer is to hire a Marketing Manager, right?
But you might wait months to find the right candidate.
And then you’ll be asking them to do creative, build adverts, post to social media, write copy, manage a budget, organise a strategy, track data, support GDPR, and so on. Waaay more than one person can effectively do.
So now you have to hire 2-3 people. And now your budget has to cover 3 salaries + costs. Every month. Even if they don’t perform.
So you delay the hiring decision. You double down on more product features. You punt out more blogs, a post or two on Linkedin, some amusing team photos to your Instagram.
Maybe you look at recruiting a sales person.
And marketing kind of…dribbles along.
You’re at an inflection point, where you can’t justify lots of new marketing hires, but you don’t want to lose momentum.
That’s the moment you realise it CAN’T happen without an agency.
“Hiring an inbound marketing specialist, a content producer, editor, social media manager, PPC specialist, and graphic designer gets expensive fast. Even if that is out of reach for your smaller business, when you hire a marketing agency, you can still get the benefits of all that experience and all those skills - for about the cost of one employee.”
Is it time to hire an agency?
Hiring an agency is rarely about handing over control. It is about admitting reality.
At some stage, growth demands more than good intentions and half-finished plans.
It needs clear thinking, consistent execution, and people who wake up every day focused on marketing rather than squeezing it in between everything else.
For some organisations, marketing will not happen because they are too close to the product, too stretched, or too cautious to move first.
For others, it simply cannot happen because the skills, time, and structure are not there yet.
Both roads lead to the same place. Inertia and frustration.
An agency does not magically fix everything (we’re only human!). But it removes friction. It brings momentum. It turns ambition into something that actually ships.
And for many education businesses, that is the difference between drifting and growing.
