communications strategy Archives - Bee Digital

Case studies: A great tool in your marketing armoury

Terry Freedman, Guest Author, ICT in Education — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 09:56:21 +0000

It’s all very well writing about the features and benefits of your product, but how do potential buyers know what it would be like to use in practice?

You may argue that you offer users a free trial so what more do they need?

However, depending on your product or service, that may be of limited use to a school.

After all, if the product involves the whole of year 7, implementing the solution and then un-implementing it are both major undertakings.

That is where a case study comes in.

What’s the point of a case study?

The purpose of a case study is, in effect, to say to potential buyers, “Look, this is what our product is like in practice.”

What we should add here is the phrase, “…in a school like yours.” This is what is technically known as “ecological validity”.

If, for example, your case study involves a school with ten pupils per class, then any teacher with thirty pupils per class will deem it irrelevant to their needs.

For this reason, you should really have a range of case studies pertaining to different scenarios, to make it as easy as possible for someone to identify a school that resembles their own.

What kind of case studies are there?

So what kind of case studies might you have? There are several types such as:

Academic
Observed
Interviews
Data

In practice, many case studies will involve elements of all of these but let’s look at them separately.

Academic

If you would like your product to be evaluated in a manner that looks objective and scientific then you could team up with a university or college department and work with them to have your product put through its paces as a research project.

The main advantage of this is that it will be, or at least appear to be, more objective than if you did it all in-house.

Moreover, you should end up with some useful comparisons such as the benefits to a school using your product compared to one not using it, or a before and after comparison.

Observed

This is where someone visits a school or class where your product is being used and takes notes about what they see going on.

For example, are the kids engaged, does the teacher have more information about each pupil at her fingertips, and so on.

Interviews

A more interesting version of the observed case study is one in which parents, teachers and, of course, pupils are interviewed to find out what they like and dislike about the product (that is, how they think it could be improved).

You won’t want to include the dislikes in the published case study but the information would no doubt prove useful for discussing improvements.

Data

This type of case study involves analysing data and would not necessarily involve setting foot in the school.

The idea is to see how your product affected key performance indicators.

For example, has punctuality improved since the product was put in place? Has absenteeism declined?

Clearly, all or most of these elements could be included in any case study, so it’s really a question of emphasis, and time.

Should case studies be a stand-alone documents or part of a larger whole?

Stand-alone case studies are very useful from the point of view that they could all be available on your website.

Potential buyers should be able to find one that sounds relevant to their needs, such as “Inner City comprehensive, 1500 on roll, 29% FSM etc”.

Alternatively, you might include short case studies, or vignettes, as part of a longer document such as a product brochure or white paper.

This is the sort of thing the Department for Education does.

For example, in a document about assessment, there will be “box-outs” or special pages with text like “Fred Bloggs Academy decided to introduce coloured badges in Year7…”.

The main advantages of this approach are that your product will be placed in a wider context, with several case studies highlighting different aspects of the product and how it is being used.

The disadvantage, of course, is that each case study will have to be quite short, and little more than a snapshot if the document is not to take on War and Peace proportions.

If you feel inclined to develop some case studies, be sure to read these essential tips on how to create case studies to fatten your pipeline.

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What are good communications (and what should your strategy include)?

Terry Freedman, Guest Author, ICT in Education — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 10:02:02 +0000

When I took up a senior management position in a local authority, an irate headteacher phoned me on my second day.

She had had her laptop taken away for repairs two weeks ago, and had heard nothing since.

I told her I’d look into it and had the following conversation with the tech support team:

Me: “Why hasn’t anyone been in touch with X to say what’s happening with her laptop.”

Tech support: “We had to send it away. Now we’re waiting for it to be returned.”

Me: “Have you told her that?”

Tech support: “But the laptop hasn’t been returned yet, so there’s nothing to tell!”

Me: “The fact that nothing appears to have changed is an event in itself. You need to chase up the repair company, and then tell X what you’ve found out and that you’ll call her again tomorrow.”

News travels fast.

The following day I was bombarded with phone calls from headteachers asking me to follow up on things that, from their point of view, had been put on the furthest away back burner in existence.

What was missing, at least in that particular section, was a customer service mentality, and a lack of attention to the importance of keeping people informed.

No reasonable person could get annoyed about waiting a couple of weeks for a repair, especially if parts had be ordered in specially.

What they would find frustrating is not knowing whether their laptop really was being repaired, or whether it was still an item on somebody’s to-do list.

So what are good communications?

I think an organisation’s communications strategy should comprise at least the following:

An easy way of finding contact details

There are some companies that seem to go out of their way to make that impossible.

You can usually find out how to speak to someone by conducting a search in Google, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence: my inner voice always says “Why are trying to hide this information?”

A response within a short period of time

For example, the phone should be answered within, say, five rings; an email should be answered within one working day.

Now, it’s easy to cheat in these respects, by using an automated answering machine and an email autoresponder respectively.

Therefore, the word “answer” should be interpreted as a proper answer – unless, of course, your automated systems can answer most issues themselves.

A respect for people’s time

Especially teachers, who usually don’t have hours to spend battling through long telephone menu systems or listening to music or, even worse, dozens of advertisements while being held in a queue.

Clear, jargon-free, emails and letters

There’s no reason to over complicate things. Speak plainly, and edit with a knife.

Once the appropriate response times have been decided, they should be incorporated into the staff handbook, staff induction pack, or whatever similar documents are used in your organisation.

They need to be honoured and become part of the organisation’s DNA.

Good communications are marketing too

Think about it: if a company is rubbish at responding to people before they’ve bought anything, what will they be like afterwards?

And if existing customers are treated shoddily, will they be likely to recommend your company to others, or to renew their contract or service plan if they can find a more communicative rival?

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