2025 EdTech Marketing Shifts: The New DOs & DON’Ts

𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗙𝗧 1️⃣: Positioned Awareness in Target Accounts

The reality is that key target accounts live in a 🟥 red sea.

Your competitors are also onto them.

This creates:

❌ Indifferentiation of message

❌ Commoditization

❌ Campaigns become dull and ineffective

Instead of demand gen for the sole sake of awareness, the shift is in:

✅ Product messaging as a differentiator

✅ Brand messaging as a strategic partner

✅ ABM and/or narrow campaign targeting w/ specific messaging

𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗙𝗧 2️⃣: Influencing Complex/Long/Multi Buyer Journeys

Because key accounts live in a red sea, buyer stakeholders become skeptical and conservative.

Shift from

❌ One-off / Transactional campaigns

To

✅ Connected, Multi-step, Multi-persona influence campaigns

✅ Long-term campaigns addressing the long sales cycles

𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗙𝗧 3️⃣: Joint Sales & Marketing Objectives

This is not just a shift, it’s a step for further action.

✅ Know & Own your numbers

From demand-gen to close won, numbers have to be black and white

✅ Start with the end in mind and trace backward

Define benchmark conversion and attribution numbers for each step in the funnel and handover

✅ Run strategies together

Sharing an objective creates partnership and accountability between teams

𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗙𝗧 4️⃣: Early SDR Action w/ Improved Contextualization

2024 saw a rebirth of identification and enrichment technology feeding sales action.

The shift is in:

✅ Identifying (website) visiting accounts, people, and pages

This tells you how warm an account is and, if used with problem-solution content, tells you their problematic areas for your solution can solve

✅ Feeding contextualization into the CRM

All this new information is automated and fed into CRM & nurturing systems

✅ Proactive SDR action based on the contextualization of accounts

“Form submits” is now known as “waiting too long”. Your competitors are waiting for them too.

SDRs can start an early trust relationship with buyers using this new context.

🎟️ 𝗕𝗢𝗡𝗨𝗦: Marketing As Revenue Generator

Putting together shifts #2, #3, and #4, marketing will have contribution and attribution in the pipeline and revenue generated.

It’ll help create cross-team trust, collaboration, and accountability.

Hi, I'm Rod👋

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