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EdTech Marketing: The Brand Awareness Fallacy

EdTech Marketing: The Brand Awareness Fallacy

The cost of being visible to everyone and relevant to no one - and how Demand Gen comes in to move the pipeline right from the top.

Rod Vronscki | AmplifyED
August 18, 2025

There’s one shift happening in EdTech Marketing: the old way of doing brand awareness doesn’t work anymore.

EdTechs are used to pushing:

Bottom of funnel ads
Educational blog posts
Messages that sound good, but don’t mean much to the audience
Institutional - see how good we are - videos and posts
Uncontextualized benefits
…you see where I’m going with this…

These used to work because:

The industry wasn’t saturated - and the novel tech was enough
Lots of grant opportunities were available
Institutions were underdigitized

These points used to make the decision and adoption easier - but it changed.

Today’s scenario is turning costly with more expensive ad platforms and market saturation - but companies haven’t changed the way they do brand awareness.

The old way ends up costing them:

Wasted Budget

I’ve seen, not once, but twice, companies run $1M per quarter “brand awareness” campaigns in which the main metric was Reach - completely separate from any down-the-funnel metric.

If that’s not wasted budget, I don’t know what that is.

What led them to do such a thing was having Sales and Marketing working apart and not communicating or sharing goals.

It’s not a marketing problem anymore. It’s a culture problem that has to be fixed from the top.

Indifferentiation

Not deeply thinking of your message and value proposition from the point of view of your customers is costly.

Imagine that throughout a 3-month campaign, most people won’t see your ads more than 3 times on Meta or Linkedin.

Your message cannot look, sound, or communicate like everyone else.

Differentiation is also not a top-down value proposition push. Your competitors can easily copy that.

You need to work the differentiation bottom-up: audience to company.

No Leads from Top-of-Funnel

Like the $1M/qtr companies I mentioned above did, Reach cannot be a key metric. You can use it as an indicator, but not your goal.

If you’re working your message the old way, Reach is meaningless.

People are bombarded with ads left and right from you and your competitors - and don’t even realize they’re ignoring ads. It became our nature.

But not giving people what they want to hear will also not generate any leads.

Just because brand awareness is a Top of Funnel step, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t expect leads coming from it.

Think with me: how many times have you read content online that you didn’t even care what website it was on before clicking on it?

Plenty. Why?

Because the message resonated with what you wanted to see.

And if they presented you with a solution, you’d have taken it in a blink.

Pushy Forms

Why would you push people to read about your brand and fill a form?

Would that be a good lead?

Usually, our value proposition doesn’t win people’s hearts.

Value proposition is a “we” message. People don’t care about you.

They care about themselves, their job, and their own interests.

Reading your homepage (or any brand-focused page) and pushing them to fill a form doesn’t work - or will get you tyre-kickers, mostly.

2 to 3-month Campaigns

After doing “more of the same”, your brand awareness campaigns come to an end with nothing much to show:

a lovely big reach
nice imagery
and, maybe, some leads you can attribute to it

I’ve seen it and I’ve measured this type of campaign many times. It’s frustrating, I know.

How to do Brand Awareness differently, then?

REVENUE-ALIGNED, CAMPAIGN-SPECIFIC BLOG POSTS

Brand Awareness needs, now, to go a few steps further. It needs to:

Confirm what people want to hear
Position the company as a helping hand
Reduce friction towards the bottom of the funnel

Follow these steps:

1. Problem-Aware Audience

You need to resonate with people’s biases.

“Safety for Schools” is not a problem or a solution. It’s a service. That doesn’t resonate at all.

Go deep into your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Personas.

Think of their:

Jobs to be done
Problems they face in getting these jobs done
Consequences of not solving the problems
What conceptual solution(s) solve those problems

By doing so, you’re tapping into their confirmation biases: they want to hear different perspectives about that problem they know they have.

2. Position Yourself as a Partner

Have you heard of the Hero’s Journey?

You’re the Guide.

Not only tell them that there’s a solution, but make them understand:

There’s a solution
There are steps to overcome to get to the solution
You’ll be there helping them overcome these steps

What are the real problems they face in getting the job done?

Funding? Guide them to get more
Integration? Tell them you can make it easier
Compliance? Show them how you match what they need

3. Offer Intent-Surfacing Assets

Just because it’s a top-of-funnel campaign, it doesn’t mean that some people are not in Research Mode.

As a matter of fact, lots of them are - and ready to be helped.

But not the way you think.

When in research mode, they need to find solutions to bring to the buying group - and compare the options.

You need to give them Frictionless Digital Assets - not a Demo.

Craft easy-to-understand, easy-to-download PDFs that they can immediately put to use.

Think of:

Your product
Your competitors’
The way your audience buys
How you help them solve the problems

Then offer this PDF in the middle of your new content so the people in research mode can download and use it.

Using this exact framework, I generate up to 19% of the leads from inexpensive blog post ads.