You’re probably just winging your EdTech Middle-of-Funnel. Everyone is.

“The wrong is wrong even if everyone does it.”
- Saint Augustine

We, personally, don’t buy from people or companies that haven’t been referred to us - or we even have heard of.

Educational institutions, composed of people, won’t buy too.

Why? Let’s see.

Human beings act, primarily, by emotions. But when stakes start to rise, we add a few other elements to the mix: biases, consequences, and trust.

And Trust is the main driver for any high-stakes decision people make.

Do you see visitors interacting with your website a few times, but not moving toward MQL? Then probably you didn’t build enough trust with them.

Trust, as put by Stephen M. R. Covey in his book (The Speed of Trust - The One Thing that Changes Everything [Amazon us, uk]), has Four Cores:

1. INTENT

Intent is your motives and your plans.

Motives: Are you coming from a place of genuine caring and wanting to help your audience?

Agenda: Is it a win-win relationship you plan to nurture? What can you do before the exchange of money?

Behavior: Do you have your audience's best interest in your heart?

2. INTEGRITY

Integrity encapsulates Congruence: Is there a gap between your intent and your actions?

3. CAPABILITIES

Capabilities can be broken down into:

Talent: What are your unique strengths?

Attitudes: What is your approach towards work/business?

Skills: What are your current skills and what are skills you need to develop?

Knowledge: What knowledge specific to your area and adjacent areas do you have? Do you demonstrate it? What’s still to learn?

Style: How do you approach problems? Is it effective? How to improve?

4. RESULTS

Past / Present / Future: Do you demonstrate results?

Communication: How do you communicate results? Do you show activities or outcomes?

You might spend an immense amount of time and effort creating awareness, but awareness is not enough to remember your brand as a contender. You need to create steps for people to continue interacting with your brand.

To tap into the 4 cores, you need digital assets.

And the main asset that can demonstrate how you help organizations is CASE STUDIES.

Want to see how poor case studies are moving prospects AWAY FROM THE CLOSE?

Most companies will relate to this:

• dreadful inertia to write - or even plan - a case study

• being unsure how to effectively write a case study

• not envisioning a future case study at the moment of close

• not adding exceptions to NDA clauses

• lacking client collaboration to write a case study

Countless times I had sales developers having to offer me a case study during a call because I wasn’t still sure the software would really help me.

I wanted to see if I had peers using their software. And “peers” is a very flexible concept. Region, company size, focus can make a case study completely inadequate for a segment of your audience - even the core industry being the same as in your case study.

Your prospects will likely relate to this:

• case studies are outdated

• case studies are unengaging

• case studies are unrelatable

GTMnow wrote a nice article about causes of pipeline stagnation, especially middle-of-funnel. They say:

GTMnow also mentions “Lack of Experimentation” as a contribution for MoF stagnation, which agrees with the results of a large survey emphasizing what High Revenue Growth leaders do that others don’t. I talked about this survey in my last post.

There’s also a third group that needs to be addressed.

Your team might relate to this:

• unsure when to market case studies

• unsure how to market case studies

Everyone of the 10 bullet points above, if not addressed, will get your prospects away from the close.

But how to address them?

Enters…

The Thought-Leadership Trust Framework

Simple, as a framework, it requires dedication, but is effective in building trust.

If everyone is just winging it with their case studies. Do better. You want your brand to be associated with thoroughness and excellence.

I developed this framework after studying how to gain and regain trust, and comparing to how big players in #EdTech and corporations write their case studies.

Here’s the 10-step framework to earn trust with case studies:

1. Define your ICP and stakeholder personas

2. List past clients matching the ICP profile

3. List their fears, problems, and hopes of outcome

4. What don’t your competitors do well?

5. Create a short questionnaire addressing the stakeholders

6. Create a short questionnaire addressing the business

7. Outline a hero’s journey story

8. Dig down to the real challenges

9. Create an on-brand - BIGGER THAN YOU - professional design

10. Market it via Thought-Leadership campaigns

For clarity, I’ll break it down:

1. Define your ICP and stakeholder personas

If you have clients referring new leads to you, then you probably have reached Product Market Fit.

It’s the PMF clients that you need to use to create the ideal customer profile. Use this guide by GTMnow to understand the customer elements involved.

The ICP is about the educational institution you’re marketing to. However, every organization is made out of people - each with their interests, ambitions, and problems.

Therefore you also need to create a buyer’s persona for each stakeholder involved in the decision process of your solution.

2. List past clients matching the ICP profile

This will give you a pretty clear picture of who you’re talking to and bring the outcome of this case study document back to the real world.

3. List your buying personas’ fears, problems, and hopes of outcome

Trust me. It’s worth the time going through this step. Your document will not only be relatable to the people reading it, but, as you’re going to see on step 10, you will be able to market this document to each of the personas.

4. What don’t your competitors do well?

By understanding what your competitors neglected, you can create future concern in the reader’s mind - if not adopting your solution.

You will apply these concerns in the questionnaires below.

5. Create a short questionnaire addressing the stakeholders

It's the dreaded moment to ask the client to collaborate for the success of the case study.

Take all you’ve learned above and craft simple, open-ended questions that will make the stakeholder or buying committee member love to answer and put them in a good light.

They are the heroes here. You’re just the guide.

6. Create a short questionnaire addressing the business

Also ask them about the business. In a large organization, you will seldom talk to the person who defined its goals.

How has your solution helped the stakeholders achieve or move toward the institution’s goals?

7. Outline a hero’s journey story

It’s simple.

• Stakeholder = The Hero

• You / Your Solution = The Guide

• Institution’s ultimate outcome = The Quest

• Buyer persona’s problems / scenarios = The Challenge

• The institution / industry = The Realm

Follow the StoryBrand framework to help you outline and craft a story. You can also find countless Youtube videos about it.

8. Not all are roses: what were the real challenges?

Don’t fall for the “challenge” trap. The below is a classic in case studies:

THE CHALLENGE - XYZ institution needed an integration between a and b to solve c.

This is not the challenge. This is hardly a means to an end.

It’s by breaking down the “solve c” that you’ll get your buying personas to relate to and trust your brand:

- what scenarios did they have that you solved?
- what industry inherent problems did they have and you solved?
- what losses or missed opportunities did they have that you solved?
- how has your solution solved or is set to solve these issues?

As I wrote above: DON’T WING IT!

9. Create an on-brand “Bigger Than You” professional design

A good start for inspiration, if you think your design can improve, is to go to the list of software and IT companies in the Fortune 500, find one that you identify with - or has similar visual branding - and use their case studies and buyer’s guides.

They pay thousands of dollars for each of those PDFs. Take advantage of what already works.

The below is a buyer’s guide we created for Akari Software, a SaaSsy client. I’m quite proud of what we achieved. 🥰

Believe it or not, the gentleman above, depicting a University Provost, is purely AI - after a few hours of fine tuning of course.

Note: if you want to check the buyer’s guide, please don’t go to their website to download. Ask me, and I’ll send you a copy.

10. Market it via Thought-Leadership campaigns

Now is the fun part: You’ve written the case study and it’s time to get some eyeballs on it.

You will use your case study to advertise to Middle-of-Funnel prospects:

• 1:1 retargeting

• 1:N ABM retargeting (check last week’s post: How to Unearth the Decision-Maker with 1:N Retargeting)

• Thought-leadership campaigns: after part of your Serviceable Obtainable Market has already seen/heard of your brand

• Lead nurturing campaigns and automations

• Advertise to each of your personas: your cover and content can change slightly and your campaigns will target different job role groups. See below:

You get the BIG IDEA: To earn more MQLs and SQLs, you need to move more people from MoF to BoF by building trust with them.

To help you write case studies and all kinds of MoF documents, use Deborah Monfette’s thorough list of checklist types for inspiration.

Apart from the obvious gain of trust, here are the ADJACENT OUTCOMES you can achieve to drive more BoF leads:

• Lead Scoring: The more digital assets you have, the easier it will be for you to score leads and get their engagement with your SDRs

• Relying on Your Info: Research in the Education industry showed that showed that nearly half of educators rely on vendor information for procurement processes

• Hit Comp-Sets: One tactic you can use to define who’s going to be your next case study, is to understand possible comp-sets your prospects have: regional competitors (e.g. state institutions), segment competitors (e.g. research universities), size competitors (e.g. 50,000+ students)

• Top-of-Middle-of-Funnel: To create further awareness with people only now entering the MoF, you can publish press releases in education media using your case studies. Done right, these media mentions will also benefit your SEO (search engine optimization)

• 10 Years Ahead: How amazing would it be to see the results of adopting your solution 5 years in the future? When you have a structured case study, you make it easy to update it as new milestones happen and your clients achieve outcomes you didn’t foresee in the beginning.

LET ME ASK YOU A SMALL FAVOR 

Forward this post to your team or peers who you think would be interested in these B2B EdTech marketing topics.

And please, after you’ve done it, let me know you did.
I will be immensely thankful for it.

DO YOU NEED

• a leader for your marketing team?

• a hand to help you form a marketing team?

• or someone to create and execute your marketing strategy?

Send me an email or DM me on Linkedin or Twitter.