Teacher's Discovery
Teacher's Discovery Blog
Project Lead
This is a project I proposed with the product managers in order to attract a younger audience to our brand. When reviewing our web analytics and social media analytics we noticed that we were missing out on young/new teachers in our sales. Teacher’s Discovery is traditionally a catalog-based company, we had a stronghold on the veteran teacher market, but many young teachers hadn’t heard of us. The primary purpose of the blog was to compete with the popular Teachers Pay Teachers website, which allows teachers to sell their lesson plans and teaching methods online. We typically sold lesson and teaching method books written by teachers. We built out the customer personas that we were trying to reach and based this blog on that. Young teachers often lack the funds to purchase full books and products, this blog offered small samples of our products for free, and provided quality content for our readers to digest and learn from. The goal was to bring brand awareness to the younger generation of teachers by offering them free and affordable resources. Our secondary persona was our loyal customers as a way to thank them and provide new content for their use. Many of the tenured teachers came up during a time when grammar-based world language was the standard, over the past decade many new methods have been developed. We wanted to provide resources for those teachers who were thinking about making a switch in their teaching methods.
Customer Persona #1
Katie, 24
SPANISH &FRENCH TEACHER
Bachelors Degree
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Katie is a world language teacher in her third year of teaching at a public high school. She’s involved in the school and serves as a coach for the freshman cheer team. She is single and doesn’t have kids yet. She is active on social media sites; Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. She has a bachelor's degree and makes $45k a year.
Needs:
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She is on a tight budget and receives little funding for materials from the school
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She wants to stay up to date on the latest teaching methods and trends in world language
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Environmentally conscious prefers downloadable content over hard copies.
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Paint Points:
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Budget
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Lack of quality resources for World Language teachers at her disposal
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Overwhelmed by which teaching method is best for her and her students
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She has a busy life outside of school and has little time outside of grading, coaching, and socializing to create new lesson plans every day
Who Is Katie?
Customer Persona #2
Who Is Mary?
Mary is a seasoned Spanish teacher. She has been teaching the same Spanish classes for years now and has a large catalog of lesson plans built out. She is married with two kids who are in middle school and high school. She is active on Facebook and recently joined Pinterest. She has her Master’s degree and makes $65k a year. Her husband works in business and brings home $100k a year. They are comfortable.
Needs:
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She is looking to learn more about new methods (CI and TRPS) of teaching Spanish that aren’t grammar-based.
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Want’s quick lessons to be able to download and use
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Has the money to buy updated materials but wants to test out a few methods before committing to purchasing a product.
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She is finding she has more free time now that her kids are becoming more independent.
Paint Points:
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Unsure what direction she wants to go in order to update her outdated lesson plans
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Overwhelmed by the amount of content out there
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She is ok with technology but struggles with some things.
Mary, 43
SPANISH TEACHER
Masters Degree
Project Details
The challenge:
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The two biggest challenges we are seeing are that we’re struggling to attract this new generation of teachers who are on tight budgets and prefer digital downloadable content over traditional books and that we have a generation of tenured teachers who are struggling to update their outdated teaching methods when it comes to world languages.
The other challenge I faced was that I was on a one-person marketing team. I was the lead on the project and did the majority of the legwork while still managing my other responsibilities with email and social media marketing. It was a challenge to mockup, build, fill with the content, market, and manage.
Solution:
I used methods from my Master’s program to conduct research and interpret analytics in order to build out a base concept and customer persona’s that we wanted to target. I worked with our product managers who had close relationships with the authors of our products, we pitched the idea of them writing blog content for us and many were on board. We were fortunate to work with some rock-stars of the world language industry and were able to use them as brand ambassadors to help promote not only their books and content but the teaching methods in general.
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Results:
We saw an increase in web traffic, social media followers, and downloads when we launched the blog. The content produced was overall well received by our audience and we’re thankful for the quality of the content.
Reflecting back on this project and taking what I know now I would’ve done a few things differently to improve results and make it more manageable. I think the biggest issue we had was we went too big with too many options from the get-go. We should’ve started off smaller with very focused content and expanded as the data and users asked. It was difficult to manage, track, and make informed decisions with the limited resources available.
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The time management of the blog became an issue after I left to pursue a new opportunity and many of the product managers left shortly after. The blog is unfortunately no longer in use as it likely became too much work to keep up with limited support and employees. You can still view the blog at blog.teachersdiscovery.com.