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Velocity Education is a programme that allows you to increase the effectiveness of your marketing into schools, colleges, universities, etc, while cutting the cost of that marketing dramatically.
Velocity Education customers can pick and choose from all the different services outlined below and build them together into a package which, if bought separately, could cost two or three times as much and take two or three times as long to implement.
What’s more, by joining Velocity Education you bring into your marketing team a new set of outsiders who will take a look at what you are doing and how you are doing it. They won’t tell you what to do, but they will make suggestions and give you ideas which you might just have missed through being too close to your own product.
The point, therefore, is for you to select the marketing services and support you need, and for us to build that with you into a complete marketing plan.
For most companies the price paid is £495 per month – although it can be as low as £295 per month depending on the services selected. For more information on pricing and services please click here
We also have Velocity Starter which operates with no monthly fee – but still gives you the consultancy benefits of Velocity.
For more information, including information on VELOCITY STARTER please visit http://www.velocity.ac/velocitystarter.html.
Velocity Education is also a very flexible marketing package in that it allows you to change the services you select each month, and there is no long term contract. You merely have to give us one month’s notice, after the first month.
What Velocity Education can include – a summary
Here’s a list of some of the services we offer to our clients:
- Marketing review and consultancy
- Writing direct mail copy, email copy, website copy
- Emailing teachers directly to their own personal address
- Shared mailings at a 20% discount
- Solo mailings at a 20% discount (excluding postage)
- Developing and promoting the company blog
- Researching direct mail and email lists of potential clients where these do not already exist
- Managing these lists and despatching direct mail and emails to potential clients
- Research into customer attitudes to your product
- Competitor research
- PR campaigns
- Search engine optimisation
- Email to advisers in Local Authorities, Special Schools
- Research of new lists of teachers not covered before
Latest additions to the service
- Research of email and postal addresses of advisers in Local Authorities, and setting up as a database
- Email addresses of economics teachers in secondary schools, drama teachers in secondary schools, site managers in secondary schools music co-ordinators in primary schools and literacy co-ordinators in primary schools.
- Buy website name appropriate to your company, add blog facility, host the site, put up blogs
- Buy website name appropriate to your company, add landing page, host the site (ideal for companies that have difficulty changing their existing website)
Below is a list of the services currently on offer. If any service that you particularly want is not included please do call 01536 399 000 – we may be able to arrange something just for you.
But please note – we are not saying that each of these activities can be used each month, within the standard fee. Rather, in consultation with you, we select the activities from the list that will be best suited to your needs in that month, and then we set to work on them.
If you would like to know more about what counts as “one activity” please click here.
Here’s some details of the work that we do with companies that currently use the Velocity service:
Consultancy
Our clients pick up the phone, call us, and we answer all the questions put. If we don’t know, we go and find out. Whether you want to know how a promotion works, whether to advertise in a certain magazine, what the government policy is on a particular subject, how school budgets are being affected, how to handle a campaign, how to set up a blog or the average response rate a certain type of promotion gets, we’ll tell you. And if we have issues that we think should be brought to your attention, we’ll call you without waiting for you to ask.
Copywriting
It is true – we can all write. But it is also true that minor changes to the style of a promotion, the exact wording of a headline, or the tone of voice used in the promotion, can all make a huge difference. And that’s before we come onto the complex issue of the effect of different colours and the way illustrations can change a promotion.
Of course, you don’t have to take our word for it – we’ll write you a promotion and you can try it out when marketing to a small number of schools, while you use your own promotion at the same time to other schools. If ours doesn’t win out, we’ll give you your monthly fee back!
Emails
First, if you have your own list of customers and/or potential customers, we can help organise it, and use our software to send out the emails for you. Our software will:
- automatically delete the “unsubscribe” requests,
- allow you to track exactly who has clicked on the link to your website,
- allow newcomers to subscribe to the list automatically.
- automatically remove duplicate or invalid entries.
Second, if you don’t have a list of potential customers, we can help you get one either through telephone research or procuring it elsewhere. Depending on the number of email addresses required and the amount of verification or extension of the database that is needed there may be an extra charge, but quite often this work can be incorporated into the monthly fee.
Third we can write the emails for you, experimenting with format and style in order to get the best results for you.
Certainly a list of enquirers and past clients containing both email and postal addresses is your most valuable asset. If you have built one, we can help you expand this, build in the people who respond to each mailing or who click on your website (in some cases) and help you develop this enormously valuable resource. If you do not have a list of past enquirers or customers, then we can work with you to build it up from scratch. When this resource is added to the use of education news services to generate more interest in your work, you can build up a list very quickly indeed.
Direct mail
We hold mailing lists of all schools in the UK, along with many other associated lists. If there is some other element of the education market we don’t cover, we’ll research it for you. If you have your own list of such an area we can work with you to expand your list, update it and de-duplicate, arranging the list so that you get the best postal discounts, and write copy for you that will gain you higher response rates.
Much of our direct mail work is based on the results of trial mailings. For example, you might have 10,000 potential customers in the UK, but we would endeavour to start by mailing just a fraction of these to ensure that you get the best results, before going on to mail all of them.
Research
Sometimes it is helpful to know what a potential customer thinks of a product or a service. Sometimes it is helpful to know which product your potential customers are using to meet a particular need.
We can undertake this research for you within the cost of the Velocity Business programme.
Take this example. We worked with a company that sold literacy products to schools. They felt that they had a product that was not only ideal for working with seven and eight your old boys who did not read (generally because of their home environment). It was, they felt, a unique product which required little more than an announcement. Their view was, “there is no other software that works with these children”.
However their own campaign was not working well. So, as part of our Velocity programme, we undertook a research project and found out that in fact teachers did not share the company’s view about the uniqueness of the product. Rather they were able to nominate several programs that they felt did the job very well with this group of children. Thus the advert was being completely wrongly written – we needed to show why this product was better than its competitors. A re-write resolved the issue and took the company forward.
It is worth noting that some organizations charge far more than our monthly fee just to run research of this type – and yet Velocity Education clients get the research and other elements of our work, all within a single charge.
Monitoring on-line comments in relation to your area of interest
In education it is common for teachers to comment on products and services through news services and discussion groups on line. If your product (or simply the area in which you operate) is mentioned on such a forum you can get hundreds of requests for information.
Through such a mechanism you can get vast numbers of requests for information and you can capture these email addresses and promote your materials to these people. It is in fact a way of getting an email list of prospective customers available for no cost.
We can also monitor comments about your company and/or your product area on the internet and then respond to any comment. Thus, if anyone says on a news service, “does anyone know if Product X is worth buying?” we can reply extolling the benefits of your product or service in a suitably subtle way.
Running a blog
It can be a very positive move to run a blog which deals with your product or service in an informal way. We are leaders in the development of blogs and information services which are produced for this purpose – indeed our first ever blog (which was launched just as an experiment to prove that we could do it two years ago) now has over 250,000 readers per month.
Blogs can operate in many different ways, and they don’t always have to comment directly on your business. The key point is to find an audience that will stay with you, and will come to trust your comments. Indeed if you can get it right you will start finding that the commentary in your blogs can be picked up by readers and forwarded to many others. In short, other people start doing your marketing for you!
If you are interested in blogs, do call us and we can provide examples of some recent articles we have written.
Running a news service
A news service can work in the same sort of way as a blog – it is just that the news goes out each week via email rather than appearing on a website. Which approach you choose (and it is possible to do both) depends on your particular needs and the product you are promoting. Please do call to discuss with us.
PR
As part of the project we can include the writing of PR and sending the press releases out to relevant journalists.
Of course we can never guarantee that a particular piece will get coverage in a certain magazine, but we can often re-work other pieces that we have written for our clients, into press releases, and send them out for you.
We work with the national press, education magazines, local newspapers, radio and TV stations.
Building your own list of past clients
A list of enquirers and past clients containing both email and postal addresses is your most valuable asset. If you have built one, we can help you expand this, build in the people who respond to each mailing or who click on your website (in some cases) and help you develop this enormously valuable resource. If you do not have a list of past enquirers or customers, then we can work with you to build it up from scratch.
When this resource is added to the use of education news services to generate more interest in your work, you can build up a list very quickly indeed.
Developing your website
Many websites are well suited to their task and don’t need our input. But sometimes we do find a situation where an email campaign does result in a lot of people clicking through to a website, but then have very few people buying.
In such a situation it is clear that if the landing page on the website could be improved we could well make much better use of the people who have visited the page. In these circumstances the Velocity Education team will re-write the website page for you and undertake another email campaign, experimenting to see if this now brings in better results than the earlier campaign.
Search Engine Optimisation
Do a Google search with the UK only button on for the single word “schools” and you get 44 million or so hits. That’s 4.5 million pages.
Of course, results change day by day but on the day I am writing to you, our own schools website (The Education News and Schools Directory www.schools.co.uk) comes up on the first page of the 4.5 million.
If you type in the phrase Arsenal News into Google without clicking on the UK button, you will probably see around 34 million entries.
Again, results can change but today, as I write this, at the foot of the first page is a list of three blogs, the top one of which is a link to our site Untold Arsenal (www.blog.emiratesstadium.info) and half way down the second page is the main link to our site.
You can use the Velocity programme to enhance your position in the search engines. There is more information here.
To find out more about Velocity Education please call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000 and ask to speak to a member of the Velocity Education team.
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