Nothing is more annoying than having a product that seems to have, in your eyes, a very high potential to succeed in your industry but not knowing your target audience as well as you thought you did. Our traveling exhibits department was recently tasked with offering edukits (Education Kits) to homeschools and I was given the assignment of researching our target audience. Since I had already worked with the target audience of our education department, and also the target audience of our traveling exhibit, I assumed that the magic formula was going to be a simple copy and paste of the current status quo. Boy was I wrong!
Don’t ASS-U-ME Anything
Photo from Pexels.com
The target audience of our education department is mostly made up teachers from pre-schools to grade 12 because they are the ones bringing their classes to us. To make sure that we hit our mark, we tailor the content to their curriculum. We actually used the same tactic for travelling exhibits edukits program because they had always been used by schools that were either too far away from our site, or they did not have the funds to pay for a trip-and-an-educational-program at our site. It was easy to just apply the same approach that was used for onsite educational programs.
Homeschools are unlike conventional schools. Some groups follow the provincial curriculum while others follow their own program that can be a mix-and-match of various curriculum. There are not set rules that homeschoolers need to follow a certain path, as long as the child can pass an admission exam when it will be time for them to enter into a college or a university. The biggest difference between regular schooling structure is that homeschooled kids can receive their education either as a 1-on-1 style or as part of a cluster of other homeschool groups.
Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels
After learning our mistakes, we were able to identify our specific target audience (gender, age groups, gender of the adult teaching, etc). We focused or marketing efforts in the image of a more private, 1-on-1 educational experience and we were able to reach our target audience and meet our goals.
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