Education marketing is getting squeezed from both sides. Buyers are moving slower and asking for more proof, while the marketing landscape is moving faster than most teams can realistically track. AI is changing how people search and evaluate credibility. Conferences are still a major growth channel, but they are expensive and hard to measure. And social platforms keep rewriting the rules midstream.

In this solo “Field Notes” episode, Elana Leoni surfaces practical signals from the last few weeks across AI, conferences, K–12 funding, and social media. The throughline is focus. What matters now is less about chasing every update, and more about building a marketing system that can hold up in a noisy, high-scrutiny, high-stakes category.

Link to the episode show notes.

Friends, welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. Today I am talking the version of what we are calling internally slash a little bit externally. We're calling this the education, woo, the education marketing field notes or what we hope to call it is the education marketers field notes. So kind of backtracking a little bit. This is just talking with me, Ilana. We are talking about

things that are happening in the industry of education as it relates to marketing. We are talking about social media platform updates, content updates, anything around marketing that you need to know, and a little bit of fun. So this is just a solo fun, hopefully very practical episode with me. I've done a couple of them and people really like it. So let me know what you think about the name. We're struggling with it. If you do like the education marketers field notes.

If you don't, you got something else to let us know on LinkedIn or email. Okay, let's jump into today's episode. We are starting with all things AI because the world is starting with all things AI. Sometimes I wake up and go, gosh, every day is moving faster and faster and faster with AI. And can we keep up? To start, I want to talk about AI disrupting coding.

in K-12 education and in not just K-12 education, but I want to look at trends, at signals on how it's going to affect K-12 education. We are seeing code.org shift quite a bit in K-12 education, moving their hour of code to hour of AI. We are going to be having somebody on from code.org in the podcast, so you'll learn more about that later on, but Spotify. So Spotify announced

that its engineers have not written any code since December. And as AI becomes more helpful, more powered by automations and agents, agentic AI, actual physical coding is becoming deprecated quite quickly. I recently just had to create some HTML, hadn't jumped in in about 10 years because way back in the day I got certified, did HTML, CSS, all the things.

jumped in to GitHub and played around with their agentic AI as it related to one of the HTML editors I had and wow, game changer. You do need to have enough knowledge to be able to direct the coding, but you don't actually create the coding and it blew my mind. So now we are seeing a signal that

even engineers that know how to code really in advanced ways haven't touched code since December. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Okay, more on AI. Neil Patel, if you don't know him and his agency, they are all about SEO. We will drop the show notes, the link in the show notes around it, but I attended a LinkedIn Live that talked about how LLM bot,

now account for more traffic than humans on websites. So I just want to pause there. Like that means AI, the bots for them, are now crawling more sites and inflating traffic and it's more than actually human directed traffic. Huge, huge, which means that you should be, you already should be, but now more than ever, when you're seeing these tipping points, you should be.

Looking at your website and trying to optimize it as much as possible for these LLM Neil had some great tips on how to ensure that the content that you do have in your website is easily summarized to make it easy for these bots to say Okay, here's my quick synopsis. We've all seen those AI synopsis summaries make it as easy as possible to do that Make sure your site has a bunch of like what we call credibility, right? So I want you to have some of those

efficacy studies, I want you to speak with authority, want you to have experts on your website, want you to have testimonials, all of the things that they will go and say, yes, this is a credible site and I want to cite this as a source. We've all seen AI citing sources as well. And then lastly, a fun fact I learned from this webinar is that LLM bots cannot crawl or read JavaScript. I know this sounds super technical.

But all you need to know as a marketer is that, hey, let's talk to my developers. Let's talk to the back end people on our website and make sure that we are not heavy in JavaScript as it relates to important things we need to get across about our messaging to buyers. If that is the case, they can re-engineer it. So it's either in the back end of the code with HTML or they just change it around and make it part of the HTML. So.

Kind of a fun fact, really, really helpful. I remember listening to that webinar and he said, if there's one thing you wanna take away from this talk, it is that point. So thank you very much, Neil and friends and his agency. We will put that link into the show notes. It's a really great LinkedIn Live. Okay, more about AI. It's been an AI week. I had a deep discussion just yesterday with some women business owners in education.

And we all went around and expressed our concerns about our industry in particular in education, not being able to move fast enough when it comes to AI literacy. And it's not just about student AI literacy. I think sometimes the focus goes there immediately. It has to start from the top and be modeled down. And in order for you to do that, you've got to have an innovative environment that fosters.

Trying things out, fosters, hey, I'm scared, let's try new things. And we have to think differently. And we have to have the space to do that. And when time is almost negative in education, it's quite hard to do that.

I think the problem is we've all just spent too much time trying to identify students who cheat with AI. And we've all seen the AI detectors and spoiler alert, there isn't an AI detector that works at 100%. I think the best is like 50%. You really shouldn't use them. And you shouldn't be using all of that energy and effort to get students that are cheating to catch them, that gotcha moment, right?

Instead, we should be using this time to truly think differently, to help create that culture I was talking about where teachers can redesign their lessons. It's gonna take redesigning things intentionally, redesigning lessons to integrate AI thoughtfully that empowers proper usage and accelerates all this critical thinking that we know we'll need as AI continues to dominate in the future. So I don't know, I'd love to hear from you all, but.

I'm wondering, can our industry really rise to the challenge and the speed we need it to? Time will tell, but this is one of the fastest moving trends I've seen. And it's not like education, K-12 and higher education are characterized by...

my gosh, we move really fast. I'd say higher education is moving even a little bit slower when it comes to AI because the system doesn't really incentivize it, right? So I don't know, I'd love to hear from you on around all this. Lastly, Stanford just had an AI conference in education. I was.

includes educators, students, and communities that are most affected by these tools, but we know in education they're least consulted, they're least often consulted, right? So that's the same dichotomy of sometimes we end up, a lot of times, sorry, we end up purchasing things, but the actual users are the most least often consulted or have any say in the purchase. And in particular, what we're talking about is the design.

So if tech isn't just supported by robust implementation and human support, it will fail. This includes AI. So Erin's point is really well taken, is that we can't just go ahead and buy these tools. And some of these carrot type of flashy tools where it does not model responsible, I think responsible, critical thinking, effective use.

of AI in the classroom, if you're just generating a lesson plan really quickly, you're not really understanding how they work. They're almost like AI wrappers. So how do we make sure that we have consistent support and robust implementation in the school and district level? It's not an easy thing to do in a slow moving industry that doesn't have a ton of budget, generally doesn't have a lot of support around rolling out new technology.

on a subject level, on a niche association level, you name it, conferences are happening from January to I would say probably mid April. And then we slow down for the little bit, then we get into more summer professional development and then we start picking up in conferences more in October time. But this is go time, this is also go time because it aligns with the K12 buying cycle as much as possible.

So we are getting into that towards the end where they got to purchase now for the next academic school year, and if they haven't already. So this is kind of last minute purchase time.

For many of our clients and education companies in general, I do see them making heavy investments in the conference sector as a marketing channel that can deliver effective brand awareness, that lead generation, but this all comes with huge nuances, huge caveats. Again, there is no one size fits all. Every single education company is unique in its own way. But in general,

People are making bets on conferences and if you have a smart strategy that's balanced, I do see it paying off as long as it's complemented with other parts of your marketing mix. So we don't ever wanna just say all we're doing is conferences. We have social media, we have content, we have PR, we've got paid, we've got all sorts of other things that we're doing to help rise tides for brand awareness and lead generation.

But conferences are expensive, you know? And I'm not even talking about the pay to play ones. And I don't need to mention all the names of them, but they are conferences that you pay to go to in the 10K plus arena. And you are guaranteed meetings with high level decision makers like superintendents. So I'm not even talking about that. Conferences are expensive. They are hard to scale in terms of boots on the ground.

And given our longer sales cycles and education, the attribution can be tricky to directly align with sales. We can sometimes directly align with lead generation. We wanna make sure it's qualified leads, but the actual sales, because they're such a multi-touch attribution, sometimes that can be a little tricky too. Lately, I guess maybe the last two years, I see many companies choosing depth over breadth.

And that means instead of going to my big national conferences that I'm not sure buyers are at and maybe more teachers are at, I might go to state and sometimes even like areas that are just specific areas of districts. So super small, deep conferences or niche associations in specific states. I see this working really well if you have a satisfied client or two.

Some districts that work with you that are really happy and are happy to spread the word, but you haven't really penetrated the rest of the state, right? For example, New York. Say you've got a big client in New York, but you don't have all the surrounding districts. And it's really great to be able to have that presence in New York. That works in terms of an expansion strategy. Again, the devil is in the detail in the execution, but I wanted to share that tip.

Speaking of conferences, I'd be remiss to not talk about booth roadkill. Do not be the booth that looks like you're just absolutely roadkill. You know the booth where you walk by and you kind of don't make eye contact because it's so sad and they're trying to give you some cheap pen but they don't really even know what they're doing and like it's just it's bad. It's just this bad feeling and you just want to go by as quick as possible. So don't be that booth. Have fun.

Give things away, but not just for the sake of giving things away. Giveaways do work. You want to make sure that you're attracting your buyer and not necessarily people that just want to grab swag though. Make it a more of a thought leadership area. Attract people with learning. Have people that they want to learn from that they look up to and have them speak at your booth.

Do really in-depth demos so people can understand the tips and tricks of your product and why it's different. I really want to harp on this is a space that you can make that can be this robust, fun source of, come here and you get an invite to our happy hour later and learn from some of the best or do book signing. So I want you to rethink your booths more and more because the industry is getting

more dominated by lots of players. We're seeing AI come in with six figure booths. You got to step it up. And then lastly, you know I'm going to say this about conferences, but conferences are never one and done events. They are ground zero for great content creation. If you were not creating content from you going at conferences, it's just like a no, no, no, no, no. And you could say I'm pointing my finger and giving you the judgy finger.

You need to be able to say, gosh, what are the opportunities to capture testimonials, to capture really great user generated contents about tips and tricks, or just what it's like to be an educator, or things about what your buyers say. There's so much fun, episodic content that you can create. If you're speaking at panels, you can create really great fodder for blog posts, short form videos, all of the things. So I can go on and on about that, but.

Just know if you're not creating content from it is a huge missed opportunity and it creates an opportunity for you to have this one time event be evergreen and pay back time and time and time again. Lastly, I wanna give you a quick budget update in K-12 education. Kind of big news, big news, but I give it a little bit of a caveat because I'm not an expert when it comes to.

huge. With the caveat that it's crazy pants town and people in the comments were like, well, do we trust it? And I say, well, I'm not an expert, but this is all I know is they've approved it. And here we go. I do want to give a shout out to Rachel, Rachel Schechter. She does research in education and she gave us a specific what was cut was research.

Ouch. So she said it went down about 20 million in research and 30 million for another type of research. So considering a research study is maybe in the three to five million range, it's quite a few studies that won't be able to happen. So thank you for that nuance, Rachel.

Hope this was helpful a little bit of trends don't want to scare you want you to really embrace AI think about how it's going to be affecting your specific business think about if you have AI in your product, how do we make sure that we're providing implementation and ongoing professional development that goes beyond your product because sometimes when we just focus on our product it becomes a little bias on this unnecessarily, but just like you're talking about your product, right so

Think about that. I don't know, we're all in it together. Hope this was helpful and we're gonna jump into some platform specific updates on social media next.

What do we got on time?

Is this new new? Like how new?

That's the one I wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

By the way, all this stuff Porter did. So that was helpful. So all the platform updates, she did it for TFA. She did it for TFA and we were like trying to figure out in our one-on-one how we can use it. And I was like, well, it definitely is in a podcast, but she was like, well, maybe it's a standalone like email. It's just about platform updates. I don't know. So we were trying to brainstorm.

how we can.

Okay, let's get into the wonderful world, sometimes absolutely, wait, rephrase, always crazy world of social media and their algorithms. Let's start with YouTube. We don't talk about YouTube enough, but YouTube, specifically in the shorts area, are going...

really, really well, let's just say. So YouTube shorts have over 2 billion monthly users. That is ahead of TikTok. So we always talk about TikTok when it comes to short form video and Instagram reels, but YouTube is now ahead. So 2 billion versus TikTok's 1.59 billion and Instagram reels 1.8 billion. I think that would be like a fun trivia question because YouTube is like this silent or what do call it?

or the dark horse, that's what it is.

Shorts, it's not only about reach and engage like the active users on the platform, but shorts also lead with engagement with almost a 6 % engagement rate. Right? So I just don't want you to think about like spending all this time on Instagram and TikTok when YouTube actually can be a bit more evergreen and less ephemeral than those other platforms and it's growing and it's stably growing. So

There's a lot of other stats I can give you. We will link to it in the show notes. I don't know. think like one of the cooler ones was channels that use shorts plus long-form video. They grow 41 % faster. So don't just do long-form podcasts. Don't just put your webinars on there. Slice and dice them up.

And you can have consistent where you're doing one long form video a week and a couple of shorts a week. You can see that growth grow in tandem.

new times, sometimes I look at this data and I'm like, okay, what's the best posting time for shorts in particular right now? The latest data shows Tuesday around 4 PM. I think that's Pacific time. We can go ahead and verify that in the show notes, but I want you to just be consistent amidst everything else. I don't care. don't like great content will overperform because it's great too. So don't try to hack and say, okay, it's this, you know, optimize this time and get away from the

focus of actually creating great content and showing up consistently. I don't know, there's not lot to talk about in the world of Facebook in the last month, except that haters are gonna hate Facebook. I get it, it is not cool. But educators are there, admins are there, and I want you to not forget that there are really engaged Facebook groups.

And the reason why educators flock, maybe pun intended from the Exodus to Twitter, is that you can have this anonymity and that really helps, especially when there was unfortunately a normalizing behavior where people would screenshot things and bring it into the district level and say, did you see so and so talking about this, right? So that anonymity allows people to engage authentically without

or just feeling safe enough to do so. So your audience is there. It's harder and harder for brands to get in the feed. But if you do so and you show up consistently and you've got a paid strategy, again, Facebook went pay to play a long time ago, it can be one of your biggest channels when it comes to reach, sometimes even engagement.

So I want you to just think about that for those of you hating on the Facebook, I get it. We've been through a lot with Facebook and Meta in particular.

I want to talk quickly about user generated content. So user generated content is all about, all right, let's look at our teachers using this product. Let's look at people that are implementing the product, maybe on a district level. Let's even talk to maybe our buyers and user generated content, content where your people are talking and they're not product marketing. They're not influencer marketing. They might be just like, Hey, why don't I take you on a day in a life of what I do?

You know, so have some really good kind of like, this is my life, empathetic, fun, episodic content too. There's so much fun user generated content. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. You know, think about ways that you can streamline the process with a fun form. You can get on a video call 15 minutes with a person, grab some information, grab some fun stuff.

is all about that social proof when you do it. builds trust. It builds the authentic voice into your content. So don't sleep on that either. User generated content is a great way to do all the things that can differentiate your brand in a highly fragmented and kind of environment where districts and schools are saying, gosh, I got too much stuff. I got to whittle it down. How do I pick what I pick? I go to my network.

I go to my network and if I see people that I respect or people like me that are talking about or just on your feed, they don't even have to be talking about your product. It's a win-win. Let's get into Instagram. No, I'm gonna cut this.

and then it looks like shorts were.

twice.

Okay, I'm gonna do one more, sorry.

Backing up really quickly about YouTube shorts, I know I talked about how popular they are and it's about consistency, but I want to give you some practical tips, right? So YouTube shorts, they can be up to three minutes as long as vertical. That doesn't make any sense. Can be up to three minutes as long as vertical.

Backing up, I wanna talk a little bit about the how-to on YouTube Shorts. Before we talked about, yes, they're popular, great. What do I do? I gave you some tidbits on how to break up long form content. But you can also do channel specific short form content. So think about QuickHack.

memes or single insights, eight to 20 seconds. And if those have near 100 % completion rate, that can travel really far. Tells the algorithm that I want to surface it back up to people like that and then people that look and act like them as well.

Think about mini tutorials, three step how tos, story style content, 25 to 45 seconds. So there's lots of opportunity to channel specific content that increases your completion rates too, because that completion rate is heavily weighted in the algorithm and that early retention. So making sure that when people start, they stay a little bit longer too.

So hope that was helpful on the how-to's when it comes to YouTube shorts. And then I'll leave you with one tip around the Facebook world. I know I said there's not a lot of cool stuff, but there's some innovation going around because we all know link posts are dead on Facebook. But what I'm seeing a lot of big media outlets do is they have a picture. And it's not just a picture. It's usually with a person and the person is looking at you. again, human forward and you know,

eye contact. All of the studies have shown that that tends to work most. You don't want stock photos though, so try to get some stuff that really aligns with your brand as much as possible and doesn't look like an ad. So I know this all sounds hard, but once you get in the thick of it, you'll get the hang of it too. So think about image, human forward, looking at the camera, and then a headline. A headline that's on the image itself.

Once I have that, I'm like, that looks good. I actually want to click on it. But don't hide the link in the comments. Don't hide the link into the copy down below where you have to do the dot, dot, dot for the preview. I'm seeing a lot of people just start right off the bat, have that little link chain emoji, and then the link itself right there, easy to click. Try that. See if it helps your click throughs. I think it will.

All right, we're gonna go into a couple of LinkedIn posts that have changed my thoughts for the, I don't know, for the rest of my life, no, but at least for the rest of the last couple weeks, I've been pondering them. So let's get into that.

Yeah, I just don't know how we would do it, but I like the idea.

Yeah.

Yep. I like it. Okay. I'm gonna jump into this one. Hopefully. la la. Okay.

Two quick posts that caught my attention on LinkedIn, one of them comes from an assistant superintendent, Curtis Pike. He gave some really good information about buying. And a lot of times it makes some assumptions of why people buy tools in the education ed tech space.

And he says, the best districts aren't buying products, they are pursuing a vision, a vision that is deeply human. In ours, it's always people over programs. So you're not walking into a sales opportunity. He says, you're stepping into a careful, into careful conversations about priorities, student staff, and long-term impact. It's not about...

districts trying to add tools. They're deciding what truly meets the needs and vision of a community. So I want you to think about that. He has some really good do's and don'ts. I'll read a couple, but I'll post it in the show notes. But he says, do learn the district's vision before you talk about the product. Do be a partner in thinking, not just a vendor in selling. Do be brutally honest as always. Right? Don't sell just because you have a quota.

Make sure that you're giving them the right advice given their unique circumstances. They will trust you more if it is not a fit for them. They will respect you and they will refer you. It'll pay back in spades. Do not lead with demos before listening. Listen, listen, listen first.

Assume urgency on your timeline. You know, hey, if you sell or if you sign up by tomorrow, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, don't put that pressure on. I know sometimes urgency and time sensitive things can work in sales, but again, focus on the do before the don'ts. And then lastly, said, don't forget that, or do not forget that every decision is filtered through one question. Is this good for kids?

So, so good. I will put that into the show notes. Thank you, Curtis. Next one comes from Tim Good. So it's Tim Good in School Harbor. And he posted this really cool infographic that was the difference between B2B sales and edtech sales. And we've talked about this in our podcast many times. I will post, I think our most popular one is with Ian McCullough and he talks about...

the difference of edtech sales versus B2B sales. And he specifically calls it B2G sales. So business to government sales within edtech. I'll post that in the show notes as well, but I'll link this post because it's a really great infographic between B2B sales and edtech sales. And I mean, there's so many things to unpack in this graphic, but like he talks about the average sales cycle length. So traditional B2B, two to six months. EdTech average.

six to 18 months. Timing on traditional B2B, continuous, right? We're buying. EdTech, super, super seasonal. And that is the biggest thing I see people miss when they come into EdTech is that their timing is just so fundamentally off, right? Who gets to talk and make decisions in the decision-making structure? That's outlined in the infographic too. So...

Kind of a bit of a spoiler once you get into it, but B2B, three to five stakeholders maybe. You know, you got some business people, you got your IT, your finance department. In EdTech, we have eight to 15 plus stakeholders. And you know, it varies between the states and the districts that you're going after, but significantly more stakeholders. Veto power is huge. Multiple types of veto power where anyone can jump in, a school board, whoever it may be.

End users are rarely involved, but they're critical for success and renewals in EdTech. Whereas in B2B, generally we have end users that are part of the buying process. There's so much more goodness into this infographic. Sometimes, you I'm all about a good visual as a marketer. This is great. Again, I will put it in the show notes. If you don't know this,

This will save you time. This will save you money. This will make you more effective, more confident. And I want you to take this infographic if you haven't already and look at like, we know that the sales cycle is highly seasonal, but your specific type of product might have some nuances in the sales cycle as well. Right. So, you know, maybe you're selling summer school. That's got a little bit of a different sales cycle, even though you're in the ed tech sales cycle on the K-12 education sales cycle.

So those two ones are really good. Hopefully it helps you stopping from scrolling and trying to find some goodness in LinkedIn. give you a couple of these a month. Lastly, I just want to end with there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world, but there's also some fun stuff. And if you're not watching the Olympics, I want you to kind of go read about the drones happening in the Olympics. Drones, it's the...

human-powered drones, it's not like a human on a drone, but they're the ones kind of directing the drones. Having drones in the Olympics has created a whole new level of way to experience the Olympics. Like imagine those, what are they called? The super G skiers going down, they're going at speeds of like 90 miles an hour. And we're finally able to kind of experience it in a way and feel that 90 miles an hour.

So super cool, they also have some fail safes where like the drone cannot go in front of the athlete because if it stops, it's like, you know, bad news, right? So I would just suggest you go down a rabbit hole of thinking about like how drones are used in such a cool and innovative way for the Olympics of bringing it all to life. Also went down a rabbit hole about curling. I still don't know all the rules. So if anyone wants to explain it to me.

I tried, but I do know that that little curling stone is very expensive and the granite is sourced from this area that's federally protected, ecologically protected park that you can only get a permit to go to, I think once every 10 years, once every 20 years, something like that. It's crazy.

So I will fact check all this nonsense that I'm talking about and put some articles in the show notes. But I hope it just gives you a little bit of laughter because I know I talked about some heavy, we talked about some practical. Again, let me know what you think of this show and what you want me to call it. Tell me what you want me to call it. Is it the education marketers field notes? Is it something else? Is it random thoughts with me, Alana? I don't know. I hope you enjoy. We'll see you next time.

on our show. was about to say all things marketing and education, but whatever we want to call this. Take care.