December in K-12 is two weeks of chaos wrapped in out-of-office replies. Teachers are hanging on until winter break, district leaders are buried in celebrations and strategy, and your carefully crafted sales push is not getting the response your dashboard hoped for. If you are still banking on December to hit revenue targets, this episode is a reality check and a reset.

In this episode, Elana breaks down what December really looks like for teachers and decision makers, how to show up with human first marketing, and why your smartest plays now are relationship building, evergreen content, and getting January ready before you log off. She also shares fresh LinkedIn and Instagram trends, plus an insight from Education Week that might change how you think about pillar content.

Episode show notes.

Mentioned in this episode:

EdTech Planner 2026

Planning a full year of education marketing takes time, and you need a clear path that helps you stay relevant, consistent, and aligned with the moments that matter. Ready to make 2026 your most intentional (and effective!) year yet in education marketing? What The EdTech Marketer’s 2026 Planner helps you do: Focus on what matters most to your brand and audience Plan campaigns around key education events Use proven strategies tailored to K–12 and higher ed Build a system that fuels visibility, engagement, and leads For six years, thousands of education and EdTech marketers have used this planner to guide their yearly campaigns and stay aligned with the school calendar. Download here: https://www.leoniconsultinggroup.com/edtech-marketers-planner

Hey, hey, welcome everybody. This is the third episode of kind of shortish episodes. It's just talking with me and I am giving you a lay of the land of what's happening in education marketing, what's going to be happening and some tips, tips, tips, tips, lots of tips, tips, tricks, strategies, all the things to get you through. And this month we're going to be talking about December and a little bit of January. And I'll get into why we're going to be talking about January so early.

So we're gonna talk about that. I'm gonna give you some platform tips, more tips, tricks, best practices, things that are just working from a social media perspective, and then end with something awesome and insight that made me think and pause and stop my scroll on LinkedIn. So let's get into it. thank you all for listening to the last episode. We got such great feedback. People are really thinking critically about what was said and taking it to action. So that makes my heart just really happy.

So thank you all. Okay, so let's talk December. December is crazy town in education marketing, but in all industries and life, right? So when we think about December, just know it's already gone. December at most is two weeks. We have holiday breaks, corporate offices closed for two weeks. When people are in office, they are frantic.

They are trying to get everything done close for the year and then prep ahead for January. So attention is super, super scarce. And any kind of sales you were trying to do for the close of the year really should have happened in November. And if you are kind of scrambling right now and relying on December to hit your goals, I want you to reflect on that for next year and get ahead of it because I have been there. I'm not on the sales side. I work very, very closely on the marketing side.

And I have worked closely to say, do we get ahead of things? How do we do just a little bit more? All right, so December is already gone. We have office closures, we've got erratic schedules, we've got out of offices. But there are some moments that we can take advantage of, right? So you're gonna have low responsiveness, but there's amazing ways to get in front of people, engage people.

So let's talk about teachers really quick. So teachers, the people, the awesome human beings that are using your products and services, they need help. This is a very hard time of year for them. They see winter break coming, but so do their students. They are erratic. are really looking at how teachers just really want to engage their students, but they are unengaged. So they need quick help. They need quick.

strategies, tips, how to use certain parts of your product or service, maybe lessons that are surefire ways to engage and excite students in this kind of antsy behavior, right? So I don't want you talking at teachers at this point. I don't want jargon. Teachers really want to feel seen. They know that they're just really counting down the days to break. And I say that with such empathy because what they're doing is incredibly hard right now.

Show them that you see them, empathize with them, sympathize with them, entertain them, teach your life, teach your humor, the things that you'd really want to look at what aligns with your brand first and foremost. But engage. When I want you to show up in December, I want you to share things on social media, share things in email that are very valuable for right now.

They're not gonna implement big plans. They're not gonna have time to dive into deep professional development. They need quick fixes or they just need to be entertained. They need to be felt seen. So think of that when you're guiding your decisions in December, right?

From the school and district leader side, right, these are gonna be a lot of your buyers typically if you're selling B2B in K-12 education. They're gonna be heavily out of office. And if they're in office, if they're smart, they're trying to garner that attention to close out the year, really do those celebrations. All of the things that happen in schools and communities take a lot of time, right?

but they may also be fake out of office and really heads down trying to think strategically to close the academic school year out while at the same time trying to figure out their tech stack, trying to figure out their vendors they're gonna partner with next year so they can continue to improve learning outcomes for their students, right? So it's that duality that your buyers are always juggling and now attention is at a negative.

It's very hard to get a hold of people. But when you do reach out to your buyers, I want it to be really heartfelt. I want it to be human driven, relationship driven. Wish them happy holidays. Show pictures of your team. When people think that that is cheesy of doing those holiday cards and showing those big group photos, it is not. We live in education. The world of education is human. People buy because of the humans behind the brand. And please do not forget that.

That is not stupid to do. It is not generic. I love behind the scenes content of what's going on with brands. Maybe do things around your holiday party or whatever you're doing, behind the scenes, getting ready. Show the personality. Show the human fun behind your brand. This is the time where humans want to connect with humans as much as possible.

I know you're gonna think I'm crazy here, but direct mail during this time. I am somebody who loves an old school card. I do thank you notes. When you have time, this is the time of year where connectiveness matters. Family, connection, whatever it is, community. So send those personal notes. Say hey, I'm thinking of you, I'm wishing you a happy holidays during this time. Send a little gift if you want.

That goes such a long way, especially right now in the world of AI slop. There is so much stuff, and I almost said the SH word, but there's so much stuff in our feeds that we just don't know, is this real? But a handwritten note with someone saying, truly am thinking of you, hey, you know, I hope you're the golf courses right now because I know you love it, or whatever it may be, showing that you care and listen.

I don't know about you, but I'm not in this industry just to sell, just to do things. I'm here to create relationships. Like that's what matters at the end of the day too. So keep that in mind. This is a really great time to do that.

All right, marketers, so what should I do if I can't get ahold of people in December? Some of this is really owning and emphasizing that human first content as much as possible. And I want you to play around too, entertain, inspire. It doesn't all have to be heavy professional development or things like that when we're talking to the people using your product, right?

The other things you can do, December is a good time to build up things so you can hit the ground running in January. I want you to build up your efficacy library as much as possible. If you do not have case studies, customer success stories where a buyer can come in and say, that's me, I'm in rural Kentucky and they did it, that worked for them, so it's gonna work for me. You wanna start building out slowly the different use cases, the different types of flavors of buyer personas.

So people can easily go to your website and say, wow, that's me, or that's a colleague that I admire. FOMO is real in our industry. So build out your efficacy library as much as possible if you can. We have a really great kind of side note, but I love doing case studies. And really make sure when you're doing case studies, you operationalize your process as much as possible. Video forward, human forward. Maybe we do a whole other episode on how to do that. OK.

I want you, we talked about humans front and center from a marketing perspective, lean into that as much as possible. Behind the scenes photos, holiday cards, team traditions, maybe just like a quick message from your founder or your executive director or your CEO, just really wishing people happy holidays and maybe their own tradition, whatever it may be, connection, human forward as much as possible.

And we can start really thinking about how do we position this to really continue that relationship with the humans in your organization. Thought leadership content. I don't want product marketing content. There is a place for product marketing, but what we're talking about is establishing recurring and hopefully deep relationships with the people in your organization. And to do that, interview.

your CEO on the main topic related to your organization. If it's project-based learning, experiential learning, coding, talk to them about it so we can really talk deeply about the topic. So we're not just selling, we're contributing to the dialogue of the topic in the space too.

December is a great time for light, fun, low-ask content. Be fun, be silly. Play around, make sure it's on brand as much as possible. But you know, I've got clients that have mascots and we're putting those mascots in different places in the snow and whatever it is, play around with it, have fun. If you're not having fun, your audience isn't gonna have fun with you.

If you can, I feel like December is not only only two weeks, it feels like for marketers, but you also have to think about the first two weeks of January. So you're doing four weeks into two. And we'll talk a little bit about how to get ahead in January. But because of that time is scarce. If you are lucky and you have a half a day or a day, put it out of office on.

How do I wanna improve? What from all of my marketing channels is delivering and what is not? Where do I wanna put my bets for my go-to-market plan? All of these things you can't really do without what I call a cone of silence. So do what you have to do, pretend that you're out of office and get some time if you can.

things never to do in December. I don't want you to be that creepy person pushing for demos, pushing for, let me just show you how our product can help you right now. Like I said, this is the time for relationships first. If they wanna do that, they will reach out to you because they appreciate you as a human. continue to lay that foundation. There's a time and place for everything, tactic, all of those things, right?

Let's talk about content that's appropriate for this space of kind of the Christmas holidays to the end of year. This is kind of no man's land, right? How do we show up when people are on vacation? And educators don't want to professionally develop, buyers don't want to think about life. It's just, how do you show up? How do you be relevant? But how do you be helpful first and foremost? So I love myself a good end of year countdown.

really, really good. Anything that's a quick win for an educator, they will save it. They are on social media and on email and things like that. They will save things for later if they find it's useful too. So quick wins are really, really helpful.

Case studies, I want you to do them. I don't necessarily want you to share them. I think that they will go flat in the time of what I call the doldrums of Christmas, holiday season to New Year's. So do the research, create the foundation, the case studies, all that thing, wait to go live in January. Speaking of January, you will come back to the first week of January. And I was thinking about what it feels like.

But I typically try to go on vacation. So I'm like restful, I come back. And then it just feels like somebody like did a Gatorade dump of ice water on you. You just feel like, my God, game on. So how do we avoid that feeling as much as possible? I want you to get ahead in terms of work. I know that sounds crazy because you have less time in December, but it will help you come back confident and feel more strategic in 2026.

So think about the email campaigns you have to do for the first week of January. Get ahead of those as much as possible. Think about your social media. Is that kind of scheduled out and we know what we want to do? Do we have some content already batched and in play? Do we have webinars prepped? I want you to think about all of those things that we can do to get ahead so we're not scrambling and losing our vacation feel as soon as we jump in the door, right?

Speaking of planning, I know y'all have heard about this, but we have a free planner. Please download it. It is something that we do from our heart every year. This is our sixth year doing it. We are lucky to say thousands of educators have used it. What I want you to do, if you do have some solitude time, look at your key moments, specifically in January, and then ideally a little bit more down the road. What are the campaigns you want to run? What are the timely events you want to put campaigns in?

content around. Get ahead of it. Don't be reactive. If you're reactive, you create this like too many cooks in the kitchen and you get these emails from people going, why aren't we celebrating this? And then it just creates icky feeling. It's like, let's take the bull by the horns. Let's use a planning resource that can help us. You can go to our website. It's all over the front page, leonaconsultantgroup.com. Okay, I hope this was helpful for you.

I gotta prep for this, hold on.

Okay, the last three weeks my team has been looking at a report by Richard Vanderburen. I always say his name wrong, but he's awesome. He's one of the foremost experts on LinkedIn marketing, specifically B2B LinkedIn marketing. He released an update to his Epic Report. We have been going through it. It's hundreds of pages long. And I want to tell you that he analyzed post types on LinkedIn and

Algorithm is changing all the time. People are using different post types all the time. What works, what gets surfaced up into the feed. So on a high level, I tried to make sense of it. And basically what his research showed is that the text plus the image post is gold standard on LinkedIn, right? So I want you to have some really great text and an image that stops the scroll. That is something that's continuing to gain popularity, is one of your best ways to tell stories.

Popularity is up like crazy. The reach in the algorithm for these types of posts is up like crazy. Engagement is also up like crazy. Document or carousel posts? I mean, how can we get any boringer when we think about uploading a PDF into LinkedIn? But who would have known that people really love it because of its swipeable features, right? So these are PDFs that you upload and they can be so many things. I want to do an episode on

all of the versatile usage of carousel posts. But I want to tell you, popularity has increased not as much as the text plus image posts. The reach has increased not as much as the text plus image posts, but the engagement is off the charts across every single post type. So if carousels are not on your radar, go ahead and look in your feed, look at what other brands are doing, get some ideas for inspiration and start them.

I recommend at least one carousel a week. Video, weird. LinkedIn does not know what to do with video. What my colleague Porter says is, LinkedIn hates itself right now. It's saying it prioritizes video, but it's not. And I think we basically flooded our feet on LinkedIn with too much video and people are just saying, whoa, this is LinkedIn. I don't want to be a passive user of video. So video across the board is down in terms of popularity.

reach and engagement, but I will say don't eliminate video from your strategy on LinkedIn and start playing around with formats because it's not always vertical. have some clients that horizontal works better than vertical. So play around with that. Don't overuse it. I think it's safe to do one video a week. If you have it, don't post video. That's meh. You're like, I got a video. So I'm going to post it only post video that will stop the scroll and is valuable to your audience.

It takes a lot when somebody edits a video and gives it to you for you to look at it and say, that's not good enough, I'm sorry. But we have to be better curators of our feed. I think I'll also say is that articles are coming back in LinkedIn as well. So if you don't know what a LinkedIn article is, quickly Google it. It is great for SEO. It is great for long form thought leadership.

It is very somewhat interchangeable with LinkedIn newsletters. LinkedIn newsletters have the added bonus of being delivered into mailboxes, which I love, love, love. This is like your other email list and you have subscribers on LinkedIn, which is awesome. I recommend all brands to do it, but we're not talking about newsletters. We're talking about articles. Articles are a great way to get in the feed. We're seeing more and more people use articles. We're seeing more and more people.

The reach of those articles increase and they get crawled from the internet, right? So it's not just your feed, but people are saying, wow, I'm googling a topic authority. Your LinkedIn article may come up on the feed and AI, all the things. Engagement has also increased quite a bit in articles too. So I'll give you those things. The losers, the post losers, I don't want to say this so harshly, would be video, text only.

People don't really understand how to do text only posts. Usually those are really great for hot takes POVs and things like that. But because they don't have an image, sometimes they don't stop the scroll. Again, content is king or queen. So if you've got a good statement, it'll go viral. Well, not viral, but it it'll be popular and resonate with your audience. But I would say overall text only posts are down. Polls are kind of down because people don't know how to use them. Right. There's a lot of bad uses of polls out there.

Only three options, maybe two folks. I love the new poll types of things of like, you say this like really powerful statement. And there was one powerful statement, not in our industry, but I think it might help you is like, it said, don't hate me, but I love carnations so much or something. Because like, and it was like Pro Flowers did it, but.

Like, and then it kind of said something around like the poll questions, even though that's not like, that's a statement. But then the poll was, yes, I love carnations or no, never again. like emotion, but related to the brand. Right. But then you can retarget those people because we know that the people like carnations and, all the things, right. And it's low level engagement. So the next time they get the feed, they, get all your posts in their feed. So that's really great too, but people aren't using polls.

correctly and I think they're also being slightly deprioritized. So again, don't put all of your eggs in one basket of post type. the other thing that I thought was really interesting is now they're saying from an individual standpoint, but I think it trickles down to company pages as well, is that when you are posting, don't try to be so diverse that you're posting five or six post types all the time. Focus in on two to four post types that truly work for you.

Because again, LinkedIn is categorizing you as a thought leader, whether you're a company or an individual. And you need to make it easy for them to say, that's Alana. She generally does carousels and videos and the occasional like image text posts. And she talks about XYZ because the way you show up in post types also affects your audience's behavior and the way they engage with you. So that is enough about LinkedIn.

There are so many best practices to go over and we will be launching a course soon in February, all about how to increase your own individual presence on LinkedIn, which I think is the coolest thing and the most transformational thing you can do in an organization. Last thing, Instagram. If you all don't know what a trial reel is, go ahead and Google it, do it. The last episode I said is,

Do a lot of reels. I want to caveat that is that if you've got some great multi-image photo dump slash carousel posts, those can perform really well too, especially during the holidays, right? We've got lots of images, curations. You can also turn those quickly into real, add some audio, add some quick stickers, those type of fun things. So trial reels, they go out to your audience that's not your audience. They go out to your bigger audience. So people that aren't following you.

And it's a great way to test your content too. And you can set the trial reel. It goes out, no harm, no foul. And then I want you to use that same reel and then put it on your actual feed too. So it's like double trouble in a good way. So if that makes sense, when you are creating a reel on your phone, I want you to dupe up that reel before and then put one to schedule to trial reels. And then the next day,

schedule that reel out to your feed. You can thank me later. It does help grow your followers and your engagement. And it also helps you assess what is your content, like how is your content landing a little bit bigger than your followers. So that is it for the social media updates. Now I'm gonna jump into one thought that made me stop on LinkedIn.

All right, this shout out goes out to Melissa Hayek. She is the Senior Director of Marketing at Education Week. They've got a great newsletter, Carl Wired Marketer, that you can sign up for free. But she talked about some of the most popular content at Ed Week. And she said that they're explainers. And they're these explainer type of content that are like years and years old. I like to call them evergreen content. She says her audience devours them.

And it's not just new teachers or new things. A lot of times people need to be reminded of what a certain topic is and the nuances that you can't just Google, you can't just get AI in. It is a deep explainer type of content. You might even want to associate what she's talking about in the SEO world as pillar page content. Pillar page of let's talk deeply about one type of content issue challenge.

And then also have it be a thoroughfare where it can connect you to other blogs, other resources so you can dive deeper, right? So.

She says, good candidates for explainers is a topic that isn't easily answered with a quick Google GenAI search. Yes, hey, I just said that. Complex proposals that require explaining new technology entering the K-12 space, making sense of the latest research. So think about that as you're creating your content strategy. Obviously, it should be really as steeped in AI and specifically GenAI.

I wouldn't ignore this. She says her pro tip, your explainer should give the reader enough info to be able to talk to someone about the topic at a cocktail party or in a casual conversation at your booth or conference. So there you go. I will put the link to this in the show notes, but she shares a couple of the resources. If you're like, I still can't figure out what that type is, I get you. She has one that's like,

Teachers pay, explained. Salaries, benefits, and pensions. Right? like she said, that article's four years old and still going strong. So think about something that's evergreen that people constantly Google, high search volume, aligned with your brand. That's a really big thing. But this content can have some legs. Okay, folks, I hope this was really, really helpful for you. This is what I aim for. We're getting some really great feedback on these episodes.

I aim to make these even shorter and even more bite-sized. Thank you for listening. Happy holidays.