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LinkedIn Is Done With AI Slop: What That Means for Your Fall Content
Episode 32 • 6th August 2026 • Marketing and Education • Elana Leoni | Leoni Consulting Group
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LinkedIn just made a real change to how it ranks content, and it's aimed squarely at AI-generated posts. Captions are getting penalized for running too long, hashtags are being deprioritized, and the platform is now rewarding accounts that show up consistently rather than accounts that post the most. For education marketers already stretched thin, this changes what "good" LinkedIn content actually looks like heading into the busiest stretch of the year.

At the same time, EdTech just closed out the first half of 2026, and the industry felt it. Several companies made layoffs as they reconciled H1 numbers against annual goals, a reminder that marketing budgets and headcount are under real scrutiny right now. It's also a good moment to ask a harder question: which parts of your own marketing mix are you keeping simply because you've always done them, and which ones actually have the data to back them up?

This field notes episode covers what's moving fast right now: LinkedIn's new rules on AI content and consistency, what recent layoffs signal about EdTech budgets, where national conferences like ISTE fit into a shifting events landscape, subject line ideas worth testing before back-to-school email sends, and a full calendar of what to put on your radar for August and September.

What You’ll Learn

1️⃣ Why LinkedIn is rewriting the rules on content, and why it matters more than a ranking tweak

Long, AI-sounding captions and heavy hashtag use are getting penalized, while accounts that post consistently (two to three times a week) are getting rewarded. On top of that, posts are increasingly getting indexed and cited by AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, so what you publish today can still be surfacing your expertise months from now.

2️⃣ What the wave of EdTech layoffs after H1 signals about marketing budgets right now

Several companies cut staff as they reconciled first-half performance against annual goals, a sign that marketing investment is under real scrutiny. It's a good prompt to look at your own mix and ask what you're keeping simply out of habit versus what the data actually supports.

3️⃣ What's actually worth putting on your August and September marketing calendar

From back-to-school timing that varies wildly by region, to where national conferences like ISTE fit as attendance shifts toward smaller, regional events, to the literacy, attendance, and gratitude moments worth planning around before October's conference season ramps up.

Why It Matters

Education marketers are heading into back-to-school season with less room for error than usual. Budgets are under closer scrutiny after a round of EdTech layoffs, the platform that most B2B education brands depend on just changed what it rewards, and the traditional conference calendar that used to anchor a lot of go-to-market planning is shifting under everyone's feet.

None of this is a reason to freeze. It's a reason to be more deliberate: know what you're measuring and why, know what LinkedIn actually rewards right now instead of what worked a year ago, and know exactly when your audience is heads-down in back-to-school mode versus ready to hear from you. The marketers who take the time to recalibrate this summer will be in a much stronger position once the fall buying cycle picks back up.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Transcripts

Elana Leoni (:

Hello everyone, welcome back to All Things Marketing in Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and this is a special episode of Education Marketing Field Notes. It's where you get to hear from me, the solo episodes where I share what's changing, what's not, and what I think education marketers like you should be paying attention to right now. Plus, there's some random stuff in between that I just found helpful, I hope you find helpful, and

As we start iterating on these episodes, please let me know what you like and what you can pass up to. All right, so let's get started about this month. I'm gonna mostly reflect on what's coming, what's gonna hit us as marketers in the pipeline. And mostly I'm thinking about the months of August and September for you. And I know as marketers you wanna get more ahead than that, but let's be real, everything is changing so quick.

Even if you've already planned out August, August and September, I want you to think critically about how do we show up with as much value and as much relevance as possible to not only our users, but importantly, our buyers as much as possible too. And that's becoming more complex. Budgets are changing, all of the good things that usually swirl around in our wonderful world of Ed Tech is happening. Okay, so.

I guess I want to start by just sharing something. And it's a little anti-me or anti-LCG.

I am all about thought leadership. I am all about how do we show up and give value as much as possible to our audience. We are in it for the long term. We are thought partners. But to what end? And I want us all to think critically about if we are selling a product, if we are selling enterprise software, if if we are a product that can scale in districts in K-12 or higher education.

How much of a thought leader do you need to be? I know this sounds so not like me. I just want to be contrarian and I want you to think about are we doing things for the sake of doing them? And whatever you do, I want you to look at what we have been investing in? How much does it cost us? And what is it actually getting us? And what is it actually getting us could be brand awareness. And I want you to have actionable ways that you can measure that. I want you to have, are we?

Creating relationships? Are we creating repeated, repeatable behaviors of engagement? You know how to measure that as well. Is it driving website traffic? If what they're doing on the website, what type of quality of website traffic? I want you to think about all of these things. And this is the moment for us, as we're starting to look at budgets and all of the things around our marketing mix, what is truly working?

A great content strategy can fundamentally transform your brand. But if you're not measuring its effectiveness and you do need a long ramp up, this podcast is almost five years old. The ramp up was really slow. And that was intentional because we had really low capacity to grow it significantly, but I knew it would take time and I wanted to invest that. And it's fundamentally transformed our content and our brand. So that is different.

But I do see brands just continuing to go through the motions. And I want you to stop and pause and say, what data do we have to support that it is working? And ultimately, there are so many things you do as marketing, but ultimately you may be judged by how many MQLs your marketing qualified leads and SQLs, those sales qualified leads, you're driving for your organization. So with that in mind, I just wanted to take like this exercise and look.

And think. There is such freedom in letting go of things that you've consistently done over and over again. if you want to get into psychology, the reason why we hold on to things, even stuff that's not doing well, and and this also goes for our own psychology of bad habits that we have, we hold on to them because it's comfortable. And there's this whole strata there's a whole concept of loss aversion.

And I've been digging into that, the psychology of it. Why do we hold on to things that don't work? So there is your moment, your moment of zen, your moment of freedom to really say, is it working? wait, Elana says, Do I have data to support it? And if I've invested enough time that the channel needs to ramp up and it's still not working, I either need to improve it or cut it. So there we go.

I'm also seeing some layoffs in Ed Tech. And I don't want this to be a doom and gloom because it happens in every single industry and it's happening across all industries right now in particular. It's it's a little bit of economy, it's a little bit like we're in this weird war and there's all these things going on, right? but in Ed Tech in particular, we have finished H1. So in July, we get those numbers out. Half of the year is over.

And if you are not pacing to goals, you're gonna have to look at how do we maintain our profitability. The way they maintain their profitability is they start cutting jobs. So we did see pretty much all at once, it felt like. I know of at least five companies that laid off people in Ed Tech, and they were fairly significant. So I just want you to know that this industry is small and that we care about you.

And there is a whole lot of posts going on on LinkedIn of people trying to help. We have a newsletter, a bit of a shameless plug. Monthly it goes out. I curate some of the best jobs for marketing and education there. And you are also welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. URL will put in the show notes, but it's just our website, Leone Consulting Group.com, backslash, not backslash, people have told me not to say that. Forward slash newsletter hyphen signup.

Okay, the last of what I want to talk about in the beginning, then we'll get into what the events are happening so you can make sure that you have them on your calendars. I want to talk about social media platform updates and then a couple of things that have just gotten me thinking from LinkedIn in particular. I want to talk quickly about ISTE. And this is a bit loaded because I feel like everyone's got their opinions because ISTE

was the biggest Ed Tech conference. It's the national Ed Tech show, pretty much. I don't know what like BETT is coming next year to USA. It might try to be the biggest Ed Tech show. FETC has gotten bigger and bigger. But ISTE from the third now it's like if I would have gone the last two years, it would have been 15 years of me going. I've been 13 times in a row. So I know what ISTE feels like and I certainly know what ISTE feels like.

Pre-COVID. Pre-COVID, they were seeing numbers of 20,000, 25,000 educators. It was the conference season. That's what people did to professionally develop. Post-COVID, and this is not just ISTE, this is across all conferences, you know, registrations are down, attendance is down. I think that they would probably say that they had numbers in like the 10,000s. I don't think anyone releases their numbers, but

I guess the question is, where do these big shows fit into your marketing mix? If you're trying to reach school and district leaders and maybe potentially educators, depending on you know where you're focusing and where your funnel is, where do you go? And I have been talking with my PLN quite a bit about this. And many have shared that their clients and them in particular might be gravitating towards, you know, BOCES or

education service agencies or regional events or really highly narrowly specific events, state events. So think about your conference strategy. Think about depth versus breadth sometimes of how many deals do I think I can close and do I have buyers in the room or I can have time with and at least have a moment to schedule

next week I'm gonna talk to them in in advance and that's a demo on the books, right? I talked with Karen Borschart, Borchert, sorry Karen, Karen Bor Borchert over at Alpaca, and she had this amazing tip. And she said, you know, Elana, when we're at booths, we don't have the time to do that one-on-one demo. Plus they are completely ADD. There's too much going on in conferences. So what we do is we try to catch them and say, here's what we do that aligns with your challenges really quickly. But hey

Let's find some time next week on the calendar right now. And they book that. And that is so genius because then they walk away, their sales team, with a full calendar of book demos. They don't have to follow up. They don't have to like, you know, they're exhausted from whatever conference they're at and it takes them a week to follow up. And then the person forgets they even went to the booth. So take that pro tip. I think it's genius. We talked about it in the last episode with Karen. I'll put it in the show notes as well.

But I just want you to think critically as as we start thinking about the role that conferences play. I don't think that national conference roles are out by any means. I think that there's a ton of value in it. It's just managing your expectations of what you want to get out of it and thinking critically before you jump into them too. It's conferences are changing, the ecosystem is getting more nuanced and complex. And

The buying is getting more and more critical and picky. So how do we get in front of buyers? How do we do it aligned with our budget constraints? Maybe we have a go-to-market strategy where we're focusing on six states and we want to focus on those states, or we have evidence to believe that those states and leaders in those will be in attendance over at ISTE or FETC or TCA or whatever those big Ed Tech shows are, right? just think, just know that we're all thinking about it.

And if you want to think about it with me, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn. I am thinking about what is always the best way to approach conferences. That channel does deliver. And it's just about how we approach the channel a little bit more thoughtfully. So I will say that ISTE also announced their new brand name. It is called the International Society for Transforming Education. I will leave you with that.

I I will not comment on that. I just wanna let you know that ISTE changed their name. It's the same acronym. It now includes ASCD. Okay.

Friends, let's get into some platform updates. So a lot has changed. I am every day looking at algorithm changes, looking at what role different marketing channels play and how they're being valued and what the algorithm is doing and all of the nooks and crannies within it. And it is, it is drama. It is bring the popcorn for me. I will say that.

Social media has always been this behind the scenes. You're doing cool things, and maybe your profile is turning up in search before. Where if I searched a brand name, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook profile will pop up. Your your individual posts rarely, or if any, because they at a long for a long time they were never discoverable. Now that is changing. Social media is a discovery channel.

That completely just debunks of like post shelf life. Remember, we'd have those graphics and we'd call them half-lifes and stuff and they were cute little graphics. I even created one and it was about if you post something, everything is so ephemeral that it'll die within a certain amount of seconds. Like a tweet was like eight minutes and you know, a TikTok 90 seconds, whatever. that's kind of no longer.

Because it's getting indexed and cited. And I'm not just talking about Google and Bing searches, organic SEO searches. I'm talking about LLM crawls and citing within LLMs. So you get that AEO GEO awesomeness. One recent study looked at almost 89,000 LinkedIn URLs and found LinkedIn was the second most cited domain across ChatGPT, Google AI mode, and perplexity.

Huge. That's huge. And I was also listening to another podcast, and they said every single post you do, you should have a prompt and make sure that you're optimizing with keywords so it can be more discoverable. I don't want you to overthink your posting. I always channel, I call it my inner Porter. Porter is a teammate that's been with me for eight years at an LCG's nine plus years, and she's she's all about just gosh, please don't be

like methodical. Please don't have a a a routine to how you post something with a hook and a this and a that. It loses who you are and it loses why people actually engage with you. So don't overthink it, but I do want you to know that now your social media posts are being indexed. And that's a whole new game changer because if you are truly just measuring social media based on how many referral clicks and all the things it's doing, that's different now.

You actually, and I was looking into some tools, and maybe in the next episode, I'm gonna go through some of the tools around how do we start measuring the effect of social media in terms of SEO and GEO? And there's a lot of cool new new tools out there that we can look at around that. So it's no longer just Google traffic, are they converting, you know, platform analytics, impressions, engagements, engagement rate, video view, all the things. so that's a whole new thing.

And that's exciting. That really is exciting.

speaking of LinkedIn, there is another big update happening on LinkedIn. We at LCG we just blogged about some a a lot of reports that have come out on LinkedIn. They have best practices on post types. They talk about the post itself talks about how it LinkedIn was more of a relationship-focused platform where it delivered posts to your relationships and connections and now it's moved to interests and topics.

So do check that out. It's on our blog. We'll put it in the show notes in particular. But I want to dive into one specific thing that is good because we're all really annoyed by it. Is LinkedIn is now penalizing. I don't know that they're not removing, but they are definitely penalizing all the AI slop you're seeing on LinkedIn. And it's gotten crazy. You see these long, long posts, and you're like, how can I even begin to read this?

I have done long posts, but they're usually about, hey, this isn't a personal update. There's no way I can justify it in 200 words. But I try to be more mindful because people don't have time to read all of this. my God, imagine a whole feed of that. So LinkedIn has gotten smart and says AI is killing our engagement. AI is killing our experience on the platform. So now they are.

not only penalizing, but they are posting things to say, hey, your your captions have to be two to three hundred words generally. And and then once you read our blog post, you'll also go, okay, but Elana, that's not true because carousel posts should have less or shorter captions. Okay, yes, fair point. But smaller captions, 200 or 300 words. And I don't want you using any hashtags, those are old school. I I don't want you over tagging people that will never engage with your posts. But

That's a big change. The AI slop removal. LinkedIn posts about it. We'll put it in the show notes, but they actually created a LinkedIn article to talk about what they're doing. And then Fast Company had this fascinating article about it too. So those are all in the show notes. But I just want you to come to LinkedIn going, no, I can't do that anymore. And maybe, maybe I can do longer posts, but this is the exception because it's authentically me showing up, or it's authentically my brand showing up.

And then last thing on LinkedIn, I swear this is not all about LinkedIn. I've got some things on subject lines too, but this is something that my team and me have been shouting at the rooftops for years and years and years, and I don't know, even before years, like decades, is that whatever you do, be consistent. And LinkedIn is finally saying, yes, we are rewarding consistency for showing up our platform on our platform. And they say, without a doubt,

The like there is no like, yeah, him and ha. It's they are saying that you need to show up on LinkedIn two to three times a week. That's two to three posts a week for individuals and company pages. If you do not, they penalize you. So again, we are a little bit of in rented space territory. We will do what the algorithm tells us to do, otherwise we get penalized.

We need to look at our marketing mix and say how much time will it take us to do all of this and what do we expect for an ROI? I will say that if you're in B2B marketing, LinkedIn is table stakes, you need to be on it. Other channels we can kind of look at and say, all right, what do we think we can get out of it? How important is this to our marketing mix? but two to three posts a week. Done. No argument there. All right, that's enough of LinkedIn. I hope you found it valuable.

Lastly, I want to end up with some email subject lines. Yes, email open rates are completely inflated. I get it, but it is a directional metric. You can start to understand what is working, even though we know it's overly inflated. Okay. We also know that click-through rates are overly inflated. Okay, yes. But I want you to start being more innovative with your subject lines. I see the same boring subject lines come my way in our industry.

like newsletter edition blah or and some people aren't even using the preview text like it's just like get some excitement in email again you don't have to have a personality you can keep it enterprise you can keep it about your product as much as possible too but some things that you might want to try out and again a lot of these trends are coming because AI is dominating everything right now.

And if you sound like AI and you sound like a promotion, it's gonna go into the promotions folder. And I I just don't feel like getting yelled at or being told, hey, go buy this, blah, blah, blah. so what stands out in the midst of all of this? Kind of also fairly similar to what's going on in LinkedIn, AI slop, right? So subject lines to try out, incomplete sentences such as like, don't make the same, or I tried this, you know.

A cliffhanger. You could add a dot dot dot if you wanted to, but sometimes like how do we pull them in? And they're like, did they mean to do that? Right? All lowercase subject lines. AI would never do that. They always capitalize that first word too. So and again, it makes you pause and you're like, is that a typo? Did they mean to do that? Again, you don't want to do things that, you know, hurt your brand or don't align with who your brand is and your tone and your voice and your positioning and all of that.

's old school. It's very like:

Emojis can stand out your subject line. Emojis can also help train people. And you're like, yeah, Elana's email always has a star. My email does not have a star. But you know, that is helpful because when you think about the sea of subject lines, sometimes a little pretty, you know, pizzazz helps. And then lastly, this a lot of these came actually from Jay Schwedelson. I'll put it in the podcast or in the podcast show notes too. But he's got a couple of podcasts.

that I listen to pretty regularly and he has these such great tips email, social, all the things. So he put something in that I was like, I don't think that would work. But then I started thinking about it. I'm like, huh. He said, I want you to do in his words, an absurdly long subject line. Like max out the characters for your subject line. I'm like, that sounds horrible. But then I think about it and it's all about real estate. Again, your phone will only

show a certain amount and then email every email client in a phone is slightly different on the amount of characters they will show for a subject line. But again, that's a little bit a cliffhanger dot dot dot. And it's also like, did they mean to do that? Right? but in desktop when you have previews associated with it too, it'll take up the whole preview space. So imagine it being super long. And for those of you watching me in video too, you can see I'm just like giving you like hand gestures. But I I'm imagining

my entire email and my subject line taking up that entire thing, including where the preview text goes. That's kind of huge. So I might be playing around with that too. So I hope these were helpful from a platform perspective. No all of this will change tomorrow.

Okay, folks, let's shift into what's happening in the next couple months from an education events and marketing calendar perspective. We're talking K-12, we're talking higher education. August and September. It's a weird time to be in the world of conferences, to be honest, because we've got

The big thing happening in education, back to school. People are going back to school. The last thing that they're going to be doing is like, I need to professionally develop or I need to go to this conference. And guess what? The industry recognizes that. And then we s slightly take a pause around conferences. There are events happening, and I'm going to talk to you about things that maybe you should be putting on your marketing calendar to say,

Gosh, you know, our audience really cares about this day or the way that the theme of this month. So we're gonna jump into that. So I'll give you those things, but just know from a conference perspective, it's a little lighter load. And we ramp up, it becomes go time in October. I think October in October and March, and March and April are like huge go times in terms of conferences. So what most brands are doing is ramping up for October.

Making sure all of their speaking submissions are being accepted, hopefully. that they're prepping for their booth strategy, their lead strategy. They're making sure that their all of their audience knows they're gonna be at these events. So that work is happening now. let's talk about back to school for a second, because that's tricky.

I think sometimes when people in international companies they come to the US and they're like, Why do you all do everything differently? I'm like, 'cause we're fifty states and we all like, you know, we got our states' rights and things, you know, and they're just like, you make it so complicated. And not only, you know, from a back to school timeline perspective, but from a purchasing perspective. Like they all work slightly differently. They all have different like state grants and you know, all the things around that. we'll get we know this, right? It's fine.

But I still think it's funny that, you know, when people come in, they're like, gosh, it's so much harder, right? so when exactly does back to school hit? And I know that this is more a bit affirming for many of you, but for maybe those of you that are jumping into the industry, and it's nice to have some stats too. But I just looked up the latest stats. I think we are teachers and what's it called? Nielsen?

We'll put those links in the show notes so you can nerd out on the data too. But nearly half of public schools actually begin before August 16th. So August 16th, we got about half of half of the public schools. That is that has changed, by the way. It used to be later, but August 16th is nearly half. and then

We also have the other spectrum where others don't return until after Labor Day. So depending on where your audience is, you know, they could be doing all sorts of things in their timeline. And there's a way to broaden it because in general, July we talk about back to school. And that's a safe bet. Unless your audience is saying, hey, don't talk about back to school. Like we don't talk about back to school during fourth of July week. Like we let that settle.

But pretty much once that's done, we jump into back to school mode to make sure that we're there for the educators and the education leaders that are jumping into back to school earlier. And then though those that aren't, it's okay. They'll tune you out. Don't worry. another stat, 48% of US public schools begin before August 16th. So that says they're nearly half. So, and then the majority of schools start sometime in August. We know that, right?

Southern states tend to start earliest, often in early August, while many northeastern states still begin after Labor Day. I actually didn't know that. I'm such a West Coast type of person, but we got the Northeast kind of doing the late starts. And this is all general, because you might be like, not this district or whatever it may be, but sometimes it's nice to understand generally the trends. And if you've got target states and target school districts, you

Better have here's exactly when they start and have a whole specific go-to-market around those. So that's back to school. It's fun, the excitement's in the air. generally, your leader audience is gonna be way triage. They're in, you know, Maslov's hierarchy of needs, right? They are not talking like.

In the beginning, whether it be August or early September when they are starting, they are making sure that everything is running smoothly. Safety, teachers, parents, starting a community, all of the things that are happening. So it might be hard to get their attention. what you want to do is just respect that and be there in a valuable way. And it's gonna be different.

For every single district and that you jump into and reach out to, but that's okay. you also want to make sure that you're showing up for your users that are are potentially using your product or experiencing your service for the first time. So be there for them, get them excited, make it easy for them to get started and grow within your product too. So I've talked

ingle year. We are working on:

cause we're in production for:

Some calendar moments to put on your radar. International Book Lovers Day. I love, love, love that one. So if anything around literacy, we have International Youth Day on August 12th. We've got National Back to School Prep Day. that one's like, yeah, it's a national day. I don't think anyone celebrates it. So I want you to also, when you're thinking and looking at calendars, also number one, say, will people be talking about it? And does my audience care about it? I think that one just says.

Hey, maybe we should be talking about back to school in general. And no one really knows that that's the day, right? We also have Women's Equality Day on August 26th, World Distance Learning Day at the end of the month on August 31st.

September. So like I said, September is either the rest of the school districts are jumping in and starting school or they're kind of getting into a little bit of a rhythm, right? So it could be a little bit of either or regardless, it's all gonna about be about how do I build classroom communities? How do I really make sure that the curriculum is planned out and I'm diving a little deeper?

you're working through a lot of the challenges, student engagement, all of the things around that. And then you're prepping for those parent-teacher conferences. So this month in September, we've got National Hispanic Heritage Month, we've got attendance awareness month. I don't really see people talking about that month. It's kind of like a womp womp, right? But it could be something because attendance and in in particular chronic absenteeism.

Is always going to be something that school and district leaders care about. So if you can find a timely way that aligns, just know that people always care about attendance because a lot of school districts, it's the way they get paid. If kids aren't showing up, they aren't getting paid for that. It's not all, so you need to be aware of what states and what districts actually do that.

We have International Literacy Day on September 18th. So anything around literacy, if you're a brand, that's a no-brainer. Join in the celebration. Make sure that your audience cares about it. It's fun ways to show resources and celebrate and educate. We have online learning day on September 15th, fun one National Play-Doh Day on September 16th, Constitution Day on September 17th, maybe to kind of

continue America's 250 celebration. I love World Gratitude Day, which is on September 21st. And coincidentally, it's also the same day as International Peace Day. So I usually pick one. Gratitude is a really fun one and it's a great way to make sure that you are expressing your gratitude for just helping others and being in this space and for the educators that take time to use your product.

And reach out to you and spread the word about your products. And just gratitude is a really nice thing, especially in our industry as a whole. It's also a great way to humanize your brand in particular. And then lastly, International Podcast Day is at the end of September. If you have a brand podcast, it's a great way to say, okay, maybe we go we do a roll of our top 10 podcasts of the year for International Podcast Day, or maybe we do a collective shout-out to the great.

education shows that we listen to or the, you know, the ed leader shows, whatever it may be, but try to find a way to kind of make it fun, make it valuable. And September, we don't have a ton of conferences, like I said, I'd say there's some things going on with the tech and learning summits, which are really cool. Educause on the higher education spectrum is towards the end of September as well.

And I think I want you to take away from this is all ramping up to the October dun dun dun. We've got lots of conferences in October. So making sure you're on point, that you're showing up, you're making the most of all of the things you're doing in October as a brand is really important.

All right, friends, let's round out this episode with a couple of things you want to put on your radar. As a marketer, I'm always like, shoot, I missed that date. I didn't even know about that. And we would have been perfect for that. So here is the moment. I'm trying to help you navigate this world at fast pace. my gosh, I wish I would have known that.

So one, I want to give a shout out to our friends at Rye Consulting, Rainer Gl Raina Glumach, that's her agency. And every month, I think it's every month, they do these state deep dives. And as you are trying to figure out what states to approach and emphasize within your go-to-market.

Know that there is an organization that gives free deep dives around the state, how they buy, what are the grants available, what are the trends in that state. And like I said, I was joking around, every state is its own country here in the United States, right? So on August 11th, they have Brian McCorkle, and he's actually going to be on our podcast in a couple of months as well. But he is doing a deep dive into the wonderful state of Florida.

too. So one of the biggest markets in education. deep dive, and we will put the link to the show notes of when you can register. And then these last two ones are

What's the word I'm looking for? Awards, if that's what they are. And if you do not have big efficacy studies or anything like that, and you do need, and we have all sorts of episodes on how to get started in terms of efficacy, whether it be qualitative, quantitative, longitudinal, all those big words with syllables, you needed to be doing something. You need to be doing case studies, success stories, all of the things. But

You also need some kind of cred, you know, like, hey, we got this award. This is cool. this panel of judges with this background or this brand has stood behind us and said we are the best back to school tech solution for this category. That's kind of cool. and I will say it's not gonna like make or break your sale, but it is something when people look at is this company legit? And you know, these accolades do.

istrict administration, their:

are out. So I will put the link in the show notes, but they've got, you know, nominal entry fees. They've got categories from anything from like CTE to curriculum to inclusive technology. doesn't have to be all tech in particular. And that is, I'm looking here, the deadline is October 9th to apply. They have another date which is confusing and they say companies will be notified on November 1st.

xcellence, the Back to School:

I am constantly learning from you all on LinkedIn. And one of the things is, did it stop the scroll in a way that wasn't just clickbaity? But God, it just got me to think about things differently. And these two posts in particular did. One is from my friend Hallie. And if you don't know her, she's a really great Ed Tech marketer. We have had her on the show. So I'll put her link in the show notes. And Hallie in particular, she had a post.

Around she recently went to, I believe it was ERDI or IEI. Let me get to the post really quick. ERDI, yes. So she basically came back from ERDI, which is a type of I don't know, what we call them internally, pay-to-play conferences. You pay a certain amount of fee, you get access to school and district leaders. There's all sorts of companies that do it, but she was sharing from it and like props to anybody who.

Is taking those moments because not all of us have the privilege to go to events all of the time, right? And especially pay-to-play events where districts are open, you know, district leaders are openly talking about challenges and they're talking about things like, hey, what gets their attention and all of that goodness, right? So she said a whole panel of district leaders said that they'd never heard about outcomes-based pricing.

But then she said in one session, one superintendent said he wouldn't even consider per student contracts that didn't directly connect to outcomes with outcomes-based pricing. So basically, she's saying is she was in one session, they were all about outcome-based contracts. And if you don't know what those are, there's a whole nonprofit or center around it. You can Google it. It's very interesting. I've attended a lot of sessions on it. Lastly, I was at ASUJSV and

There is some great data around it. There's also a lot of challenges around it. But she was like, hey, it was all the rage in one session and everyone knew about it and they were heading the nodding their heads. And then an hour later, there was an entire different group of people that have never even heard about the terminology. So there's a lot of silos going on within leadership as well. There's a lot of trends in little like separate bubbles, too. And then she kind of just said, you know, that wasn't the only thing. There were so many district leaders that were.

Of contradicting each other at times because they have completely different experiences and preferences, right? So, like for example, she said some district leaders said it was okay to connect with their board, their school board. And others said, please never ever do it. Right. So then you're like, okay, I'm throwing up my hands. What do I do? You gotta read the room, you gotta understand when you can jump in in a non-abrasive, potentially value-driven way.

And she said the screen time situation is all over the place, right? So you can't make assumptions about where a particular district leader stands, but you can see what their boards are saying if you're doing Burbio or Starbridge or tools like that where you can actually look at school board notes. They're also public record and you can use LLMs to do that too. But it made me pause and just say, wow, that's a whole other level of complexity.

And so you do need to be able to say before you jump in and approach schools and districts, where is their evidence of what their top challenges are? What do they care about most? And what are their preferences on things like contracts? Like these are all really important for procurement and closing the deal itself. So I mean, the question is, how do you possibly scale this? That is a hard one. and

Ultimately, it does come down to relationships and not transactions. And that's what Hallie doubled down on. But that's not necessarily it can be scalable. And really, when you're in education, it is for the long term. And those relationships, you know, really double down because we see turnover, we see people moving and shaking in different districts. But it's just not a one size fits all. And this post really made me pause and say, gosh.

It sure is hard out there, but you need to make sure you're leading with intuition, you're leading with data, and you're making sure that you're not making broad assumptions. So, shout out to Hallie. I will put a link to her LinkedIn and that post so you can learn alongside her. Last but not least, I am giving a shout out to my friend Katie Tess Davis. She was the head of ASCD comms back in the day. She has a company called Forthright Advising.

And she works a lot with nonprofits. And I think her tagline is, shoot, Katie, I should know your tagline, but it's like about, you know, nonprofits that do good for children or something. So it's it's broader than education. She ours she is a PR comms. She just does all the things around there. But she gave me something in a LinkedIn post that now I see everywhere.

And I forget what that's called. So if y'all know it's it's that selection within your brain is once you start to recognize it, you see it everywhere. And it bothers me now. And it probably bothered her, what's why she created this LinkedIn post. But she showed me a spam email on this LinkedIn post and she said, I got this email. As soon as I saw it, I need to show my network about it. And it's about, you know, when you put something in and you're like, hey, this is not.

a spam message or I'm not gonna steal your info or just kidding or you know, like you're already putting in these negative, like you're putting it in their brain, even though you're trying to contrast it, if that makes sense. Right. So in her email, she said, in the middle of her email, the spammer promises me, this is not a scam. This is not an MLM. and she said, Well, if I wasn't thinking it at first, I sure am now.

Right. And so you gotta think about even if you're using things to contrast of like this is not just a one and done blah blah blah. Like sometimes you're like, well maybe they are that because the industry is like that. I really want you to focus on what you are, what you do different from anybody else, and stop with the weird negative comparisons or putting in what you're not. Because as soon as you say what you're not, I pause on that. I'm like, hmm, maybe they are that.

So I see that, like you think about that and you're like, that's stupid. No one will do that. People do it all of the time. I see it everywhere. So thank you for this note and this reminder. Katie, I will put her link to this great LinkedIn post and her profile in the show notes. So I hope you all found some value in this ramblings. I really want you to take away just a couple of things that you can change in your marketing mix as a result of this.

So whether it is looking at events that can be timely, prepping for conferences, really understanding what the shifts of the industry are doing and the trends, I try to provide that. And then last but not least, if you're just a real practical person, what are you gonna do differently on those platforms we talked about? Whether it be LinkedIn, social media as a whole, email, I wanna hear it. So thank you all for joining me. We will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. And

We are getting more reviews on whatever platform of your choice. Apple, Spotify, I see them coming in. I thank you. Please take just one second to do some five stars for us. We want to reach more people. Thanks everyone. Have a good whatever you're doing right now, and we will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Bye.

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