The School Place creates brand equity by advertising in prominent, nationally circulated teacher publications such as Instructor magazine and Learning magazine, each with circulation in excess of 150,000 readers, both targeting educators in grades Pre-K thru 8.
Funding for national advertising is provided cooperatively by The School Place and various manufacturers & publishers within the school market who support The School Place mission.
The ultimate beneficiaries of the advertising are the individual School Place dealer members. It is neither economically feasible, nor practical, for each local dealer to independently engage in national advertising. By joining forces together as School Place dealers, the national advertising campaign becomes not only economic and practical, but also powerful and unique.
Click here to see an example of a recent School Place ad.
The School Place's website, www.SchoolPlace.com, plays a critical role in national advertising, template based email marketing, lead generation, social media marketing and search engine optimization. In fact, virtually every marketing activity conducted by The School Place is associated with a specific landing page on the website designed to provide detailed information to the consumer. For example, a national magazine ad might include the statement "Visit www.schoolplace.com/FREEGIFT to receive your free gift." The landing page /FREEGIFT would contain the details of the promotion.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are employed to ensure maximum exposure to new teachers who tend to begin their search for teaching materials through on-line search engines. Three (3) percent of all on-line sales are reinvested in the effort to improve site rankings in the form of paid keyword advertising campaigns (i.e. pay-per-click). All search engine ranking activities are managed by a third party specialist firm with a proven record of high search engine rankings.
Connecting Teachers With Local Stores
The School Place website was designed to associate the teacher with her nearest School Place store as early as possible during the browsing session. We are typically able to determine the consumer's physical location at one of the following times: (a) when she creates an account, (b) when she makes an on-line purchase, (c) when she registers for a drawing or other contest, or (d) when she clicks "Find a Location Near Me" button. Once we have determined the consumer's zip code, we associate her with the closest School Place store, presenting that dealer's logo at the top center of all pages from then on.
As more and more educators rely upon the Internet for everything from homework assignments, posting grades, and sourcing materials, the challenge of drawing teachers into the store continues to increase. The School Place website brings new customers into your store who might not have otherwise found you.
Every new consumer contact that is captured through on-line activities is forwarded to the local dealer as a potential new customer lead. Site visitor information is sourced by zip code and sent to the nearest member store. Dealer members are encouraged to add these leads to their customer database and to include them in your School Place template based email marketing.
The School Place conducts promotions every month. Many times the promotions are tied to the current season or holiday. Other promotions are sponsored by manufacturers/publishers looking to launch a new product.
We also occasionally conduct contests, giveaways and drawings for shopping sprees. Nearly all of these promotions are accompanied by a template based email campaign so that you as the store owner, can participate in the promotion.
Here are links to a sampling of recently used promotional landing pages (note that your company logo would appear at the top of all these pages):
The School Place recognizes the growing importance of social media marketing. The School Place announces many of our ongoing promotions at Facebook.com/TheSchoolPlace with links back to SchoolPlace.com where the teacher can find a local store.
In other cases promotions are more closely integrated with our Facebook page. For example, we recently held a classroom decorating contest where the contestants were required to post pictures of their classroom on our Facebook page.
Once the three winners were chosen, we forwarded each winner's name to their local School Place member so that the local store could let the winner know they had won!
While The School Place has over 5,000 Facebook "likes," we encourage all School Place members to maintain their own Facebook and to use it to communicate regularly with their customers.
Our slogan is "Strength in Numbers." Before The School Place existed, independent teacher supply stores all over the U.S. were going it alone - "reinventing the wheel" and many times repeating the same mistakes over and over. With The School Place as our common denominator, member businesses are able to support and learn from one another and consolidate buying power.
Support
- Quarterly conference calls
- School Place member committees: product committee, marketing committee, ER Connect committee
- Annual membership meeting
- School Place dealer advisory council
- Networking
- Operational data sharing
Buying Power
- Discount on ER Connect
- Special manufacturer product promotions for School Place members
- Free seasonal merchandising plans
- Free website
- Free logo design
- Free national advertising
- Discounted mailing lists