What are you doing to get yourself and your brand back to school ready? Please share with us in our Mastermind group at www.growwithusmastermind.com.
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Get Your Teacher Store Back to School Ready
Summer is a great time to focus on your store. Teachers are, for the most part, enjoying their summer break and they have more time to get to know you. They have more time to peruse social media and search for new ideas on Pinterest. Summer is when we gear up for the new school year. This episode is packed full of tips and ideas to help you get yourself ready for the back to school push.
Blogging Challenge
We committed to doing six blog posts in six weeks over the summer. Our blogs are a big focus for us and we really want to give teachers information and ideas for the upcoming school year. We both were struggling with getting those blog posts out so we created the challenge to help us and you stay focused and motivated to complete the posts. It also gives us more stuff to share on social media. Please join us at www.growwithusmastermind.com. We have already started but feel free to jump right in and get moving on those blog posts!
Angie struggled during the first week to finish that blog post. But once it was posted, it brought a lot of traffic to her blog and she got a bunch of new email subscribers. Yay! It really validated for her how important those blog posts are, especially during the summer when teachers are looking for new, fresh ideas.
April struggled as well but she got it done even with working on a brand new webinar AND having a wisdom tooth pulled! A webinar is great PD for teachers in the summer so if you have a niche in which you can teach others about, a webinar may be good for you!
- We both are focusing on email lately and the blogging challenge is helping us to also get some more opt-ins out there so that we can target them at back to school time.
- Depending on which opt-in they sign up for, we take that information to send them more targeted emails at back to school time letting them know about sales or resource releases that they may be interested in.
- We love ConvertKit for helping us to tag and segment our lists to help us be able to target them about what they might be interested in.
- We send them emails in the summer with resources that they may be interest in for back to school based on what they have liked of ours so far.
Pinterest ads over the summer do drop in engagement and the click through rate is much lower in June but that is nothing to worry about. We just remind ourselves that we aren’t paying if they aren’t clicking so we aren’t spending. But also that if they are relevant for back to school to keep them going and they will bounce back come July. So if yours are down, don’t worry!
Even if you are seeing the click but then not seeing the same return on sales, that’s because, we think, people are wishlisting more during the summer and then buying during the back to school sale. April did an experiment and had a super low conversion rate on purchases according to her UTM data BUT she saw her wishlist numbers go up a lot during this time.
Check out www.growwithuspodcast.com/episode4 to find out more about how we use UTM codes to track that data that we have available to us. We know it’s so hard to track some of the data so we sometimes we just have to have blind faith that it will work out.
Pins We Promote During Summer
- Back to school resources
- Year-long bundles
- Professional development type blog posts
- Our most popular back to school resources
- During the school year, Angie doesn’t post much during the school day as she sees way less engagement on those posts but in the summer she changes her frequency to post every few hours and even adds a few additional time slots.
- Teachers are way more engaged in Facebook during summer. Don’t be surprised if your engagement drops when teachers go back to school.
Facebook Ads
- Facebook ads for back to school resources or yearlong bundles.
- Also we run some ads to our lead magnets to try to get more email subscribers. Plus, this also warms up a cold audience so that we can target them later on Facebook.
- April is running ads for her upcoming summer webinar and that is getting her a bunch of sign ups.
- We find Facebook ads should be more timely in nature. We don’t start promoting our back to school resources on Facebook until closer to when teachers will need them.
- Instagram is very active during the summer but we find it to be more of a struggle for us, being full-time TpTers. We aren’t prepping a classroom for next year and we find those to be the popular/relevant posts during this time of the year.
- Things that we have found that get great engagement over summer:
- Stacks of books you are reading (PD or YA Lit)
- Giveaways that target your ideal customer in some way
- April is trying something new for her upcoming giveaway. Instead of Rafflecopter, she is trying out a free resource to help with it called King Sumo. It encourages them to socially share and results in more email subscribers. She will keep us posted on how she likes it.
- Find something that they would LOVE to have that goes with your niche to give away.
- Blog posts that focus on PD for teachers or back to school time
- Classroom decor and organization
- Resources that are good to prep during back to school
- Memes that are funny and relevant
- Quotes
TpT Store
- Make sure covers on popular back to school resources or year-long bundles are looking great.
- Bundle things you’ve been putting off bundling and make some pins.
- The new bundling feature is AMAZING! We are both in the beta for it and are so excited for some of the features all ready released and for the features we know are coming. We are just trying to be patient. If you are interested in joining the beta, visit this forum post. They are adding new people all the time.
- Update descriptions to be clear and concise so teachers know EXACTLY what they are getting. We find this really cuts down on unhappy teachers.
- Side note: There is a new beta for formatting your description right on the TpT upload page. Check out this forum post if you’d like to sign up for that one.
- Add previews to any resources that don’t have them. We know some teachers will not purchase a resource if they can’t see the preview.
- Make sure the first line of your description naturally includes the key words that are relevant to your resource.
- Finish any open growing bundles that you have before back to school if you can.
We hope you found some nuggets here to help you prep this summer and that you don’t feel too overwhelmed.
Please come share with us what you are doing to prepare for back to school in our Mastermind group at www.growwithusmastermind.com. We love learning from all of you, too!
