The September 2022 report by the NAEP was a wake-up call for stakeholders across the education landscape to support the upward mobility of children and enable international economic competitiveness and domestic equity. The US Department of Education has expressed the need for rapid innovation across the edtech domain to leverage the penetration of technology to meet the nation’s educational goals. Unfortunately, research suggests that globally over 200 million children will still be out of school in 2030. The goal now is to make education available for everyone, irrespective of whether they are enrolled in a school.
The sheer numbers are enough for edtech companies to realize the need to increase penetration and accessibility and promote inclusivity and equity in education. The first entrant into the market has the competitive advantage in gaining significant market share and positioning itself as a thought leader in the industry.
Enter the Market Already!
Education solutions are being sought across learner segments. For K-12 schools, the onus is on engaging students and recovering learning loss through blended education solutions. Higher education institutions too can ease job-specific skill development for students with online tools that allow collaboration, simulation of real-world situations, and video-based skill demonstration. In addition, corporations have collaborated with edtech companies to up-skill and reskill their workforce to meet the dynamic industry requirements through SAAS-based solutions.
Education needs innovation, and it needs it now! If you start to research the market today and then develop the product, the ship would have already sunk by the time the product is ready. Late entry to the market also means losing out on adoption potential and customer acquisition volumes. The most effective way to succeed is to gain the first-mover advantage.
Short Go-To-Market Cycles Mean Improved Market Share
As the demand soars, so does the competition. To take advantage of the opportunity, edtech firms must be prepared with solutions, ready to be integrated with an educational institution’s existing digital ecosystem environment to enhance revenue growth.
Remember how Xerox was synonymous with photocopying a document for decades, despite multiple photocopy brands having entered the market? That was because Xerox was the first brand to hit the global market, taking the photocopying industry by storm. As a result, first movers get an edge to establish themselves as brands that can predict future needs and provide solutions even before the demand arises.
Additionally, when you are presenting a solution to avoid a problem of the future, your customer acquisition cost drops in multiple ways. Firstly, customers are looking for future-ready partners. Secondly, a satisfied customer becomes an unpaid marketer for you, spreading the word about your powerful solution. Most importantly, you are seen as an edtech firm with a finger on the pulse of the future of education, which can directly translate into business growth.
How to Perfect Your Go-To-Market Strategy
You need to partner with state-of-the-art plug-and-play tools and eLearning solutions to help your edtech company launch the latest products before anyone else. In addition, your products must enable seamless augmentation of existing education delivery. Also, with accessibility and inclusivity in mind, your client base should be able to provide access to your products across multiple devices. This means the products should be responsive to screen size, compatible across devices and OSes, and available offline, with the ability to sync when the device is next online.
Against this backdrop, here’s how to shorten your time to market:
- Use pluggable solutions for lesson development, assessment, and scheduling.
- Integrate a content authoring tool, pre-loaded with themes and templates, to speed up content development and deployment.
- Use an LTI- and QTI-compliant assessment engine that supports all question formats, including multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true/false, and descriptive questions.
- Use powerful content conversion tools to convert legacy content into ePub3-compliant formats easily.
- Adopt a proven content creation and distribution platform that allows seamless interoperability and easy integration of third-party apps.
- Choose robust digital rights management solutions that support multiple licensing types and maintain complete control of access to your solutions.
- Use a SaaS-based solution where you can access the support of experts to build custom features for specific needs quickly.
Pre-Built Solutions
EdTech is moving towards a global, interoperable, and standardized ecosystem. The common goal is to drive learning, irrespective of student background, time constraints, and location. The edtech industry has an overwhelming responsibility to support the education sector in achieving this goal. However, given the highly competitive edtech landscape, you need to collaborate with a technology provider who can help you reach the market before your peers.
Some of the features to look for in a technology partner are:
- White-label solutions for you to provide fully branded experiences to users.
- Easy-to-integrate modules to create curriculum and standards-based content, assignments, assessments, and more.
- Plug-and-play analytics tools to generate reports regarding learning progress and provide actionable insights to improve specific elements of your offerings for maximum benefit for all user roles.
- End-to-end, cloud-based solutions for maximum uptime and high performance.
Conclusion
The education industry is evolving rapidly. The market is set to hit $288.4 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 14.5% between 2021 and 2031. Governments, parents, and corporates are pouring funds to enable individual growth and development. Partnering with an advanced technology solutions provider can give your business an edge over the competition. Having modular eLearning solutions that can be easily integrated with any LMS, SIS, or digital ecosystem can help edtech companies acquire and retain clients while offering the right tools to meet the global skill set requirements.
Talk to us now to learn more about how you can minimize your go-to-market time.
