In this episode, Katie Stoddard, owner of Ed2Market and a seasoned marketing expert in K-12 education, shares all of her wisdom on hiring teachers outside of the classroom and what you need to know if you are looking to land your next role in the marketing space.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Why This CEO Wants Teachers for Marketing Roles
Daphne:
Hi Katie, thank you so much for being here today.
Katie:
Thank you for having me.
Daphne:
Katie, I was so excited when I looked at your background and knew that we booked you for this interview. Because we’ve done some deep dives on sales, we’ve done deep dives into different career paths. But you have a really impressive career when it comes specific to marketing, you have over 20 years in marketing and you started out as an eighth grade language arts teacher so I have to start there.
Katie shares why she left the classroom
Can you tell us all about your career, some of the paths that you’ve taken even after you left the classroom?
Katie:
Yes, absolutely. So I started as an English language arts teacher like you said., I taught for two years and actually it was one of those things where I had been kind of considering leaving the classroom and just wondering if it was the right role for me. At the same time, enrollment in the school that I was in was going down and I was the low man on the totem pole and so my position was reduced. So it really kind of forced me to think about, “Do I want to look at another teaching position in this district or another one or just see what else is out there?” So before I had gotten into teaching, I had always really dreamed of this career in publishing and I explored what else was out there. So I was lucky enough to come across, at the time it was Sopris West Educational Services. Now many of us know it as Voyager Sopris, but I was able to get a job as a temp editor there and use my background as an English language arts teacher and do some temp editing on some ELA curriculum.
So at the time it was elementary reading and literacy programming and I loved it. It was just kind of fun thinking about education from a different angle and a different perspective and really being part of that creative and content development process and it really just kind of boosted my career path in a different direction.
Daphne:
Even that first role, you took a temp job which is on paper it feels like a risky position to take and to leave, “A stable position for in teaching.” Were you really nervous to take that risk?
Katie:
Yes and no. I mean, first of all I was probably 23 or 24 at the time so it was a little bit different. I was not a highly paid educator with just two years of experience and I had been laid off my position technically because of enrollment. So I was in a different position where I wasn’t necessarily leaving a salary to take this role, and so at the time where I was located in Colorado there was not a ton of opportunities in education publishing. So to me it was like, “Wow, this one sounds amazing.” It sounded like there was long-term potential there and I just really liked what I would be able to do there.
Daphne:
Do you feel like taking that first leap into even the temporary position helped you really learn the ins and outs of the corporate environment or marketing in general?
Katie:
Absolutely. So one thing to note, before I actually was a teacher I had a bachelor’s degree in English and I worked as a writer editor at a little business writing firm for a year. The job honestly was not the best but it gave me a little bit of experience, kind of customer experience, just the ins and outs of a corporate environment a little bit more. I realized that was not the job for me and decided to go to graduate school to pursue teaching. So I had a little bit of an unusual… Or not unusual. But a little bit of maybe a different kind of path to the classroom where I had a little bit of experience to leverage, even though it was only a year it was something on my resume. So yeah, so I think going to Sopris at the time and getting that experience as a temp. Just seeing what it was like working in a publishing house, seeing what kind of that backend looked like.
I think at the time, again I was in my early 20s, I didn’t have this grand plan of what does my long-term career look like in education. I just wanted to do something that was going to make sense, ensure that I didn’t waste my time in graduate school and earn that degree that I got and just do something that I was excited about. That’s what I really focused on with this job and, also I would say it was very comparable when it came to pay what I was making in the classroom versus what I was making in this temporal.
Daphne:
That’s incredible. That’s usually the people who are earlier on in education are able to match their salaries much quicker. I was only a few years into teaching, I had a master’s degree but I was able to pretty much match it and increase it within the first year with a role that I was working one third of the hours that I was as a teacher. Moving into your career trajectory, even after that temporal because you continued to grow and climb the corporate ladder. How did you pick new roles or new companies to work for throughout the years?
Katie:
I feel so lucky whenever I talk about this that I just kind of feel like I ended up in all these great situations that put these roles in front of me or just kind of fell into my lap at the right time. So I feel very fortunate about that, I’ll definitely talk through that. So I worked as a temp editor for about a year at Voyager Sopris and then I was approached by someone on the production and design side for me to go over there and support really production management. Which in publishing is a lot and especially this was 2006, 2007. So it was around routing content between editorial and design and authors and things along those lines, and so a job had opened up. I’d been around for a little while, I understood what was going on and I definitely was starting to make some friends in the organization. So it was really a great opportunity and that was a full-time role, and so I officially transitioned out of being a temp there.
I just kind of grew a little bit into that role starting as a coordinator and then moving into production manager and really working closely with design and production. Keeping in mind this was an elementary publisher at the time, so really graphic, heavy, lots of design, things like that. So it was great seeing both sides, I had that editorial experience. I was kind of starting to understand design and production best practices, and honestly the time I don’t think I realized how valuable all of this experience was. But it would turn out to be quite valuable, and so it was great. I loved the company, I loved the team that I had there or the team that I worked with. But one of the biggest drawbacks of this role was that it was an hour long commute each way for me, and so I started looking into just what else was out there. I started feeling like I had some experience and I could start transitioning into something else and this is still a part in my career where I wasn’t even focused on staying in education.
I loved publishing at that point, and so I was really looking at what else was out there publishing wise. So I applied probably over a six-month period for just everything I possibly could just to get closer to the city ’cause I was living in the city and just commuting out of it every day. So I ended up finding this role which was part of a company called the Leadership Learning Center which was a professional learning organization. They were looking for a new publishing director and they were a very small imprint, they mainly published a handful of books that really supported the professional learning workshops. Then they would publish training materials and training manuals, at the time DVDs, things like that. So it worked out really well, it was such a better fit for me in terms of location and it was a huge step-up. They hired me as publishing manager but from a salary perspective it was a significant step up from being in an editorial and production role and kind of jumping into this publishing role.
What was so interesting about this company was they had one person in this role prior, that person left and then they hired me. It was like I was the one person publishing team, so in hindsight I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I was given tons of responsibility and really kind of leeway with what I wanted to do with this role and position. So when I started in addition to that pretty much the whole professional learning team was new. My manager was pretty new to the team and she didn’t have any publishing experience and really was just kind of looking to me to drive this whole department. So I had a budget to work with some outside contractors and freelancers, and it was so fun to be honest. Because I got to take this super small imprint that would publish as things came up, and not always focused on the overall goals or what was selling super well when it came to professional learning services and we got to completely redo that whole process. So in the first year, I think… I don’t know the exact number.
But it was somewhere like 15 to 18 books that we published which was significantly more than they had published before. We moved really quickly, we were able to sign some new authors and bring some new voices in and it was just such a great experience. I learned so much and had such a great time, I loved that team. Eventually the company was actually acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and we were still working the same thing and my department was growing a little bit. So I was able to hire and we were able to continue to evolve and again it was just such this great experience of really kind of diving into what professional learning publishing looked like and how that aligned to professional learning services. But ultimately I felt like being this sort of one or two person department, I just wasn’t learning as much as I wanted to and I felt like I had kind of further places to go in my career. So again, I just started looking at what else was out there and that’s what actually drove me to Corwin and this is a really funny story.
‘Cause I had applied originally for an editorial position at Corwin, ’cause really to that point most of my career was in publishing in content development and I went through lots of interviews. I knew Corwin as an organization before that, we had partnered quite a bit when I was at the Leadership Learning and Center with Corwin anyways. So I was really excited about the role and ultimately I didn’t get it and I was bummed. But I was still ready to stick out with HMH and I was excited about that and then I don’t know, maybe two or three days later after I got the news that I didn’t get that editorial role. I got a call from the marketing director at Corwin who was someone who I met with during the interview process. This is a funny story and we’re still friends to this day, so she’ll laugh when she hears this. But she was like, “Would you be interested in coming to Corwin as a senior marketing manager?” I was like, “I don’t have any marketing experience.”
She’s like, “No. During the interviews you talked like a marketer. You get it, you understand this market and you really get education and you kind of come with that teacher background.” So I was just really very transparent that I don’t have this skillset but I’m interested. Because I loved the company and I still kind of was excited about a new opportunity, and so we did a couple interviews and I chatted with some folks on the marketing team and I went for it. She had faith in me and really it was just probably a position I never would’ve applied for because I didn’t at that time have real marketing skills. But I think just through that relationship and kind of meeting through the interview process. She found something in me that I honestly didn’t even ever think of as a career path and it turned out to be really the best decision I could have made. Because that’s where my marketing career path started and has evolved from there.
Daphne:
Yeah. It sounds like with all of those positions, depending on the type of company whether it’s a smaller startup or a larger one there’s always different responsibilities. But it sounds like you had a good variety of different work environments that gave you this really holistic view of product, of organization strategy, of even managing freelancers which ultimately set you up to own your own company.
Katie:
Absolutely. I think it’s one of those things that I did not realize this along the way that I was getting all of these great opportunities and experiences. It really wasn’t until I launched my company and realized how valuable these things were, that I realized how fortunate I am to have had this path that I’ve had. I think as an entrepreneur many of us think like, “I wish I would’ve started this company 10 years ago or 15 years ago.” ‘Cause I started my company in early 2020 and it’s been great and I love what I do. But I also realized I could not have had the success that we have if I would’ve started it sooner because I needed all of those experiences along the way.
Daphne:
Absolutely. I feel like there are so many experiences in my life where I have that same exact feeling of I wish that would’ve happened earlier and I’m like, I wouldn’t have been that smart earlier. I probably would’ve struggled even more than I do right now. So that’s such a great outlook to have. One of the things that I really was excited to pick your brain about. Which I know all of our listeners are going to be excited to hear your input, is as a business owner you’re responsible for hiring and picking who’s going to be a top candidate for new positions. You really wanted to come on and share why you think teachers make great marketing professionals and what they can do to stand out. So let’s dive into a little bit about your business and then what types of paths are going to be really good fits for teachers.
Katie breaks down her education marketing business, Ed2Market
The first thing I really wanted to ask was, at your company, someone who’s totally new to marketing might see the different categories that you do. Marketing strategy, planning, content development and market research, email marketing and automation, social media, web design, SEO. They might see all of that and think do I have to learn all of those things in order to get into marketing? Do I have to be this Jack or Jill of all trades? What are the roles that do specific types of content and then who are the roles that might be more general for almost everything?
Katie:
Sure. Let me start answering that question if it’s okay with you, by giving a little bit of a overview of what we do and kind of how we work with clients and that’ll really set me up for the next part of that. So at Ed2Market we are a marketing agency who works with companies in the education space who are mostly selling products and services to schools and school districts. So our poor clients are folks like curriculum companies, professional development organizations, ed tech companies, nonprofits, anyone in that educational space. We have a handful of clients who are more selling educational products to parents like tutoring or learning apps or things like that. But really 90% plus of our clients are those that are going direct to schools and districts, and the way that we work is every single client comes to us with different needs. Some have no marketing team at all, some have big teams and they really just needed additional support. So every single client we’re building a plan that works for them, and so we do consider ourselves a full service agency where we offer anything that falls under a marketing umbrella.
Like Daphne said, social media, email marketing, content development, website SEO, anything that’s really marketing related. But that does not mean that every single one of our clients wants all those services or needs them. Some of our clients might come to us just for one or two like, “We just want content development and some email support.” Or some are working with us just for graphic design and social media or something along those lines, and so we’re working on building plans that make sense. So in our team we have a mixture of employees and contractors and every client who works with us gets what we call a marketing project manager, which is their main point of contact and kind of the person driving strategy for their account. That person should probably have some kind of marketing experience, whether they’ve worked for a marketing team in an education company or something along those lines. Or kind of grown up with our company and learned those skills over time, and then we lean on other folks that specialize in other areas.
So we have social media marketers who really only do social media, we have graphic designers, we have a couple of content folks who focus just on writing. Whether it’s blog writing or emails or other content that we need, case studies, things along those lines. We have market researchers, so we have people that really specialize in those areas just like we also have some of the technical things like website and SEO. So those more kind of rounded positions of those marketing project managers typically because they’ve had longer careers in marketing, they have skillsets in some of those areas. But they don’t always have the capacity to do everything, and so that’s when we’ll lean on sort of some of those additional experts whether they’re employees or contractors that we use from time to time.
Daphne:
That makes sense with that marketing project manager, because it sounds like they have to be able to make an inference of how long something’s going to take? Who’s going to be the best fit for the position? Whether or not they’re able to do it or if they do need to actually outsource it. So that takes a level of expertise for someone to jump into that role and not really have experience with that. It’s going to be a much harder learning curve and potentially a bad fit for them.
Katie talks about what skills a teacher would need to be considered for an entry-level marketing position
But what would be one of the better entry level positions for a teacher who’s looking to get into marketing and just wants to get their toes in the water and really start to understand this world but without doing a ton of upskilling?
Katie:
Yeah, absolutely. I immediately think that we see a lot of success when educators look at roles like content development, social media, market research, email writing, things like that, that are skills that are relatively easy to learn. I think you can do some kind of self-learning through some high quality content that you could probably find for free or very affordable on YouTube, HubSpot, blogs, things like that and just really upskill and also have those work samples. So even if you’re not getting a part-time job as a marketer right away, start drafting some emails, start creating some social media posts. Maybe it’s something you could do for your school or blogs, you can submit to third party blogs anytime that you want to. There’s so many of them out there. So start getting those samples because that’s the biggest thing to then kind of convert it into an actual contractor position.
Daphne:
Yeah. That’s something that people see these roles and they get so excited. Like social media, being able to handle someone’s Instagram is so much fun and it seems like such a cool position. A lot of teachers are really learning the actual platforms like Canva, that honestly you may be able to get a job as a social media manager just depending on the company and what the qualifications are for that company if they’re using Canva for their graphic design. But anyhow, I think the piece that’s really missing is people are playing around, they’re learning these things. But then they’re really not accurately reflecting what they’re able to do or bring to the table when they’re submitting resumes. Is that something that you’re seeing on your end as well?
Katie:
Yes, definitely. We see anytime that we have an open position or we typically have just an open ongoing position open for contract support. We do see that disconnect where we see a lot of educator resumes, which we’re excited about because as an education marketing agency we rely on our expertise in this field and oftentimes we want teachers. We have multiple teachers and former teachers working on our team team. So when there is those transferable skills that would work in marketing aren’t apparent on someone’s resume. It’s difficult to understand if they’re going to have that skillset and if it’s something that makes sense for us. So it’s a mixture of seeing those samples and then having a really good understanding of what this looks like to manage it. So again, for us being that we typically support companies in this space. I love it when teachers can come to us and say, “These are some of the best social media posts that I’ve seen for companies that I love or resources that I use in my own classroom, and here’s why I like it and these are things that I would replicate in this role.”
Things along those lines. So really having a strong understanding of, especially for us agency social media is very different than personal social media. So just being able to have a true grasp of what that role would entail and what skills would make sense.
Daphne:
Yeah. I think I’d love to dive into even I heard you say you want someone with an educational background, and this is something that I am seen at the companies. I worked for Microsoft, I worked for GoGuardian and when it was coming to content writing. When it was coming to creating the professional development or doing something that’s going to be public facing, speaking about education, they wanted someone with an educational background to help them create the content. Because someone who has not been a teacher can easily misstep and do something that could go viral in a bad cringey way because they don’t even understand education. I’ll give a basic think of something like a test assessment company could create a campaign that just says like, “This is going to help solve the teacher retention problem because we’re creating more tests to help them assess their students.” Most teachers would be like, “Well, that’s the biggest headache that we have right now. That doesn’t solve our problem.”
Katie explains why teachers are so great for marketing positions
So talking to teachers and seeing what do they need, how can they talk about it so that it makes it a more needed platform or program that they have is the role of a marketer. What have you seen teachers be able to bring just by having experience and education to a marketing position?
Katie:
Absolutely. I think the role I see of a marketer is to solve the problems of the audience that we have and so exactly what you’re saying. If we don’t know the problems that they have and we can’t articulate that, then we cannot solve it. So when we have educators on our team, I’m a former educator, granted it’s been a while. But I spend as much time in schools even now as I can through a variety of other ways. We have four other former educators on our team, both of the teacher and the admin level. We spend a lot of time talking to teachers and administrators just so we have that ongoing language and understanding of what’s going on around school or inside of schools. So without knowing that and just guessing or just kind of guessing based on what you see in the news or what you see with your own kids’ school, that is not effective marketing and I think educators see right through that.
I mean, if you’re not talking the same way that they talk and really highlighting the true problems and using the same words and the language that they would, then they see through that and it feels very inauthentic. So, it’s so important. I think even more so for us as an agency we value that education experience. We talk about it with our clients. All of our team who is client facing has education experience, and anyone who’s creating content has education experience. Again, whether that’s for education marketing or classroom and you can’t make that up. You have to have that, and you have to have that experience and really understand what it means to talk with educators.
Daphne:
But there is a balance. Just sending in a resume that says I was a teacher for 10 years, is not going to help you stand out for these types of positions. Because you have to be able to prove that you’re passionate about the position and that you understand what the role is and that you’ve gotten your hands a little bit dirty so that people know that you’ll even enjoy it. Looking at marketing project manager, content marketing manager, this is something that I’ve said so many times as the exact same example. But I thought that I would love writing blogs just based off of what I thought I would love owning my own business. Then I found out I really like search engine optimization and I would’ve not known that blogs kind of drained me to actually do the writing of them. But I like the strategy, I like automations with emails, I like search engine optimization and that’s the type of thing that you’re not really going to know until you start getting your hands dirty and understanding that.
So people who are in charge of hiring also want you to be able to reflect on what you like and don’t like during the interview process. Which is not going to happen if you haven’t really started to learn these different types of roles and picked out what you liked.
Katie:
Exactly. I think in a similar situation, earlier on in my career I wanted to be a high school teacher and I realized really quickly that wasn’t for me and I decided to be a middle school teacher. So I think you have to dabble in this stuff to really get what makes sense for you and understand what you like. Also with that said in every role I’ve ever had, there’s probably aspects of it that I didn’t love or were those things that I wanted to quickly get done and checked off and move on to something I liked better. So you have to really figure out what that is and the beauty of contract work is you could just choose to do that one thing that you love to do. One of the contract marketing managers that we work with, she loves writing. It’s all she wants to do, and it’s all we assign her and we assign her work a lot all day long and she gets out amazing content and so I think that’s not for everybody.
For me I love writing, but I think I have a limit onto how much good quality content I can write in any given day. So you really have to kind of understand what works for you and dabble in it a bit and I think some of the folks that we’ve worked with. I am sure the samples that they shared were not necessarily published samples or things like that too. But we just need an understanding that you know what it is when we say we need a content blog on this topic or that you would know what that meant, or we need social media posts for this company for a month. What does that look like? So we need to be able to take a look at your resume or your portfolio and see that, that work is transferable.
Katie shares how her time in the classroom set her up for future success in business
Daphne:
Yeah, that’s such good advice. I’d love to go back a little bit more about your own journey from leaving the classroom and now owning your own company. How do you feel like just those few years in the classroom set you up for success in all the different positions? What types of skills did you find were really transferable and helped you with the rest of the roles that you took after the classroom?
Katie:
It’s such a great question. I mean, first of all I am the first admit it was only two years. It wasn’t 10 or 15 years of teaching experience, and it’s been pretty far removed and so a couple of things. So I think the first thing is early on in my career, anything that I was doing I would think about myself as a teacher and how this would impact the work that I was doing. Whether it was creating curriculum content and a publisher or professional learning content or anything along those lines. I would really try to view it in the eyes of myself as a teacher and then I think one of the things that I realized again early on was that idea of having that education experience or that classroom experience was so important. But not everybody could just up and go be a teacher for a couple of years to get that, and there’s other ways to get access to teachers and to classrooms.
So through that, I would spend a lot of time at conferences and a variety of the companies that I’ve worked with where we’d engage with teachers and it wouldn’t just be at the booth. Again, this is back to I think I had a lot of great opportunities along the way. Where I’d get to go to professional learning conferences and engage in the sessions as if I were an educator. So really just sitting side by side and hearing teachers talk about this and reflecting on their students and what this looks like to bring back to the classroom tomorrow. Those were just such great opportunities or just even in the booth at conferences, talking to teachers and hearing what they’re struggling with and administrators too not always just teachers and then volunteering in classrooms as much as I can. So now that’s a little bit easier for me, I have three kids in elementary school. So I spend as much time as I can at school volunteering on district committees, things like that and it’s different. Absolutely, that is not at all being a teacher.
But I think it’s just having experience and a little bit of familiarity in those environments is such a positive thing and a way to kind of continue that knowledge when it comes to what’s happening in schools and classrooms and then I think there’s other ways too. I am reading content on a regular basis from some of my favorite education blogs and news sources and listening to podcasts and things like that. Just so I’m constantly and my whole team is getting that language and hearing those issues that everyone’s dealing with and understanding that a little bit deeper. Because you can’t say, “Oh, I had two years of experience as a teacher back in 2004, and I know everything about education.” Obviously things have changed in the last two decades.
Daphne:
You still have the heart of a teacher where you just love to build relationships as a parent. But also you’re a forever learner and you’re continuously learning about education and passionate about education and making sure you’re staying knowledgeable and supporting educators in the best way possible. I feel like so many people are so quick to say, “Oh, I was only a teacher for this long or this long.” But it doesn’t discredit. You still went into the classroom, you still were a teacher and it means that you still have that heart and you’re still bringing that heart to whatever you do after you leave the classroom.
So kudos to you, you have done so much and this has been just such a joy to talk to you and learned from you. Katie, if anyone wants to learn a little bit more about Ed2Market, see if you’re hiring for any freelance or contract positions how do they find you? Where do they go?
Katie:
Sure. So head to ed2market.com. You’ll see any open positions that we have. If you’re interested in just submitting a resume for potential contract positions, just email us at info@ed2market.com or fill out the contact form on our website, and we’d love to connect and learn more about your work.
Daphne:
Don’t forget to update your resume and send over samples when you’re doing that.
Katie:
Yes, please.
Daphne:
All right. Thank you so much, Katie. This has been so fun.
Katie:
Thank you.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Learn more about Katie’s company at ed2market.com
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
