So who exactly are we creating our materials for? Who are the target groups of our marketing and promotion activities?
Well, in a word: any person who wants to improve their English and has access to the internet. So, that’s a huge group of people – at least over 1 billion. Since it’s obvious that we can’t reach and serve one billion people we need to drill down on these numbers and demographics.
To keep things simple we should focus on the following 5 main target groups.
- Individuals who are looking for printable exercises, tests and other English language learning materials. Within this large group we have the following sub-groups:
A) Professionals who are preparing for the TOEIC test. These are typcical in their early thirties to late forties who want to advance in their professional careers. In many cases their employers ask them to take the TOEIC test to make sure they meet the language skill requirements of their next promotion
B) College students who are preparing for the TOEFL test. In most cases these are teenagers from Asia whose parents want their children to study at a university in North America, Australia or any other country of the western world.
- English language teachers. Again, this group can be divided into the following sub-groups:
A) Teachers who primarily teach in face-to-face classrooms. These teachers are looking for handouts, worksheets and other materials they can use to make their lesson planning easier and assess their students’ progress in a certain areas.
B) Teachers who primarily teach online either by using a platform such as Cambly, iTalki, Verbling, etc. There thousands of those platforms and tens of thousands of teachers all of whom are working as freelancers.
C) Teachers who are teaching other teachers. An excellent example of this type of customer is Jack with this website Teaching ESL Online. A customer like this typically has hundreds if not thousands of followers and clients all of whom need their own teaching materials. We can team up with people like Jack who even founded his own company JDA Industries Inc and work out an affiliate partnership.
You will find more ideas on how to approach English teachers here.
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Learning platforms like 7speaking, Lingoda, 3xEnglish. These are typical start-up companies who grow very fast. They use internet technology to attract and engage learners. These companies need learning materials they can easily implement on their platforms and offer to their learners/users/clients.
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LMS providers. These are companies like MindScroll and hundreds of others. They are offering cloud-based learning management systems to companies, universities and other organizations. We can approach them and negotiate affiliate programs since all their customers also need the type of materials we are offering.
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Text check providers. Here is an example: Alan's story | TextRanch Happy Customers