When we’re helping clients build an audience for a campaign, one of the most common requests we hear is:

It makes sense. If you’re spending money marketing to schools, you want to reach the people who can buy what you’re selling.

But purchasing in schools doesn’t always work that neatly. The person who eventually approves a purchase might not be the person who first recognises the problem, researches the options or recommends what the school should buy.

And if you only ever market to the person at the end of that process, you could be missing the person most likely to get it started.

The person who buys isn’t always the person who cares

Let’s imagine you sell SEND assessment software.

The Head Teacher might ultimately approve the expenditure, but who is dealing with the problem every day? It’s much more likely to be the SENCO or Inclusion Lead. They understand the challenge, know where the current process isn’t working and may well be the person who researches alternatives before taking a recommendation to somebody else for approval.

In that situation you could have three different people involved:

• Problem owner: the person experiencing the issue
• Influencer: the person researching or recommending the solution
• Decision maker: the person able to approve the purchase

Sometimes one person fills all three roles. Often they don’t.

What might that look like in a school?

Every school is different, and a large MAT can have a very different procurement structure to an individual primary school. But these examples give you an idea of how the roles might work:

These aren’t fixed purchasing routes. The point is to think about how your particular product is likely to travel through a school rather than assuming “target the Head Teacher” is automatically a marketing strategy.

In fact, one mistake we see fairly regularly is suppliers asking us for “Heads and Business Managers” before we’ve even discussed what they’re selling. Sometimes they’re exactly the right audience. Sometimes they’re simply the most senior job titles the supplier recognises.

Our campaign data suggests relevance can beat seniority

We’ve seen something interesting when looking at our own email campaign data.

Across campaigns that included different school job roles, average click-to-open rates included:

These are campaign-level figures, and campaigns can include multiple job roles, so we wouldn’t claim that a Head of Careers is individually more likely to click your email than a Head Teacher.

What it does support is something we’ve seen repeatedly over the years: seniority doesn’t automatically equal relevance.

If you’re promoting a careers resource, the Careers Leader has an obvious reason to care. If you’re selling a maths resource, the Maths Lead may immediately recognise the problem you’re talking about.

A Head Teacher may have more purchasing authority, but that doesn’t necessarily make them the best person to start the conversation with.

We’ve seen this work in real campaigns

A good example is our work with Prim-Ed Publishing.

Prim-Ed wanted to promote its subject-specific workbooks to primary schools. We didn’t recommend simply targeting the most senior people in each school.

The campaigns included Head Teachers and Deputy Heads as potential decision makers, alongside Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 Coordinators as important influencers in deciding which resources were actually used in classrooms.

As we explained in the case study:

That’s the distinction we’re talking about.

The senior leader may have the authority to approve the expenditure, while the Key Stage Coordinator is much closer to the resource itself and may be the person who recognises its value in the first place.

Rather than choosing between influencers and decision makers, the campaign could reach both sides of the purchasing process.

We’ve used a similar approach with The University of Law. Their campaign audience included senior leaders alongside Heads of Sixth Form and Heads of Careers, specialist roles with a very obvious interest in the opportunities being promoted.

The University of Law subsequently told us the activity had helped generate links with schools and colleges that its Schools Team found crucial.

Again, relevance mattered alongside seniority.

Your influencer could become your best salesperson

This is an important point, particularly if you sell a higher-value product.

Imagine you sell a SEND platform costing £4,000 per year. You run a campaign to SENCOs and one of them loves it, but they can’t authorise £4,000 themselves.

That doesn’t make them a poor lead.

If the SENCO understands the problem, wants your solution and believes it will make a difference, they could be the person who takes it to the Head Teacher or School Business Manager.

At that point, think about what you can give them to make the internal conversation easier. It might be a one-page summary they can forward, evidence of impact, a clear breakdown of costs, implementation information or a short business case explaining the problem, solution and expected benefit.

Rather than trying to bypass the influencer to reach the budget holder, help the influencer make your case internally.

The same product can need different messages

Different people can also care about the same product for completely different reasons.

Take safeguarding software. A DSL might care about how easily concerns can be recorded, monitored and followed up. A Head Teacher may want oversight and confidence that safeguarding procedures are effective. An SBM could be interested in cost and contract terms, while somebody responsible for IT might need answers about security, integrations and implementation.

You don’t necessarily need four completely separate campaigns, but you do need to understand what matters to the person reading your message.

The same applies when that lead moves through your sales process. The person who first enquires may need completely different information from the person they’re asking to approve the purchase.

So, should you target influencers or decision makers?

Quite often, the answer is both.

You might target SENCOs with messaging focused on the problem they deal with every day while also reaching senior leaders with a message around outcomes, cost or the wider benefit to the school.

Alternatively, your initial campaign might focus on the influencer, with your follow-up sales process designed to bring the budget holder into the conversation later.

The value of the product matters too. A £200 classroom resource is likely to have a very different buying journey from a £20,000 software platform.

That’s why understanding school job roles and who they are likely to influence is so important.

Our education database includes more than 130 individual job roles, allowing campaigns to be built around the people most relevant to the product rather than simply targeting the most senior person available.