Build Your Perfect Homeschool Marketing Campaign

Marketing dollars are limited, but the choices for marketing are infinite. How do you choose what to invest in? Use this detailed guide for platform-specific strategies and best practices for your objectives and budget.

EVALUATING THE OPTIONS FOR INFLUENCER MARKETING

Reaching the homeschool market requires a sophisticated understanding of various marketing channels and their unique advantages. This comprehensive guide explores the most effective digital marketing strategies for connecting with homeschool families, from social media platforms to blog reviews and email campaigns. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to the homeschool space, this detailed breakdown will help you craft a targeted, successful marketing strategy that resonates with your audience.

Why Should Companies Market Through Blogs and Social Media?

Although social media and blogs are only one part of a company’s overall marketing strategy, they are a powerful influence in the purchasing decisions of women. Marketing through relevant blogs and social media channels serves to:

extend your influence
build your reputation
drive traffic to your website
attract new customers
strengthen the loyalty of existing customers

How can influencer collaboration bring these benefits? Because women trust influencers to introduce them to new products and to provide accurate and honest information. Even homeschool moms with strong networks in their local areas often turn to the Internet for product reviews from trusted voices. The relationship that bloggers develop with their readers is one based on genuine trust over the course of years of quality content and interaction.

Pew Research Center found that women are more likely than men to report buying something after seeing an influencer’s or content creator’s post on social media. Specifically, 36% of women reported making purchases based on these posts, compared to 21% of men.

Sprout Social’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report revealed that nearly half of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts. The report also highlighted that women, particularly younger generations, trust influencers significantly and are more likely to make frequent purchases based on their recommendations.

A study published on Theseus emphasized the important role social media plays in consumer purchasing behavior. It pointed out that consumers, including women, actively seek information on social media platforms before making purchase decisions.

BOTTOM LINE: If you want to reach women with your product, blogs and social media are the most cost effective way to do

iHN Puts the Social in Social Media

Let’s look at how these principles are put into practice through strategic partnerships.

Social media can shorten the time to conversion. When a potential client has interacted with your company on her favorite social network such as Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook and has seen the recommendations of respected bloggers, she is much more willing to invest in your product or service. She already has a sense of relationship with you – that’s the social in social media.

iHomeschool Network exists to make those social connections seamless for our client companies. If you desire to market to the homeschool niche, iHN can make it happen for you. We speak the language of the homeschool mom because we are homeschool moms.

Our bloggers are hand selected according to a rigorous set of criteria. Besides being able to write and use graphics well, they have earned the trust of their broad reader base. When you cooperate with the bloggers of iHN, you are invited into that circle of trust as we introduce you to our loyal readers.

Social media marketing is much more inexpensive than traditional marketing and often shows much faster results. There may be other companies that offer homeschool reviews, but we are confident that no one can reach the homeschool market better and with more excellence than we can. Our competitive prices for search engine optimized reviews and social shares are a sensible advertising investment. Learn more about typical sponsored post pricing here or here to see how we compare.

Contact us today for more details about our services. Let us draft a proposal tailor-made to fit your overall marketing strategy.

Marketing Products Through Blogs

Blogs transform the power of traditional word of mouth endorsements into a twenty-first century powerhouse of influence.

Traditional advertising is easy to ignore or avoid altogether. When people want information about products, they take the initiative and perform an internet search. The issue then for you as a company is what potential customers find when they do that internet search. Blog posts about your product show up in search engine results and offer consumers the facts and opinions they need to make a purchasing decision.

The blog reviews done with iHomeschool Network are search engine optimized so that detailed, helpful reviews by our bloggers show up in the first pages of search results. Their content may also be scraped by AI tools, lending to positive impressions in those results.

Blogs are generally perceived as trustworthy because they are owned by individuals rather than businesses or corporations.

Statistics have verified the effectiveness of blogs to influence behavior. For example, 2023 data from HubSpot indicates that, “blog posts are among the media formats with the highest ROI, along with videos, images, and podcasts” thanks to extensive product information, links to your company website, and persuasive language.

Reviews Plus Action

The blog posts in an iHN campaign can cater to your special marketing plan. What do you want visitors to do? Besides driving traffic to your website and product pages, common calls to action include

sign up for a freebie or free trial
use a coupon code
shop a sale on your website
join your Facebook group
follow your YouTube channel
subscribe to your podcast

iHN blog posts can invite readers to act in those ways. When you contact iHN for a proposal, communicate your priorities to us so that we can craft a perfect project for you.

Blog Posts Go Beyond the Blog

The bloggers of iHN are active on social media – the places women relax in their free time and consult for advice. As part of any blog post package, the iHN bloggers will promote their review on Pinterest and Facebook. Instagram, and YouTube content is available as an add-on to a campaign or as part of an a la carte project.

Paying for Product Review Blog Posts

What about the ethics of paid reviews? Doesn’t compensation skew the review and violate the trust of the reader? No. The established bloggers of iHN have already proven themselves trustworthy to their loyal followers. Their reviews will be honest and will include a clear disclosure, as required by law. The majority of readers do not begrudge a blogger’s receiving compensation for her time to use a product and craft a detailed review.

The Social Networks That Are Best for Reaching Homeschool Moms

When building your social media presence, one of your choices is which platforms to invest in. The best case scenario is to be everywhere. So every company should set up profiles and/or pages on the major social media networks. If you cannot have active engagement there, at least you have an account so that users can tag you appropriately. Another plus is that you have reserved your brand name in case you do later decide to become active.

The reality of time and budget constraints require that you select only one or two places to spend the majority of your social media time. Being active everywhere is not realistic. Besides, some platforms lend themselves better to some niches than to others.
So where are homeschool moms? Which social media platforms are the best places to engage with them? Where should you invest your social media efforts and dollars?

This answer has changed dramatically since 2012 when iHomeschool Network launched. Back then, we had YouTube and Facebook. But there was no Pinterest, Threads, or TikTok, and Instagram was a brand new platform.

According to research by the CDC, the most popular platforms with parents are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Our bloggers bear out the truth of this data when it comes to homeschool moms, specifically.

Let’s look at each platform and identify how popular it is with homeschool moms and its special benefits.

1. Facebook

Although Facebook is the senior citizen of social media, it still offers three major perks:

Frequency | It’s still a place where families share happy photos and keep up to date with each other. So homeschool moms still use it, checking in at least weekly but often daily.
Community | There are vibrant Facebook groups centered on homeschooling where moms turn for advice and recommendations.
Ad Targeting | Facebook’s parent company Meta has one of the absolute best ads platforms for targeting homeschool moms.

These three reasons make it a strong starting point for any company that wants to reach homeschoolers.

All iHN blog post campaigns include a share on Facebook at no extra cost. This share will link to the blogger’s post and will tag your company, making it available for you to use in advertising.

2. Instagram

Instagram is another great starting point for reaching homeschoolers.

Preference | For many moms, Instagram is their favorite platform because of all the pretty images and videos to endlessly scroll through.
Visual Flexibility | The visual nature of Instagram gives bloggers the flexibility of showcasing your product through either still photos or video.
Hashtags and Captions | Instagram allows for long captions where bloggers can add hashtags which lend to further discovery and help homeschoolers find one another
Ad Targeting | And like Facebook, Instagram is part of Meta, one of the absolute best ads platforms thanks to its detailed targeting options.

Because of Instagram’s high value, shares on this platform are available as an add-on to your regular campaign. You can choose from a single image, a carousel of multiple images, reels, or stories. Or leave the choice up to the blogger for more variety and authenticity.

3. YouTube

While Facebook and Instagram can host video, YouTube is the original and still dominant player in the video category.

Long Form Video | YouTube allows for very lengthy, in depth coverage of topics.
SEO | Since YouTube is owned by Google, its videos are given preference in search results (something you will never see from Instagram or Facebook).
Ad Targeting | By using Google Ads, you can leverage YouTube to show ads before relevant video content.
Frequency | YouTube is a daily stop for many users. They check in on new videos from the channels they have subscribed to as well as let the algorithm offer them relevant new content.
Alternate Search | After Google itself, YouTube is the second largest search tool. Many homeschool moms go directly to YouTube as a starting point for research about a particular curriculum.
Interaction | YouTube’s commenting feature allows for genuine dialogue which generates loyalty and community.

Why You Need Product Reviews on Homeschool Blogs

While social media platforms provide the framework for reaching homeschoolers, blog reviews serve as the cornerstone of effective homeschool marketing.

You already have a website and an online store where customers can buy your products. You set up a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, and an Instagram account. Maybe you attend homeschool conventions and even pay for traditional advertising such as magazine ads.

But if you stop there, you are not doing all you can to market your products to the homeschool audience because you are not harnessing the full power of social media and online search. The part you are leaving out is product reviews on homeschool blogs.

Buzz and Traffic

Reviews written by homeschool bloggers create buzz and traffic. Besides the post where the bloggers review your product on their blogs, iHN campaigns include a share on Facebook and a pin on Pinterest at no extra cost.

User Perspectives from a Trusted Voice

Reviews can highlight your product in a way that your own site cannot achieve. There is no way you can demonstrate all the possible facets of how your product can be used, tweaked, and organized. And even if you could, customers trust other customers more than they trust you.

Of course you are going to say good things about the product! It’s yours!

But when a homeschool mom demonstrates on her blog what a good fit your product is for her own children, potential customers are interested.

Stock images and staged marketing photographs are no competition for a mom’s casual photo taken with her smartphone because they are authentic. Other moms see those images and can mentally replace their own children with the ones in the photo or video.

Homeschoolers are a notoriously frugal group, and they are cautious about spending their homeschool budget on a new product. Moms search product reviews before they commit to spend. What do they find when they search for reviews about your product?

Test it yourself. Do an incognito (logged-out) search of [your product name] reviews.

Are there reviews out there?
Are they colorful and thorough or dull and impersonal?
Do they have pinnable images that have been pinned to Pinterest?
Do any YouTube videos come up in the search?

What a potential customer sees on this search can make a huge difference in their final decision to buy. If the reviews are lackluster, the potential customer may consider your product the same.

Links for SEO

While we are talking about search results, let’s touch on a final reason why you need product reviews on homeschool blogs — search engine optimization (SEO).

Backlinks send a signal to Google that your site has quality content that is worthy of being linked to. When relevant sites link to you, Google takes that as evidence that you deserve to be served up in the search results. Backlinks on homeschool blogs are votes of confidence that boost your rankings in the search engine results.

Why do you want search engine traffic? People searching for answers to their questions who find you via search are far more likely to purchase than visitors coming from any other source.

Finding Homeschool Bloggers

If you need help with finding bloggers to write product reviews, contact us. We can help. Our blog reviews are the best in the homeschool arena. We will connect you with a team of bloggers that is a perfect fit for your product and brand.

How to Get Product Reviews on Homeschool Blogs

Once you are convinced that you need homeschool blog reviews of your product, the next step is to actually get those reviews.

Start With You

Having a unique and outstanding product is a prerequisite to getting reviews. No blogger wants to talk about mediocre products unless they are criticizing them.

Check your website and make sure that your outstanding product is not being hidden behind an unattractive site. But let’s assume that your product is amazing and your site clearly reflects the quality of the resource. What if you are still unknown and not getting blog reviews?

Give Bloggers Incentives

Offering free products to bloggers is not enough to get a quality review. You need to offer incentives to get bloggers to talk about you.

One great option is having an affiliate program, a low cost way to get promotion for your products. Bloggers are paid only when people buy through their custom links. Even if no one buys, you are still getting press on their blogs through text links and ads.

Special blogger teams are another option. You can recruit your own team of bloggers and create a sense of community for them where they feel that they are part of a meaningful group. Be sure to give back to the bloggers via perks like social media mentions, previews of new releases, and newsletter shoutouts. Coordinate link-ups and work together on contests and promotions. Many bloggers feel the sense of community is payback enough.

Money! Yes, money speaks to bloggers. Pay them for their time in taking photographs of your products and writing about your products. An excellent homeschool product review takes many hours. Wondering what is a fair amount to offer? See the chart here.

The Easy Way to Find Homeschool Bloggers

The easiest way to locate bloggers to write product reviews is to contact iHN because blog reviews in the homeschool niche are our specialty. Tell us your goals and we can offer you a blog review campaign that fits your marketing strategy.

How Homeschool Blog Reviews Compare to Eblasts and Emails

Email marketing is another option to consider when crafting your homeschool campaign. While blog posts are around indefinitely, sending traffic for years to come and sending SEO signals, emails have a short shelf life – typically maxing out at 24 hours. But they are highly targeted and can be an effective vehicle for a time sensitive message such as a sale, a limited free trial, or a registration deadline for an online course.

At iHN, we offer personalized email campaigns that stand in direct contrast to an eblast.

They Offer a Single-Shot, Mega Eblast

In a homeschool eblast, a company pays a homeschool group which owns a large list of email subscribers to send out a message on their behalf. These lists usually run in the tens of thousands of subscribers. The company creates the message, including all copy, images, and subject line, which the group replicates and broadcasts, typically with a note at the top indicating that it’s from an advertiser.

We offer Personalized Email Campaigns

With iHN email campaigns, you get a group of various bloggers with smaller lists who each write personalized messages to their audiences.

The email is in the blogger’s normal voice and style, so it’s not jarring to the subscriber. It’s natural.
Each message has its own subject line, so there are more possibilities to reach the broader homeschool audience in case one subject line doesn’t resonate as well as it should.
You can provide talking points, links, and images as desired. But the brunt of the work falls to the blogger, so your job is far easier!
You’ll get a test email to approve before the message actually sends.
And — here’s a major perk — iHN email campaigns include a resend to the subscribers who didn’t open the first message. This resend typically goes out 2-4 days after the first one and has a new, revised subject line, too.

Contrasting the Two Types of Emails

Do eblasts work? Do they cause readers to click over to a site and buy? In some cases, yes. But in many cases, no. I have heard many stories from clients who have invested hundreds of dollars in an eblast and had virtually no response whatsoever. What went wrong?

The Numbers and the Odds

When you are considering an eblast, you need to ask some tough questions. The person with the massive email list is going to sell you on a large number of subscribers. But you need to pry deeper and ask these two key questions:

What is the open rate for the last 10 campaigns?
What was the click through rate (CTR) for the last ten campaigns?

If a list of 50,000 subscribers has an average open rate of only 4%, you have reached only 2,000 people. Is that worth spending $800?

Compare what you would spend on an eblast with a blog review campaign where the bloggers have email subscriber lists with open rates of 35-50% or daily pageviews four times the 2,000 people you are reaching through the eblast.

With iHN personalized email campaigns, you can see the open and click rates for each list. And each blogger will send reporting for the results of your particular emails afterwards.

With an eblast, you get a single shot. If that email subject line fails to inspire an open, your money has been wasted. But with a personalized email campaign from iHN, you are getting a variety of subject lines and a second set on the resend. The odds are much better with a set of bloggers sending multiple emails versus one single message to a huge list.

How a Blog Review Campaign or Email Campaign Compares to a Magazine Ad

Print magazines tout their circulation numbers, but how do you know how many people are actually seeing your particular ad in that magazine? Maybe the ad was a great success. Maybe it was just throwing money away. It’s almost impossible to know.

When people do see your print ad and act by visiting your site, there’s no way to know they came as a result of that ad without directly asking them.

Your analytics data will show them as direct traffic if the visitor input the URL into the browser. Or if the visitor used search to find your domain, the visit will appear as search traffic. Either way, you don’t know what kind of actions happened as a result of your magazine ad.

Blog Posts and Emails Generate defined Metrics

With homeschool blog reviews or email campaigns, however, the analytics data on your site can monitor traffic sources, naming the exact homeschool blogs that sent traffic and how many visits occurred. You will know how many visits happened as a result of your campaign and exactly which bloggers sent that traffic.

(This data is gathered by your own site’s analytics such as Google Analytics. iHomeschool Network cannot access that data for you. Before your review campaign, talk to your web developer to confirm that you have installed an analytics function on your site.)

Blog Posts Have Longevity

The beauty of a blog review as opposed to a magazine is longevity. The lifespan of a magazine is a few days or weeks at best. Once it’s read, it’s typically discarded. In the best case scenario, the magazine is passed down to another interested reader who might also see your ad.

A blog post, however, is accessible online indefinitely. Savvy bloggers like the bloggers at iHomeschool Network know how to create attractive pinnable images that are shared on Pinterest for weeks, months, even years after the blog post publication date. Because that same blog post is optimized for SEO, internet searchers can be led directly to those blog posts that answer their specific questions.

Take a look at our matches page to see what your product reviews or sponsored posts might look like.

How to Target Homeschoolers in a Geographic Region

While digital marketing through blogs and email offers broad reach, sometimes businesses need to target specific geographic areas. Occasionally we get requests from clients who offer a service from a physical location, trying to generate business from the homeschoolers living in their area. It could be a college, a tutoring center, or in-person extracurricular lessons such as dance, martial arts, or music instruction. Can iHomeschool Network help?

If your service is delivered online and available to anyone, anywhere, yes! We can help. But in the case of a service that requires in-person contact, it is a bit tougher.

Our primary service at iHomeschool Network is blog post campaigns (advertorials, evergreen sponsored posts, and reviews). There’s no way for a blog post to target people in certain geographic regions because the posts are read by readers from all over the world. They are published on the internet to be found by anyone.

Of course, different bloggers have different audience makeups. While the vast majority of iHN bloggers’ traffic is USA based, some of our bloggers have a healthy following from the UK, Australia, or other nations. After digging into their analytics, certain bloggers may discover that they have a nice following from a certain state or city. But there’s no way to direct a blog post (from the blog itself) to readers in a particular geographic region. There are two possible caveats:

1. Working with Geographic Niche Bloggers

If you can find a very niche site that specializes in content relevant to the state, metro area, or region you serve, that’s your best bet. Simply perform Google searches to identify relevant sites. Here are some suggested search phrases:

state/region/city parenting blogs
homeschooling in state/region/city
state/region/city blogs

We don’t have blogs like this in iHomeschool Network, so we really can’t help with this area.

2. Using Geographic Specific Keywords

The post itself can use keywords relevant to a particular location in order to be found in search for those terms, but a more direct way to get that search traffic is simply to focus on your business’s own local search optimization. Why direct people to a blog post about your Atlanta cooking lessons for kids when you can simply work on being first in the search query yourself?

But, yes, if you are already ranking #1 for your geographic keywords and you want to dominate the rest of the results with additional content that points to you, we can help! In that case, the blog post campaign would center on using geographic keywords in the title, subheadings, alt image tags, and body text.

Of course, reviews wouldn’t work for this type of campaign, so you are left with the option of an advertorial or an evergreen post. Take that example of an Atlanta based cooking workshop for kids. Advertorials would be simple posts constructed by our bloggers, using talking points and images you supply. They would add a personalized introduction at the start and use a call to action at the end.

Evergreen posts would still be geographic focused but would take a broader perspective beyond your service. Here are some examples from our hypothetical client:

5 Unique Birthday Party Venues in Atlanta
4 Ways Homeschoolers Can Beat the Hot Atlanta Heat this Summer
Perks to Being a Homeschooler in Atlanta
6 Unconventional Summer Camp Themes in Atlanta
How to Choose a Homeschool Extracurricular Activity in Atlanta

Using Facebook to Target Geographic Areas

While blog posts can’t be targeted to readers in a certain geographic area (outside of the two options outlined above), Facebook ads can.

A blog post campaign with iHomeschool Network provides content on our bloggers’ sites that is shared on Facebook which you can then boost to whatever audience you are trying to reach. This is done through the branded content feature on Facebook. It’s easy for us to integrate this option into your campaign (at no extra cost). The bloggers in an iHN campaign by matter of routine share their blog posts on Facebook through their Facebook pages. When they share, they tag you—the client—via the branded content tool. That post will then show up in your Facebook account (see insights→branded content) so you can pay to boost that post for any desired timeframe and to whatever specific audience you choose (choose your geographic area and the interest of homeschooling).

Why would you boost a blog post campaign instead of just running Facebook ads yourself? Well, you should run Facebook ads from your own company page (or hire someone to do it for you), but boosting branded content posts from iHN is the best way that we can help you reach homeschoolers in a particular geographical area.

The rates for this service are no different than our rates for any other blog post campaign. The Facebook shares and branded content are a normal part of our work to help you reach the homeschool market. But if geo-targeting on Facebook is one of your goals, please let us know upfront so we can be sure to integrate it into the recruitment phase with your blogger team. Email us at info@ihomeschoolnetwork.com to get started with recruiting a team.

Conclusion

Successfully marketing to homeschoolers in the digital space requires a multi-faceted approach that combines the right platforms, authentic content, and strategic timing. Whether through blog reviews, social media engagement, or targeted email campaigns, the key is to maintain authenticity while providing real value to the homeschool community. By understanding and implementing these various digital marketing strategies, you can build a strong presence in the homeschool market and create lasting connections with your target audience.