[Case study] How audience insights helped a company expand into three new educational markets

The Challenge

Convosphere’s client, a multinational company in the “edutainment” space, wanted to explore opportunities to expand into Germany, France, and Japan. The client’s goal was to reduce inequalities by providing global users with digital learning systems through their service.

The markets of France, Germany, and Japan don’t exactly bear many similarities (especially in regard to the client’s industry). Totally different cultures, demographics, and educational systems meant that Convosphere had the challenge of establishing consistent data points and metrics to measure, regardless of geography.

Another key challenge of the project was the fact that educational data can be tricky to gather in the first place. Students (primary students, in particular) bear little resemblance to traditional consumers and data firms often cannot directly assess their needs. Instead, data would have to be gathered via third parties such as parents, educators and industry experts.

The Solution

Convosphere set out to answer three questions about each region:

What are their needs and challenges related to education and ed-tech?
Who represents the largest sect of potential customers (think: educators versus parents)?
What is the potential reach of an edutainment company in the region (based on factors such as availability of Internet access)

Convosphere relied on a combination of primary research and third-party data to determine all of the above. Using conversational data, social media, and AI, the company was able to fill in the gaps to determine whether or not it was worthwhile to pursue opportunities as an edutainment brand in France, Germany, and Japan.

Below are the four specific steps that Convosphere took to find and organize their data.

1. Connect with local analysts for demographic info on each region
2. Conduct conversational analysis via social media
3. Put data into context and get even more granular with analysis
4. Separate consumers into specific market segments with Audiense

The Results

Convosphere was able to return to their client with a sense of confidence regarding how and why they should expand into the German, French, and Japanese markets.

Snapshot of Convosphere’s findings as they relate to the viability of edutainment businesses in each region:

School closures, online learning, and children’s wellbeing during the pandemic were among the most-discussed topics among all markets. Still, the educational community demonstrated an understanding of the value of STEAM as an educational approach.
Many schools were not equipped with up-to-date teaching materials, connectivity or equipment: this made providing adequate digital education a distinct challenge.
There was a disparity between teachers and students in terms of access and use of online courses and Internet connectivity: this was especially true in France and Germany. In Japan, online safety and digital literacy were considered crucial topics for students to learn.

Convosphere’s findings helped their client understand the prevailing interests and concerns regarding education in each region and what was driving them. They also learned that current technological needs in the education space were focused more on hardware than software.

Based on these findings, the client was successfully able to narrow the scope of their next research phase. Meanwhile, Audiense played a pivotal role in contextualizing Convosphere’s initial round of research.

“Audiense helped us to segment the accounts actively discussing education, whether they were education experts or parents, based on their profile information. We had interesting results which clearly showed the breakdown of segments was different by market. The insights from Audiense ultimately helped the client to determine which market and segment they should target in the long run.”

Mariko Suzuki
Project Manager & Insight Analyst | Convosphere

How audience insights helped a company expand into three new educational markets

About Convosphere

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results