Earlier this year my team and I went through close to 2,000 education company websites: edtech platforms, online course providers, language schools, test prep companies, training firms, and more. Alongside that we read about 1,000 education marketing job posts from 47 countries, because what a company hires for tells you a lot about what it actually values.
I half expected the usual story about a sector that’s behind on digital, and that’s not quite what came back. Education marketing is busy, reasonably well funded, and pretty good at getting noticed. It gets weaker at the point where someone who has noticed needs help deciding.
In This Article:
How many education companies actually do content marketing?
About three in five run what I’d call an active content presence. A maintained blog or resource hub, a recognisable mix of formats, some sign that someone publishes on purpose. Another three in ten have a handful of posts and a news page nobody has touched in a while. The last one in ten treat the website as a brochure: about, programmes, contact, done.
So the first divide in this market is simply whether a company treats content as a job at all.
Search visibility follows the same shape, only steeper. A typical company in our sample, the one right in the middle, ranks for under 600 keywords and gets something like 5,000 organic visits a month. Buying those same clicks through ads would cost roughly $19,000 a month, and I’d treat that as a ballpark rather than an invoice. Then there’s a small group at the top ranking for tens of thousands of terms. The gap between them and everyone else is big, but it’s also where I’d go looking for room.
Is the content helping anyone decide?
Mostly, no. We sorted every piece by the job it was doing for the reader. A bit over 40% was there to get attention, a little over a third was for people weighing options, and only 18% spoke to someone actually ready to choose. Content for existing customers came last at 9%. Put simply, there’s more than twice as much “notice us” content as “choose us” content.
You can see it in what’s missing. Fewer than one in four active sites show pricing. About 5% have any kind of comparison page, and ROI calculators turn up on around 3%. Case studies appear on about 35%, and content that answers the usual objections on about 30%.
We scored sales enablement, meaning everything a cautious buyer needs to justify a decision before talking to sales, out of four. The sector averaged 1.57, the lowest score in the whole study. Conversion paths weren’t much better at 1.88, and roughly one site in thirteen gave a reader no visible next step at all.
That matters more in education than in most markets. A school administrator, an L&D lead, or a parent choosing a course is usually doing the research alone, often on behalf of other people who’ll ask hard questions later. If the proof isn’t published they rarely email to ask for it. They go to the provider who answered.
What is AI search doing to all this?
This was the number that stopped me. AI Overviews showed up on about 85% of the high-intent education searches we checked, the “best LMS for” and “employee training software” kind. Classic featured snippets were on about 5%.
For a growing share of buyers, then, the first description of your company comes from an assistant’s summary, pieced together from whatever it can find and trust.
In practice that tends to mean visible expertise: named authors with credentials, original data, an editorial standard you can point to. Across the sector, original research appeared on about 29% of sites and author bios with credentials on about 26%. Only one company in seven showed strong signals overall.
The hiring data suggests nobody has really been asked to own this yet. Answer engine optimisation came up in about one in 80 marketing job posts, and TikTok came up roughly ten times as often.
Where does the content go after it’s published?
Usually nowhere. Distribution was the second weakest area we measured. Not much more than a quarter of the sites have a newsletter, about the same share run webinars, and only 4% visibly repurpose anything they’ve made. The habit is to publish, share it once, and start on the next piece.
Nearly everyone who publishes is on LinkedIn too. What they post there is mostly hiring news, opinion pieces, and product updates, which is fine, but hardly anyone uses it to keep a conversation going with people who might buy.
Paid spend splits the same way as everything else. Across the broad market, about one company in six runs Google Ads. Among the most content-active group it’s closer to two in five, and many of them spend it promoting webinars and guides rather than the product directly. The companies that already take content seriously are the ones putting budget behind it.
Who is doing the work?
The job posts explain a lot of the above. Data and analytics was the skill asked for most, in just over a third of posts. Behind it, at around a fifth each, came paid media, content, and running a CRM such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Slate. Strategic planning came up in about one post in 20, cross-functional collaboration in about one in seven, and only about one title in eight was senior.
Most education companies in our sample have fewer than 500 employees, and the marketer is often the whole department, so the teams are built to execute. AI is being adopted fast. About 17% of posts mention it, some name Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity outright, and nearly all of them want it for producing more content faster.
Given everything above, that worries me a little. A sector that already over-produces awareness content, now able to produce it quicker, will probably make the imbalance worse unless someone points the tools at the bottom of the funnel instead.
Does any of this connect to growth?
It seems to. Companies we classed as high growth were more likely to have an active content presence (about 52% against 43% for low growth), and they scored higher on conversion, sales enablement, and how clearly they define who they’re for. Active presence roughly doubles between the smallest companies and the $100M to $500M band, while funding status made only a modest difference.
So what would I do with it?
If I ran marketing at an education company tomorrow, I’d start at the bottom of the funnel, because that’s where the competition is thinnest. A pricing page, or at least a range. One honest comparison page. A few named case studies. An answer, on the site, to the objections the sales team hears every week.
After that I’d make the expertise visible, with real names on the content and a bit of original data, and I’d check every couple of months what AI assistants say when someone asks about the category.
None of it is glamorous, and most of it costs more time than money. In a market where most companies compete to be noticed, the ones that help people decide still have a lot of room.
The full data, including the breakdowns behind each of these numbers, is in our State of Content Marketing for Education Companies in 2026 report. And if you’re weighing outside help for this kind of work, it’s worth asking any demand generation agency you talk to what it would build at the decision stage, as well as how it would get you more traffic.
About the author
Stefan Kalpachev is the founder of Content RevOps, which builds content, data, and automation systems for B2B companies with long, trust-led sales, including many in education. Before that he worked on content for Pearson Online Learning and King’s College London. He leads the company’s research into how education companies market and hire.
