Extramarks Education is a new age 360-degree digital learning company focused on the Pre-school, K-12, Higher studies, and Test Prep segments. To bridge the gap between teachers and end-learners, making education interactive, inclusive and accessible and leveraging 12+ years of expertise in providing holistic learning solutions, Extramarks has recently launched the ‘The Teaching App’- an advanced teaching platform that extends the benefits of a live classroom teaching experience to school teachers, private teachers, and home tutors and coaching staff across the country.
In an interview with Medianews4U, Arpit Agarwal, Vice President – Marketing at Extramarks Education spoke about the brand’s journey, marketing initiatives, trends in the edtech sector in the country, and more.
Excerpts:
Speaking about the brand’s journey and the factors that make them stay relevant in the cluttered Edtech space, Agarwal said, “Extramarks has been in the Edtech ecosystem way before any of the new age Edtech companies in the country. We have been there for the last 15 years. Extramarks is not just an online learning solution provider. We are a holistic online solution provider. We are trying to build a connected ecosystem where we are trying to engage with the students and parents community, now we have forayed into the teaching community as well. It is the holistic coverage of the entire education sector which we believe in taking forward in our future marketing initiatives. We started our journey by digitizing schools way back in 2007, and at that point, technology wasn’t omnipresent as it is today. Our mission and vision have always been to make education accessible, easy, and effective for students in the country.”
In the 15 years journey, Extramarks were able to reach out to 10,000 schools in the country, installing smart classrooms and thereby digitizing them.
“Owing to 15 years of experience, we have been making a lot of content for the schools and catering to various education boards. We have been catering to almost 15+ education boards and cover almost all subjects and classes. As we have created a lot of content, we also launched a learning app which houses all these contents and to counter all the new age edtech companies,” he added.
Talking about the recently launched, Extramarks – The Teaching App, Agarwal said, “The app is a 360-degree solution to all the teaching needs. With state-of-the-art teaching technologies at its core, Extramarks-The Teaching App equips school teachers as well as home tutors with cutting-edge tools to create, manage, and track their entire live classes’ schedule on a single platform while automating the mundane and manual documentation tasks. The app lets teachers create, assign and customise assessments with premium access to over lakhs of questions in the Extramarks repository. The app also allows customization of notifications to make the whole teaching experience interactive, engaging and fun. We will be the only Edtech platform in India to provide inclusivity for teachers and students.”
He further added, “By allowing the teaching fraternity, including school educators and home tutors, to set up their classrooms anywhere on any device, the Teachers App provides great inclusivity of education delivery in tier 2 and 3 cities. The App ensures a ‘barrier-free access’ to teachers beyond metros who can expand their learner base across the country and strengthen their entrepreneurial stance while redeeming specific sets of rewards for their day-to-day app usage. With the simple user interface and classroom setup, the platform currently operates on a freemium model for schools and institutes and free of cost for home tutors for an indefinite period.”
Speaking about the brand’s customer base, he said, “We have a presence across the various cities in India. We have partnered with DPS RK Puram to government schools in West Bengal, Maharashtra, and more. We have penetrated across metros, non-metros and Tier 1,2, & 3 cities. When it comes to digital learning we have observed that adoption is more towards metros, at the same time, Tier 2 and 3 cities are picking up.”
Marketing activities have been a fairly recent phenomenon in Extramarks.
“Recently we have done our rebranding and launched our mass media campaign. Ab Padhai Ke Liye Sirf Extramarks was live across regional and national markets. Apart from that, from a regional perspective, we conduct regional events in schools named EM-Connect, where career counseling etc are conducted under the same. Digital is the heart of the company. Before our rebranding exercise, almost 70-80 percent of our marketing spending was on digital. There has been a shift or equal spending in mass media post rebranding exercise. We realized that digital media is effective in reaching out to the consumers in metros and Tier 1 cities. Our large part of consumers are in Tier 2 and 3 cities, and to reach out to them it is very critical to resort to traditional media. The ad spending proportion could vary depending on the marketing requirement.”
Speaking about the future of the Edtech sector in the country, he said, “There are three things critical for an Edtech Company to survive in this country. The first one is content, we always need to work on various innovative methods to develop the content. We are now looking at the gamification of the content, which will soon be delivered, and some of our modules are being developed.”
According to Agarwal, online-only is not the way of learning.
“It has to be online + offline- the hybrid learning approach is the way forward for edtech companies. Some of the Edtech players have already started adapting to the hybrid model. One of the advantages of Extramarks is that we have a stronghold in the hybrid model of education,” he said.
“While the edtech sector in the country is cluttered, the private and home tutor segment is unexplored, these markets have a lot of potential and will witness humongous growth,” Agarwal concluded.
