Drove a 107% increase in CTR on our Paid Social campaigns.
Decreased the cost per lead by 82.33%.
Achieved position 1 for the industry’s most competitive key terms.
The Challenge
This education software company provides management systems for early-year settings, like preschools and nurseries. The business’s USPs are that it is an all-in-one solution, developed by early years experts to overcome real challenges in day to day work. They’re also cheaper than any other provider available and believe in supporting small nurseries.
At the start of our partnership, the business was undergoing a website refresh to increase conversions. Their brand was used almost exclusively as a resource, rather than a sales tool to convert users. This was due to the fact that the only content on the site was blog content, targeting preschool teachers or practitioners, rather than the decision-makers in the business, like managers and owners. The business initially approached The Good Marketer as they wanted to get off on the right foot with content creation for the new site.
The client had previously had different marketing agencies handling different channels. However, they quickly realised that the most efficient way to work and achieve a successful, holistic strategy was to bring all marketing activities together. The business was so pleased with our content creation, transparency and communication that they brought their Paid Social activity to The Good Marketer.
Our initial analysis of the accounts identified:
- Both channels had spent in excess of £1000 without a single conversion or lead.
- A low domain authority which was leading to sub-par search engine rankings.
- Poor website layout which was leading to issues with the full funnel approach.
- Landing pages were not being utilised to drive conversions.
- Facebook campaigns were focused on metrics that were not contributing any value to the business.
Solution
SEO
The brand was conceived by early years experts and was looking to connect to their audience by showing them that they understood the obstacles in their working lives. As such, it was essential to the client that the copy spoke authentically but authoritatively.
To ensure we captured this tone of voice, our team dedicated time early in the relationship to getting to know the product. We reviewed the customer journey path, including booking a demo and we also reviewed the competitor’s websites and conducted thorough keyword research to ensure we appointed the most valuable and transactional keywords to each page of the site to meet the client’s goals.
Whilst the website was being built, The Good Marketer consulted on conversion rate optimisation. We implemented different paths for a user to get in touch, such as the Live Chat function on the homepage. The buttons and calls to action on the site were also dull and hard to find. We used colours and added more CTAs to highlight the desired action for the user to take.
From no visibility at all, we have achieved position 1 for the most competitive key terms, “nursery management software” and “preschool management software” in Ireland. We have also achieved page 1 results for the same keywords in the UK and are using backlinks to push on this.
High-intent, low-search volume keywords such as “learning journal software” also achieved position 1 in both markets.
Paid Social
When taking over these campaigns, we realised that the campaigns targeting different funnel stages were overlapping and not at all clear. As the goal was to bring in new users, we focused mainly on cold campaigns.
We identified and implemented a clear campaign structure to reach our key audiences. We divided these out by target country and focused audiences on fields of study, job titles and interests. We also set up lookalikes of those who had engaged previously via the Facebook page.
As we knew from our initial analysis of the account, the cost per click was very high. To control the spend as much as possible, we conducted thorough, regular reviews and excluded any demographic, ad or platform that was not converting. We excluded Instagram and only targeted women. We also knew that the age group 18 – 24 were very unlikely to be in a decision making position and also excluded these. As a result, we were able to reduce the cost per click to just €0.67.
Working with such a niche product, data was slow to come through at first. We knew our targeting was refined and accurate but needed to make it easier for users to provide their data to be contacted. We duplicated the campaigns but set them up with on-Facebook lead forms. In just three months, these campaigns generated 180 leads with a cost per result of €31.81, down from approximately €180.
The Good Marketer worked closely with the client’s sales team to improve the quality of these leads. We tested and changed fields in the form to deter students and teachers in training. We also began to exclude childminders who proved not to be a valuable audience.
We regularly changed the copy and creative to ensure it was always relevant to the audience. This included copy that addressed demands in preschools due to COVID-19, as well as Return To School messaging. In the first three months of running social campaigns, we increased CTR by 109%.
The Results
Whilst working on the campaigns, we were able to:
- Increase clicks from Social channels by 99.74% to 41,001.
- Decrease the cost per lead by 82.33% from €180 to €31.81.
- Generate 194 leads from no results at all.
- Create and implement new optimised landing pages.
- Achieve position 1 for the industry’s most competitive key terms.
- Increase overall visibility in 2 countries.
- Drive a 162.22% increase in new users YoY.
- Achieve a 6 minute 39 seconds average session duration.
- Capture 1,277 goal completions.
