Strategy: What an Integrated Marketing Campaign Looks Like

This is a plan that I proposed to our leadership for an integrated marketing campaign for 2019-21. We have slowly been implementing all of the elements which I outline in detail below.

Reasons to Revamp GAC Marketing

Based on the Board’s recommendation, GAC is interested in making a significantly larger investment in marketing. This effort is intended to be focused (hence microtargeting) and data-driven, leveraging the best of marketing tools available to increase lead generation. GAC has experienced healthy enrollment for the 2019-2020 school year and is projecting even higher enrollment for 2020-2021 and beyond as a result of this campaign and the systems that will be put in place to sustain the campaign long term.

Marketing Campaign Goal

With this campaign, we aim to reach success-driven parents in affluent target zip codes within the perimeter (ITP) (and some OTP) to increase enrollment across school levels at Greater Atlanta Christian School (but particularly in High School).

Campaign Platform

We've developed 3 key messages that respond to GAC questions and known concerns -

1. Greater Opportunities - Offer an advantageous alternative to Intown private and public schools by demonstrating GAC’s value-add with messages that address ITP persona needs

   1. Atlanta Magazine data, GAC in the middle of cost but providing some of the highest value in terms of academic results and offerings.

   2. Address pain points (the problem): college placement, known by teachers, build your resume' in smaller school, college counselors, counselor ratio, peer to peer, hope eligible

   3. Top values: innovative learning modalities, breadth and depth of program

2. Greater Innovation - Demonstrate how GAC is the most innovative school in Atlanta in its modes of instruction

   1. Design of spaces to support collaboration, outdoor space for LS, immersive learning

   2. Find a better way to talk about Ethos and use that as our linchpin to talk about innovation

   3. Develop stronger key messages for this with Dragon Army

3. Greater Access - Address misconception that GAC does not serve ITP families due to distance by marketing bus routes available to these families.

   1. Beyond bus routes and the ability to simplify your life, we can tout commute resources, and programs before and after school that enrich the student experience and help parents get to and from the school outside of rush hour commute times.

   2. Do ITP see us as other?

Expected Marketing Campaign Outcomes

With our microtargeting, multi-channel approach, we anticipate a 10% increase in ITP enrollment. Based on our conversion rates, this means we will need a 16.9 % increase in inquiries and a 13% in tours.

Because we are taking a digital-first approach, we are able to iterate throughout the course of the campaign, adjusting methods and content. We will also be able to split test our content until we find what resonates with our audience.

Marketing Persona

• Affluence score of 100-200+ (chart one)

• Success-driven parent for whom the highest value is academics (not necessarily faith)

• Majority choosing private school education for their children (chart two)

• Marked by a parenting style of “concerted cultivation” (The Atlantic)

• Looking for enriching experiences for their children, lots of co-curriculars, future focused - college outcomes are important (The Atlantic)

Campaign Strategy

• Targeted promotions to our microtargeting audience

• Tailored messages that address our customers’ problems

• Trackable performance for all of our initiatives

In terms of our content, we will take the Storybrand approach to this campaign:

• Lead with the problems our customers are facing. Then our solution will make sense.

• Cut copy down; make everything about “what’s in it for me” from the customer perspective

• Have one clear offer

• Give customers a clear path

• We are the guides; the customer is the hero of the story

• Invite the customers into a story

Here is what we are proposing:

• Search Engine Marketing

  • Google AdWords (PPC)

    • Use some of the target keywords used in past PPC campaign with Frenik, like Best private school near me

    • Other keywords that we haven’t done before: Best private school Atlanta, Best Christian school Atlanta, Flexible school schedule, Online school, Hybrid school Atlanta, innovative private school Atlanta, most innovative school Atlanta, same keywords but also adding in high school

  • Search Engine Optimization

    • Need to optimize content on pages based on keywords and campaign-driven language

    • Need to generate content that will help to boost position on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

      • We are started to create a Parents Resources page which will help organically drive traffic to the site with rich SEO-content. These will be shared like lead magnets where people have to give their email address to download (and then they will automatically be entered into a workflow). Example lead magnets we are currently working on: How to choose a private school in Atlanta; Steps to encourage leadership in your child.

• Facebook/ Instagram ads and boosted posts

  • Spend a small amount to boost a Facebook post to get high reach from our engaged audience for social validation, then boost to target Microtargeting audience afterwards

  • Promote Facebook posts to Instagram

  • Run Facebook ads targeted to ITP audience; run several campaigns:, Innovation, Access

  • Create a lookalike audience for our ITP families and see how that list performs compared to target ITP list

  • With everything, create tracking UTM parameter URLs so can monitor and track all campaigns in Google Analytics

  • Sample asset for Facebook ad: view gif

  • Microtargeting Audience in Facebook has a reach of 320,000 based on zip codes and parents of children ages 0-17, income in top 5-25% of zip code

    • So far we have been boosting routine Facebook posts by $30 and setting ads (marketing video, Open House) at $100-300. Here is an idea of how many people we would reach of our microtargeting audience based on ad spend in Facebook.

• Direct Mail (Postcards)

  • Target zip codes, get lists of families with students making certain income level or above (messaging can be targeted to different ages?), depending on how big the lists, determine an approach (number of postcards in the series, for example)

  • Do a series of postcards (2 at least), touching on GAC Opportunities, Innovation, Access messages

  • Sample assets

• Strategic print ads in education-focused issues and strategic in-town publications

  • Re-negotiate all contracts, asking for digital ads/articles and social mentions to accompany print ads; use digital articles across all digital marketing channels including newsletter, social, and web

  • Get cost down to half of the $40K we are spending

  • Just imagine for a second that we move $20K into targeted, tailored, trackable ads?

• Events

  • Tried in the past: The Atlantan Private School Premiere (mixed results)

  • Admissions events (add here) - Taste of Alpharetta, etc

• Hubspot workflow

  • Refresh HubSpot workflows to fold in new campaign messaging

  • Need right level of selling for different campaigns and different ways people are getting to us. For example, if they are downloading a lead magnet from the Parent Resources page, need a softer sell probably. Calls to action will probably also be different.

• Website landing pages

  • In conjunction with all of the campaigns we are running on various platforms, we will need the following landing pages

    • GAC’s innovative education model (keywords/ads: flexible school schedule, online school, hybrid school Atlanta, innovative private school Atlanta)

    • Value (Return on Investment?) of a GAC Education - (keywords/ads: best private school, best Christian school)

    • Worth the Drive - Access campaign message (keywords: private school near me)

    • Find the Right Fit School - helping parents figure out the best fit for their child; use quizzes

  • Landing pages will help us track the effectiveness of each campaign. For a particular campaign message, we will point to the landing page for that message thus being able to gauge which campaign drove the most traffic and conversion.

• Thought Leadership

  • We will use LinkedIn publishing tools to publish articles about GAC as an innovator in the education space. Publishing tool is only available to individuals so we would need to publish from someone’s profile (recommending Scott) and then share on our pages. This is more powerful than just publishing a post on our page.

  • We can also get pieces published on online publishers and media outlets.

• Digital quizzes through platform Interact

  • Options with Interact: embed quizzes on landing pages or website; set up as Facebook ad; do popup or announcement bar on website; share as a direct link or social media post; monthly subscription

  • We can make as many as we want of these but I am suggesting one that is: What is my school personality type? Here is the start of a sample quiz: https://quiz.tryinteract.com/#/preview/5e443f450e03570014c5ad3d

  • These can be very complex with logic set up or they can remain basic.

  • At the end of the quizzes, we ask for their email addresses. This form integrates with HubSpot through a Zapier API which I’ve already set up, which will connect with a special workflow. If we get a higher level membership (which I would not suggest unless these end up being super popular and show ROI), we get more analytics and tracking (it links directly to Google Analytics).

  • We can link to a landing page where we lay out our values (Big Ideas), which they can hopefully connect to, as well as detailed information about different aspects they would be interested in.

• Options not being considered at this time:

  • Display ads: these have a very low CTR in the education sector (0.53%). We don’t think these are worth the investment at this time. We will take them when we can get them from our print advertisers.

  • Print ads that are not in education guides

    • Eg, Suwanee Magazine ads (can redirect $5,000 to digital spend or if we can negotiate to have digital editorials, then keep)

  • Youtube ads: Youtube no longer supports education accounts so we don’t have an account to advertise.

Timeframe

• Campaign launch: October 1, 2020

• Campaign duration: Through April 28, 2021

Measurement

It will be important to measure the effectiveness of this campaign and ROI. Ultimately we are looking for an increase in enrollment but also want to accomplish all we can in the way of brand awareness. Some of our efforts will have spillover benefits such as re-educating our current families on our offerings and programs, thus helping increase brand loyalty.

We will look at performance with each platform and compare it against past campaigns and industry benchmarks (PPC for example; industry benchmark for education). This can be presented as a dashboard for leadership on a quarterly basis, as well as our lessons learned from the campaigns.

Here is some data for enrollment from ITP in the last year. Here is the link to most of the data. We are recommending a detailed data analysis to get a full picture: which zip codes yielded most inquiries and applications and best applicants so we can best target high quality applicants.

Recommended Next Steps

1. Secure leadership support

2. Develop a detailed plan for implementation (recommending step-wise process of introducing materials, taking action; not everything has to be launched at once, nor do we have to wait until we have everything in order to implement)

3. Hold kick-off meeting

4. Hold messaging workshop to establish messaging platform

5. Conduct focus group with ITP current families and possibly others outside GAC in order to test messaging

6. Launch implementation