Sarah Brody

Overview

Teddy Bear Club is a bilingual French-English preschool in Lincoln and Newton, MA.

When Derek, the Co-Head of School, first reached out to me, he had a long list of ideas for improving their marketing strategy in order to drive more applications and enrollments for Teddy Bear Club. But without a background in marketing, Derek was looking for help prioritizing those efforts and executing them well.

The Challenge

At the time I began working with Derek, TBC had been allocating a lot of budget toward offline advertising methods, and had a few scattered digital marketing efforts in place. Derek was looking to expand on these digital marketing efforts and optimize each to generate as many conversions as possible, while also collecting data across various channels in order to determine the best areas to invest their budget.

The Strategy

I worked with Derek to test and optimize a number of TBC's marketing channels over the course of 6 months. Here are just a few of the several areas we focused on.

Facebook Ads:

We started running Facebook ads in late February, with the goal of driving more traffic and conversions. We ran two main campaigns: one a retargeting campaign for all TBC website visitors, and the other targeting females by age, location, and income range.

The first set of ads we ran were promoting TBC's upcoming Open House. I began by building out a dedicated landing page to direct our ads to, where parents could get more details and register for the Open House. The Open House ads generated very strong results, bringing in 6 signups from the demographics campaign and 5 signups from the remarketing campaign, both at an extremely low cost-per-acquisition.

These Facebook ads contributed to one of TBC's highest open house attendance rates.

We then tested broader Facebook ads, with the call-to-action to schedule a tour of TBC. These ads did not generate nearly the same caliber results, so we were able to deduce that the best use of Facebook ads is to promote specific events. This will be a channel TBC can continue to leverage for this purpose going forward.

AdWords Campaigns:

After an initial AdWords audit, I discovered that Teddy Bear Club already had some well-structured AdWords campaigns in place. To build upon the existing campaigns, I optimized for better keyword/ad matching, and added more copy variations, a few additional ad groups to expand into new keyword categories, and a remarketing campaign to more fully leverage website traffic.

We were able to increase conversions from AdWords by 73% between Q4 of 2015 and Q1 of 2016. The remarketing campaign also achieved the lowest cost-per-acquisition of all campaigns, aside from brand-name keywords.

Email Nurturing:

Previously, Teddy Bear Club didn't have any email nurturing in place, and was only leveraging email marketing to send occasional notifications. After deciding to shift our strategy to focus on converting more leads at the middle of the funnel, I built out an email series to nurture everyone who submits a form on the TBC website.

The email series is designed to send content over a 1-week period that will educate parents about the value of TBC, and encourage them to schedule a tour of the school.

Having this automated email series in place will help Derek shift away from him manual approach to following up with leads, and will help convert more leads to the next stage of the marketing funnel.

Results

By taking an organized, prioritized approach to testing a variety of online marketing channels, we were able to collect data to indicate which channels will be the best investments for TBC going forward. We were also able to put in place a number of marketing assets (such as the email nurturing series, an email subscription pop-up, a list of content marketing ideas, and ad campaign performance benchmarks) that Teddy Bear Club will be able to leverage as they continue to build out and improve their marketing strategy.