Why are we changing?
Our team needs specific targets to work towards and review
performance against. Our current stuck is a lack of specific
targets: without a cohesive strategy, there has been a focus on
tactics only. Strategy sets a specific long-term vision and our
team is ready to commit to higher performance based on strategic
organization. This report is directly responding to the previous
lack of strategy with research, data, and actionable
takeaways.
In this report you will find data from audits showing a baseline
from the past fiscal year. You will also see a full analysis of the
current state of digital marketing, a projection of what we are
building to, and the steps it will take to reach our
objective.
3Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Contents Current State of Data 3 Google AdWords 3 Programmatic
Advertising 4 Social Media Advertising 5 Fusion Mosaic (blog) 6
Organic/SEO 7 What do we need to change? 8 New Strategy Goals
9
Digital Marketing Strategy 2018-2019 10 Google/Bing Advertising 10
Programmatic Advertising 11 Social Media Advertising 12 Social
Media Organic Traffic 12 Fusion Mosaic (Blog) 13 Email Automation
14 Organic/SEO 15 Referral blogs 16 Glassdoor, Yelp, and Other
Referral Sites 17
Digital Marketing Funnel 19 Why Are We Changing/Why Implement?
21
4Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
2017-18
Google AdWords
PPC Search From July – mid-December, PPC Search was strategized and
ran by Emily and Ricardo. Summer, Brand, and Private School
adgroups were being optimized and running. From December –
currently Stevens has been in charge of running PPC Search. Stevens
changed the structure of the account from a multi-campus campaign
approach to grouping all campuses together via zip codes into
larger adgroups based on key- word grouping. This new structure
allowed the account to change from a manual CPC bidding approach to
an automized CPA bidding approach.
New summer, private school, and brand landing pages were built in
Unbounce and used until April. Ste- vens created new landing pages
for Brand, Private School, Anxiety, Tutoring, and ADHD
adgroups.
Display From July – December 2017, Display campaigns were optimized
and ran by Ricardo. Google Display was shut off in January 2018 and
the budget was reallocated to new programmatic campaigns.
Retargeting From July – mid-December 2017, the retargeting strategy
and implementation was ran by Emily and Ri- cardo. Starting in
January 2018, Stevens took over running retargeting and the budget
was cut to $5/day and reallocated into the new programmatic
campaigns. Targeting has been minimally customized due to an
unorganized Google Tag Manager and poor website page layout.
AdWords Acquisition Data
6Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
AdWords Impressions and Clicks (Google data)
7Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
8Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic campaigns (MIA/BR, PA, Focus Schools, Focus Schools
2.0, COGx, Fusion Forward) were launched with the company Simpli.fi
in January 2018. A holistic, campus-wide campaign (38 cam- puses)
was launched in June. Tactics used are geo-fencing, keyword
contextual, audience behavior tar- geting, keyword search, display
banners, video pre-roll, and native ads. The reports offered from
Simpli. fi showed traffic and conversion data. However, due to only
a last-click attribution model of reporting, connecting impressions
to inquiries from this tactic was unsuccessful. Simpli.fi data and
Pardot data also never matched similarly and conclusions for
inquiries driven by this tactic were near impossible to draw.
Programmatic Acquisition Data
Total inquiries: 17 Total revenue: $8,460 (completed contracts)
Total landing page views: 39,284
9Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Social Media Advertising
Paid Advertising The current strategy around Facebook ads has led
to inconsistent targeting, reporting, and success. There have not
been solid objectives built out to track KPI success or failure
from social advertisements as well as no content marketing plan to
support the content of the ads. The majority of ads created last
year sup- ported new campus openings and their events. The field
has been trained to use Facebook ads to support their campus
events, and the Marketing team built out visuals for the ads.
Organic Up until now, the Marketing team has been responsible for
managing social media software for every campus in the country.
However, the system was riddled with in-efficiencies and was highly
ineffective. Campuses were expected to be their own mini social
media experts and were frequently stressed over what sort of
content they needed to post. With our switch to running national
social media advertising, campuses will no longer have to worry
about how their social media channels support inquiries.
Social Media Acquisition Data
Total social-referred inquiries: 30 Total revenue: $48,900* Total
landing page views: 12,078 Website visits via social referral: 382
Website visits via Facebook referral: 373 (98% of social
referrals)
10Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Fusion Mosaic Journal (Blog)
The blog houses our stories, thought leadership pieces, and any
news coming from the campus. This past year we have focused on
telling more teacher and staff stories. In May, SEO was audited and
updated to improve our content presence on Google. Up until now,
strategy has been lacking and the blog was a tactic added into
various projects without solid support. An editorial calendar is in
process.
Total blog inquiries: 34 Total registers: 6 Total revenue:
$242,510
Blog Acquisition Data
Top Converting Blogs
Organic/SEO
Organic traffic and SEO efforts were monitored and optimized by
Ricardo until December 2017. Organ- ic referral traffic comes from
both Google and Bing search networks. The organic traffic has been
under reported. Stevens took over optimizing SEO for new schools as
of January 2018 through managing Goo- gle Identification note
cards. Melissa has been in charge of optimizing the back-end SEO
keywords of the website and is transitioning the role to Matt. The
Marketing intern, Katherine, gathered updated campus information
from about 20 campuses so that listing websites can be updated
(Noodle/k12, Private School Review, GreatSchools, etc.).
Organic* Acquisition Data *Website Tracking Pardot Campaign
Data
Total registers: 537 Total revenue: $13,052,277.31
Fusion Website Domain Authority
14Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
15Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Digital Marketing Strategy 2018-19
16Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Create and establish a healthy and effective digital marketing
funnel.
Goals
1. Build thought-leadership through evergreen/pillar brand content
and inbound marketing tactics target- ed at appropriate funnel
levels. BHAG: become the number one resource for our families and
profession- als in the innovative education sphere.
2. Create a highly efficient awareness and conversion funnel that
is easy to use and leads to more campus visits and more community
connections.
3. Use data to inform strategy, content, and targeting which will
ultimately lead to higher quality leads. (The right people, at the
right time, in the right place.)
Actions: What do we need to change?
Develop content marketing strategy • Create objectives to measure
KPIs • Create fresh, targeted messaging and creatives
Target with funnel-specific strategy; data-driven content
Audit resource management • Optimize time – manage less vendors and
utilize team skills if possible
Audit and re-organize Google Tag Manager • Optimize for retargeting
campaigns • Redo “goals” in Analytics
Improve tracking and data auditing • Streamlined UTM system •
Clean, tested pixels
17Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Optimize website to convert • Build new pages for retargeting,
enhanced SEO, and user-experience driven conversions
Report, report, report! • Monthly report rhythm minimum • Build new
dashboards • Survey stakeholders for what data they need to see •
Review IVIR quality data; compare referral and inbound
inquiries
Customer personas/Insight journey maps • Complete audience profiles
and add them to department brand • Create system for auditing,
testing, and enhancing audience profiles
Organize region-specific data • Keywords, phrases, trends, zip
codes, pros, qualitative feedback
Lead-nurturing • Analyze the marketing funnel for our audiences and
create lead-nurturing campaigns to target each appropriate stage of
the funnel
18Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
1. Plan
Before any tactics are utilized, we’ve gathered data to inform
strategy and to build out a plan. We’ve mapped out defined targets
and goals, SMART KPIs, have focused on investing in content
marketing, digital media, and experiences. Our integrated digital
strategy will continue to help define audience/mar- ket
segmentation, targeting, and positioning for our online value
propositions.
Types of branded content that will be created or gathered at this
stage: evergreen/pillar content, testimonials, brand story, brand
message, brand promise, and more.
2. Reach / Exploration
In this top stage of the funnel, we publish and promote content
through search engines, social networks, publishers, and other
blogs to draw influencers, networks, and relevant audiences to our
content hub (AKA the Fusion website). Key measures for this stage
are unique visitors and the growing number of fans/followers.
• Google (Search & Display) • Bing (Search & Display) •
Programmatic Networks (Search & Display) • SEO/Organic •
Facebook • Instagram • Twitter • Pinterest • LinkedIn • Mom Blogs
(Traacker) • PrivateSchoolReview.com • GreatSchools.com •
ADDitude.com
3. Act / Decision Making
In this stage, audiences are led to our website, blog, and lead
generation landing pages. These pages are filled with content that
is relevant, inspirational, and useful with the intent to encourage
audiences to fill out our web forms and become inquiries. Key
measures for this stage are number of leads, conversion rate, time
spent on site, engagement (shares/comments/likes).
20Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
4. Convert / Purchase
In this stage, marketing automation and remarketing are used based
on contextual relevance to drive con- versions to audiences who
have visited our website previously, but did not convert. Strong
investment is focused on this stage in the funnel to support
conversion rate optimization (CRO). Key measures for this stage are
registers, revenue/profit, and inquiry to register rate.
• Google (Retargeting) • Bing (Retargeting) • Programmatic
(Retargeting) • Facebook (Retargeting) • Instagram (Retargeting) •
Email Automation (Lead generation)
5. Engage / Advocacy
This stage in the funnel is fulled by raving fans. Positive
testimonials and reviews are the key to social media marketing,
social proof, repeat sales, and referrals. Testimonials are
collected and incorporated into the foundation of our content
marketing that is used at every stage of the digital marketing
funnel. Key measures for this stage are repeat sales (lifetime
value), satisfaction survey results, advocacy and referrals.
• Facebook (Reviews) • Glassdoor (Reviews) • Instagram(Reviews) •
Yelp (Reviews) • Testimonials • Family Referrals • Professional
Referrals • Returning Students
21Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Google/Bing Advertising
Search We’ll continue to test the new account structure, CPA
bidding strategy, and landing pages frequently. Reports will be
made monthly on traffic, conversions, and awareness generated by
this tactic. All landing pages will be mobile-optimized for our
main audiences and will use Pardot tracking pixels. We will begin
exploring Acquisio a Google/Bing management alternative to regain
internal management over the ad- vertising platforms.
Display Display banner ads will be used to reach targeted audiences
and build the base for retargeting audiences. Messaging and
creatives will be hyper-focused and lead audiences through the top
section of the digital strategy funnel down to informational pages
(like the website and blog). This tactic is not meant to build high
amounts of immediate conversions, but instead supports as the first
step in a longer attribution chain. We will continue to test and
optimize landing pages.
Retargeting This tactic will use lists of audiences built into
Google Tag Manager. We can target audiences based on rules such as:
different retention windows, “blog readers,” tuition page visitors,
converters or non-convert- ers, adgroup type, etc. As testing
builds data around the optimal audiences, we’ll increase bids for
high ROI-audiences. We will spend proportionately to conversion –
more money will be spent on retargeting compared to
display/programmatic due to the fact that audiences are more likely
to convert at this stage of the funnel and touch-point. We will
continue to test and optimize landing pages.
22Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Programmatic Advertising
We will continue the holistic Fusion campus campaign until August
and review Simpli.fi as a program- matic vendor. We will begin
testing programmatic with a new company called Acquisio on the bay
area and Chicago land Fusion campuses. We are looking to improve
our reporting capabilities to contribute to an omni-point
attribution model which we are still missing. The creatives used on
this platform will be the same as Google display and retargeting.
Programmatic will be used to build more reach and audience lists
and utilize retargeting campaigns on other networks. Native ads
will be used to draw more audiences and traffic to our content
marketing hub: the Fusion blog. This tactic is still in the works
of becoming more efficient to manage and report on. We will
continue to test and optimize landing pages.
23Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Social Media Advertising
Facebook/Instagram The Marketing team will write, build, and
monitor national ad campaigns for Facebook and Instagram. The
company Acquisio offers a robust A/B testing software which we are
demoing. This functionality offers a seamless sync to our Facebook
Business Manager account and allows us to advertise to any of the
pages that we own. Their advertising software creates up to
hundreds of A/B test variables in mere minutes which is an
incredible advantage for our team. The strategy for Facebook
advertising is to have consistent, fresh, and highly tested ad
copy. We will create and test custom audiences for both display and
retargeting advertisements. These ads will push to the next stage
of the funnel: white papers, the website, blog posts, etc.
The Marketing team will still support local campus teams with their
Facebook event advertising by creat- ing sharable images for the
local teams to use.
Pinterest Pinterest has become known as another “search engine” and
our team will be reviewing and demoing the platform advertising
features. The audiences that use Pinterest fit our targeted
demographics well and could be an excellent addition to our
top-funnel digital advertising strategy.
Social Media Organic Traffic
Organic social media strategy is making a large change in the
direction of streamlining the Marketing team to run similar to an
advertising agency. This shift in strategy means that campuses will
be posting di- rectly through Facebook and Instagram when they
share images from their campus and focusing on only creating events
and sharing photos from local campus events.
The Marketing team will update trainings to reflect how to use the
Facebook and Instagram apps natively.
Edgar is the new program that the Marketing team will be using to
run social media management. Edgar makes it easy for teams to
compile an unlimited collection of content and then easily post it
to multiple so- cial media platforms. This program successfully
compliments the content marketing strategy that has been developed
by the team. This program is much more cost efficient than Social
Studio had been (about $600/annually), and also matches the new
strategy flawlessly. We will use Edgar to post thought leader- ship
content and promote connections from influencers via
Traacker.
The Marketing team will manage national Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts (with support from the recruiting
team for LinkedIn) and continue to support new school Facebook
pages.
24Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Fusion Mosaic Journal (blog)
The Marketing team is committed to data-informed, strategy-driven
content. On the blog this includes content that will support our
projects written for the right audience at the right stage of the
funnel. A Teacher Freelance Network plan is in progress and we will
utilize other internal content creators as well. Content types
include: evergreen content for ads and landing pages, thought
leadership pieces to be post- ed internally and on external sites,
and relevant/timely content. A larger focus will be placed on the
distribution of content on the right channels and in the right
commu- nities to build awareness, drive inquiries, and bolster
engagement. We will be utilizing Contently to manage our entire
Content Marketing process and network of content creators.
25Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Email Automation
Pardot has a robust tool called Engagement Studio that email
automation will be managed through.
We will move targeted audiences along the marketing funnel through
a series of content including blogs, videos, and testimonials with
the goal of having them attend an event or set up a visit.
Considerations will be made as to how this interacts with the sales
process and communication with RDAOs, DAOs, and Operations will be
paramount. Automation funnel ideas are: re-engaging Disqualified:
Unresponsive inquiries, blog subscribers, and more.
26Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Organic/SEO
To maintain our organic traffic, we’ll use the program Moz/Moz
Local to manage all of our campus list- ings around the internet.
Through Moz we can make sure that google listings are up to date –
especially new campuses as they move through pilot to launch
phases.
We’ll use Google Analytics to report on trends such as unique
visits and bounce rates to measure the user experience on our
website. As we develop and launch a new website, we’ll have to
carefully watch our traffic trends and can use previous data to
compare and make sure that our new website is performing to at
least standard or above average metrics for the initial launch
phase.
Due to technological and cultural advances, more of our audiences
are using mobile devices for online navigation than ever. We’ve
noticed a heavy and consistent trend of more mobile users on our
website which means that we’ll have to closely monitor user
experience on our website for organic traffic. Our focus for the
new website will be to make it primarily mobile optimized for this
reason.
27Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Referral Blogs
We will begin using the program Traacker to build influencer
networks. This program is owned both by the Marketing department
and RDAOs. This program will keep track of the influencers we need
to network with, find new blog and social content to share, and
help build relationships and referrals. This tactic will work
closely with the content marketing plan to both promote
Fusion-created content and also connect with industry-expert
content helping to build our thought-leadership platform.
28Digital Marketing Strategy 18-19
Glassdoor, Yelp, and Other Referral Sites
Glassdoor Glassdoor management is co-owned between the Marketing
and Recruiting teams. Content is updated regularly and any time a
blog is posted it gets updated here as well.
Yelp Yelp is another important referral source and will have a
complete and updated list of campuses. Calls to action will be
updated on a regular basis and landing pages will be created to
track inquiries coming from Yelp. Pay-per-click advertising
opportunities are available and will be investigated.
Referral Sites Our team will champion updating referral sites such
as:
• PrivateSchoolReview.com • Niché.com • NoodleK12.com •
GreatSchools.com • and more
We will work with all of the campus teams to collect information
and manage updates as needed.
June 1, 2018
with contributions from Melissa Kersjes, Storyteller & Content
Writer