Omnichannel Content Marketing Strategy for Bright Kids School [5-month case study]

Building my client’s community and selling out their courses means I didn’t take much care of my own content marketing strategy lately. But that’s OK. ????

That just means I now have a nice little case study to show off. ??

Meet Bright Kids, a Romanian online school teaching children:?

• 7 Foreign Languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese),?
• Mental Calculation,?
• Personal Development,?
• Arts & Creativity,?
• currently also testing out Coding,?
• and later this year even Financial Education. ??

The school founder is Maria Andreea Baja , a wonderful English teacher with a huge passion for quality education. (More on her being a perfect client in another future post. ??)

Mom of 2 boys herself, she’s always on the lookout for new opportunities to teach kids skills that can benefit them in the unknown job market they will have to face.

Introductions aside, here’s where I came in.

Andreea reached out to me on LinkedIn this spring and asked for a content marketing strategy to help her enroll students this fall.?

(Perfect planning btw, we had the whole summer to bring her social media accounts back to life! ??)

(Also, FYI, she was a lurker. No likes or comments before she reached out in the DMs! So just keep posting!! The right client doesn’t necessarily engage with your content—yet...)

Here’s what I offered to do (and did):

• A thorough brand identity audit + clarifications where things were fuzzy. Andreea has reinvented & grown her business in tough times—obviously, her initial plan & objectives had slightly changed.
• A complete content marketing strategy. In this case, it included 4 channels: IG + FB + website copy + email marketing.
• A comprehensive social media audit & an organic awakening of her social pages. I planned, wrote & even designed tens of posts & stories, helped with reel ideas for her to create, engaged with other creators, curated & shared other creators’ useful content, rewrote the Bio / About section, researched & chose the right hashtags, pinned posts, highlighted stories—you name it. The Facebook page had been well tended for before the pandemic (gotta give credit where it's due), then not so much since 2019. Instagram had 14 posts in total, but it wasn't cohesive or structured, just a lovely display of inspiring quotes (something I kept in our strategy because they're just a very important aspect of Andreea's vision)...
• Website audit & planning, editing existing content, adding new course descriptions, newsletter subscription form, blog articles & blog organization.
• Email marketing from scratch. Strategy, MailerLite setup, initial subscription invite email to her existing client database (then deleting the ones that didn’t subscribe), welcome sequence & other automation setups (+ creating the lead-magnet), subscriber management (assigning them to groups according to their actions), actual “newsletter” emails (a total of 13 between June and September)

Besides that, I helped out with a few other minor tweaks here and there, as needed. Sometimes it was a WhatsApp message template, other times even an SMS.

(When Andreea got featured on national television, I had to adjust and include the awesome news in our messaging somehow. ??)

Now, the number of newsletter subscribers might seem insignificant to an American, which is perfectly fine. When you live in a huge country with 50 states, you speak to a simply massive market, plus the rest of the world.?

Not our case here. Romania is almost the size of Michigan State, with a New York State population. Furthermore, my client’s audience isn’t “everybody” in Romania (??) but just the middle-to-upper-class parents who support online learning and want premium courses for their children.?????

We started with a roughly 200 email address database of past clients and leads from 2018 to 2021.?

27 of them subscribed after receiving the invitation email.

The rest, we further collected through a dedicated landing page + the website form I asked to be featured on every single page.

0 to 27 to +70 in 5 months without dedicated ads is a pretty good win for my first complete marketing strategy (brand id + strategy & copy for 4+ channels).?

And since I’m especially happy with our email results, here’s the stats:

57.46% average open rate?

(welcome sequence obvs higher, at 72.36% open rate, but not included in this report)

14.04% click rate?

(mostly text emails, but also 3 surveys, about 10 third-party free resources in links and a few emails with links to our own courses or resources)

And not shown here:?

A total of 3 unsubscribes, 2 of which were in September (which is why I guess it averaged it to 2 per month ????)

Btw, unsubscribes are awesome!—in my experience. It just shows that sometimes people filter themselves out. Makes our marketers' lives easier. ??

I’m still waiting on Andreea to share the conversion rate of our email strategy (August-September is her enrollment period, so that should be crystal clear by next week).

Besides that, I’m considering joining forces with her on another different level too, by creating a copywriting course for teenagers, to be featured in her Bright Kids School. ??

Will happen next summer, so I’ll be back talking more about this around April.???

In the meantime, I’m just doing my best to deliver great results, so I might not always manage to showcase everything here. ????