PR Academy Case Study
Growing PR Academy’s online revenue through cost-effective traffic generation, and sophisticated lead nurturing.
Background:
PR Academy is a leading provider of professional qualification courses for industry bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and Public Relations and the Communications Association (PRCA).
Each year, PR Academy teaches hundreds of students how to excel in PR and communication.
Studying for a professional qualification is a significant investment - both financial and time - which means lead times can be two years or more.
PR Academy needed a way to nurture prospective students through the decision-making funnel from the first contact through to booking a course.
Key objectives:
Support and drive sales and revenue growth.
Increase website traffic.
Generate higher numbers of qualified inbound leads.
Improve search rankings across non-brand keywords.
Optimise channels for most positive ROI.
Build on PR Academy’s solid foundation of credibility.
Actions:
PR Academy worked with us on a full-service digital marketing programme, including SEO, Content, Paid Advertising, and Email Marketing.
First, we undertook a detailed, data-driven evaluation of PR Academy’s current digital marketing.
Using the See Think Do Care strategic planning model we mapped their customer journey to identify the pain points and needs at each stage of the decision-making process.
This was used to develop the messaging to support the customer decision-making process – rolled out across all digital channels: web, SEO, Content, Email, PPC and Social Media.
We used the journey mapping to create automated lead nurturing funnels, using ActiveCampaign, for each of their courses. This gave PR Academy a repeatable, scalable marketing system that delivers a consistent sales message and works for them 24 hours a day.
Our web development partners BrightMinded rebuilt the PR Academy website in WordPress and integrated Active Campaign delivering a highly robust platform to power their digital marketing.
Results & Impact:
Website traffic up 107% YoY.
SEO traffic up 145% YoY.
PPC ROI 4,700%.
SEO ROI 5,600%.
Email Marketing ROI 1,470%.
Key first page SEO rankings include: 'PR training’, ‘PR courses’, ‘public affairs courses’, ‘online PR courses’, ‘PR foundation’.
In the first 12 months of the new programme, PR Academy achieved its best year ever in terms of revenue, despite adverse economic conditions as a result of COVID-19.
