About Hill Point Montessori
Hill Point Montessori is a private school for children ages 2-12. Their curriculum is based on Dr. Maria Montessori’s Montessori Method. Hill Point’s students consistently test several grade levels ahead of their peers, illustrating the great success of their education programs. They specifically target parents looking who want to provide an advanced form of education beyond what the local public schools are able to offer. They deeply care about their students and put a tremendous amount of effort into hiring the best teachers and creating the best educational environment.
The Challenge
Despite having an outstanding educational program, enrollment was declining at Hill Point Montessori. In the past, they grew almost completely based on word of mouth. As students graduated from their program, they found it difficult to fill the excess capacity with new students.
Hill Point Montessori specifically struggled to attract new elementary level students. They lacked the marketing ability to help local parents clearly understand Hill Point’s unique differentiators. Without those distinctions, many parents were opting for the free public elementary option.
Hill Point Montessori needed to attract new families to the school, specifically parents. They knew they needed to get more parents to tour their school and really see the value of their educational program. The conversion rate on tours is very high but they were only averaging 1-2 tours each month. It wasn’t enough.
The Assessment
We engaged Hill Point Montessori with a discovery call to clearly understand their goals for growth, current marketing strategies, and local competition. They were anticipating 30 open seats across all of their classes for the upcoming school year. With an average annual tuition of $13,000, Hill Point Montessori was at risk of losing $390,000 in potential revenue.
We identified two core personas. Parents with preschool aged children and parents with elementary school aged children.
The next step was conducting a competitive analysis to identify the marketing strategies used by other local schools. Several of their competitors had better websites, stronger social media presence and had invested in PPC (although it was clear there was a lot of wasted ad spend).
The Strategy
At that point, we crafted the overall marketing strategy. We focused all of our efforts on parents with an elementary school aged children persona. This is where Hill Point Montessori had the most unused capacity. Acquiring preschool students was less challenging as they didn’t have to compete with a free public school option.
It was very clear to WSI Connect that every part of the marketing strategy needed to be focused on driving parents to the school for a scheduled tour.
Implementation
We began implementation of the marketing strategy by creating a new responsive WordPress website.
We then optimized the content for SEO which significantly improved their search engine rankings.
We focused on conversion rate optimization in several areas. We helped them develop content highlighting their highly qualified faculty and administration. We added several CTA’s to drive parents to a dedicated landing page for the tour process registration.
We added several photo galleries for their programs, summer camps and extra curricular activities to help prospective parents gain a deeper understanding of their educational environment.
Upon completion of the tour form, parents are taken to a “thank you” page that includes videos highlighting a recent parent testimonial, a school overview and recent commencement speeches. Parents also receive an automated email response with additional information about the tour process and next steps.
We implemented a monthly content calendar and inbound marketing program to help attract and educate new parents about Hill Point Montessori and the Montessori Method. This includes blog posts that are distributed across their GMB, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts.
The Results
In the video above you our client details the metrics that we discussed frequently to help judge the success of the campaign.
Here are the core metrics that we reported back to the client to illustrate that success:
- 96% Year over Year, Google Organic growth
- Which led to a 300% increase in school tours.
- Based on their tour conversion rates they’ve been able to receive a 356% Monthly ROI!
Quote:
“ WSI Connect has helped immensely from implementing SEO, building an attractive and effective website, writing informative blog posts, creating Facebook ads, giving us monthly updates about our progress, being available to us for anything that we need and working with us collaboratively on different ideas. Always offering a creative and informed perspective… We could not be more pleased with our experience with WSI Connect. We recommend WSI Connect to all the other small businesses we know and we owe a great deal to their team for all of their outstanding work.”
Anishka Nawagamuwa
CO-ADMINISTRATOR
Hill Point Montessori
