Read-A-Thon is a fundraising platform designed to help schools raise funds to improve education. Read-A-Thon came to Digital Authority Partners to lead their marketing efforts to generate more leads for their sales team to close. Through a strategic combination of marketing tactics, we increased their online visibility and generated interest in their reading events and programs. DAP also enhanced the online user experience and boosted conversion rates through targeted email nurturing campaigns and strategic outreach.
Read-A-Thon had historically grown slowly through limited sales & marketing activities. The new ownership looked to grow quickly by investing in digital marketing.
The expected cost of acquisition was close to $75 per new client. However, this would make it difficult to scale the paid media efforts quickly. Read-A-Thon needed a set of strategies to generate a more affordable acquisition cost.
Read-A-Thon is a very seasonal business and needed to make a quick push for results. We had to balance quick results with a strong return on marketing investment.
Digital Authority Partners created a digital marketing strategy to help Read-A-Thon meet its growth targets through paid search & email marketing.
— Objective:
Quickly scale Read-A-Thon using paid media.
— Challenges:
Many keywords have high search volume; however, they are not specific enough to education—for example, GoFundMe, churches, and more.
Managing media spend & demand is difficult due to seasonality. Search traffic for relevant terms is significantly suppressed during the summer and doesn’t pick back up until the Fall season and the start of the school year.
— Our Approach:
Create a paid ads strategy based on three target personas. DAP identified people looking for fundraising opportunities at their schools. We determined the right people to target including principals, PTO/PTA, and librarians.
We created a priority list of keyword types to focus on the most specific keywords for our target audience:
Top Prioritized Keywords that contain tokens that eliminate all vagueness Elementary, PTA, PTO, Reading, Book
Secondary priority are keywords that come with partial vagueness school, educational, education
Tertiary keywords include competitors in the same elementary focused space Scholastic, give a thon, book it Tokens that signal a user is searching for “like” / similar companies will be prioritized Fundraisers like, competitors, alternatives, etc.
Lowest Priority keywords are brand-agnostic “ballpark” searches for all KINDS of fundraisers cookie dough, pizza, fun run, candy, etc. Ad copy was focused on Read-a Thon position as a healthier alternative, more educational, more revenue, etc.
Demand generation: Utilization of display, video, and social
Demand capture: Non-branded search, remarketing campaigns, and branded search
— Results:
— Objective:
Enhance email marketing performance to increase brand awareness.
— Challenge:
DAP built two versatile email templates for Readin-A-Thon for their email marketing campaign that would be used for the RAT team to plug-and-play in their copy and automate into their workflows. The first template was designed to align with the landing pages created by the DAP team. The second template was created from this Unlayer template and was made to match the branding of Read-A-Thon. These templates allow for easy updates, allowing Read-A-Thon to modify content, visuals, and layout elements quickly.
— Our Approach:
— Results:
— Objective:
Review and optimize the Nurture workflow set up by the Read-A-Thon (RAT) team to ensure it functions as intended.
— Challenge:
The initial audit of the Nurture workflow revealed several issues, including an incorrectly configured “RAT – Nurture Flow – Enrollment” trigger that excluded the intended audience, an inadequate list size of only 24 contacts, inconsistency between RAT’s custom “State” property and the default “State/Region” property, and shortcomings in the PTA/PTO, Librarians, Principals, and Other branches within the workflow, including missing actions and content placeholders.
— Approach:
— Results:
