Our challenge was to provide The Trades College’s courses to people of all ages and levels of experience who are interested in embarking on a new and exciting career journey with them.
For some, this means a complete change of career, possibly to earn more money or to realise their dream of becoming self-employed. For others, it’s to get certified at the higher NVQ level 3 so they can make the step up in their existing career.
The first thing we needed to do was to fully understand the business and their audience. Not only were we focusing on people who were starting a new career, we were also targeting people within the industries that have a basic knowledge of their respective fields. The Trades College offers an opportunity to hone specific skills to help further their careers and overall make more money.
Next, was to create a new brand identity which people could trust. We also needed to build a new website as a base for providing information about the courses and generating new leads for the business.
Branding – A rebrand was the first task. Conveying that potential students can trust they’re in good hands is vital for an education centre. Creating a brand that showcases that these courses can change their future for the better was a key element within the logo. Showing the evolution of where they are, the process and the end result embodied within the iconography. We then created a simplified version for other applications such as video watermarking & social posts.
Website – The brand identity has been created, now we need somewhere to send potential applicants. The home page is the first impression users would have of The Trades College, this is where we start our journey. Adding tag lines such as ‘changing the future together’ and ‘your future in your hands’ implies that the student, with the help of The Trades College, can shape their future which fits with their branding. We then included information such as useful pages to look at within the website, training course locations and how the courses are structured.
Each of the courses needed its own page. If we were to run adverts specifically aimed at electricians, making the user journey as streamline as possible was key. SImplifying the user experience makes it easier to get the right information to the right people but also helps us track results. Highlighting what they aim to receive at the end of the course was one of The Trades College’s selling points. We also included information about the courses and blog articles which emphasises the transparency of the courses and what users can expect.
[Screenshots/Mockups of above image, Inside The Course & Blog Page]
Creating Traffic – To rise to such a mammoth assignment, we needed to attack the situation from several angles. We decided to employ an integral 3 tier digital marketing approach to reach the right audience and maximise the success of lead generation of new students.
Social media – We started with Facebook as it has users across all ages with a very wide demographic that can be targeted for a tailored budget spend. A big push here got us off to a great start implementing lots of great social content, videos, posts and targeted advertising about the individual courses.
Utilising social adverts helped us narrow down the search criteria. Through AB testing, we were able to decipher the age group, hobbies/interests of our audience and provide more reliable leads to the website. We didn’t want to just bring a high volume of traffic to the website, we made sure that they were suitable candidates.
[Facebook Page Mockup & Social Post examples]
Google Paid Search – Our PPC experts will employ multiple test adverts on google to understand what works best and the best use of the budget. We determine which route is the most effective. Once we establish the correct message to the public it’s all about tweaking the website and adding content over time to suit the searches being made.
SEO – SEO can take some time to take effect and takes a lot of man-hours to implement correctly. Once we were up and running with the landing page, our SEO experts went to work, expanding on the site, adding valuable content through a keyword strategy, backlinks, and improving our session time by assessing bounce points.
We have, and continue to generate high quality leads through various channels for The Trades College. Take a look below at some of our search results to date;
Search results to date – (SEO/PPC) – Turn Into Infographic
Visits – 298,686
Avg. session duration – 2 minutes
Bounce rate – 32%
Leads (SEO/PPC) – 18,409
Facebook social stats Infographic
Youtube Channel
No matter the size of the project, big or small, we want to talk about it. Get in touch and let’s chat about how we can help your business excel.
