Recruiting Education Champions To Close Opportunity Gaps

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Overview:

PRACTICE B Corp is an evidence-based education company that advances equitable education for urban students to close the opportunity gap. Based in New York City, their groundbreaking approach helps ensure that no child’s circumstance limits their potential and that scholars see themselves represented in the curriculum they are taught. They partner with principals, teachers and parents to supply educational support services including direct support through in-person tutoring, virtual tutoring and enrichment.

Challenge:

PRACTICE was looking to expand its pool of Education Champions (ECs) as the COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted in-person schooling and subsequently their in-person tutoring efforts were impacted. While rebuilding their pool of in-person ECs was crucial, with hybrid learning models taking full effect, finding ECs who could also support online tutoring was a new challenge they had never faced before. Furthermore, based on the nature of the work and the learners they historically were targeting, finding passionate and committed ECs was mandatory. They did not just want students looking for side-gigs, but were looking for ECs who reflected the communities they worked in and that were individuals dedicated to helping close education opportunity gaps.

Strategy & Execution:

Audience + Segment Development

Using PRACTICE’s user personas of their target audience, we determined building out audiences and utilising segments would prove to be valuable. This would allow us to find the best segments within Google Ads to target as well as leveraging custom and combined audiences to find more, high quality leads. We were able to build out custom audiences around keywords, events and publications that we knew would likely find our students within our niche market.

A/B Test Landing Page

We created dedicated landing pages to ensure that our messaging from our ads aligned with the page users would land on. We also gathered from data that many potential ECs would browse and gather more information about the opportunity from their mobile device, but likely would complete a full job application on a desktop computer. To mitigate the risk of high bounce rates on the landing page, we opted to build an A/B test of the page with a call to action focused on having details about the opportunity emailed to them on the A side (email collection) and the B side being a standard form submission. The A side saw a 175% higher conversion rate and a 122% higher application rate.

We initially built landing pages speaking in a similar voice to many of our competitors, focusing on features and benefits such as working from home and financial incentives. While these landing pages performed relatively well, the dropoff from email submissions to qualified interviews was high. We pivoted from here and decided to build a landing page that was aspirational in tone, targeting those who were looking to not just be a tutor -but who wanted to be difference makers in their community. This "difference maker” landing page led to a 53% increase in conversion rates.

Upper Funnel

Based on PRACTICE’s desire to find highly dedicated, community oriented ECs, we determined that an upper funnel strategy utilizing our custom audiences would allow us to expand our efforts beyond solely Google Search. We were able to use their user personas to identify targeting opportunities on Google’s Discovery network and YouTube and build campaigns that saw CPAs 54% lower than search.

Results:

We were able to support the build out of a complete Google Ads marketing strategy from the ground up. After our early learning phase, we were able to generate a consistent monthly volume of EC applicants, and subsequently new hires. Our upper funnel strategy proved to be highly successful as we were able to acquire new applicants at 54% lower CPA than through search. We scaled the budget 450% over 6 months based on our continual driving down of CPAs as we continued to gain more data. We also had an impression share of 22%, which was ranked #1 in a very competitive New York City market. Dedicated landing pages proved to be valuable as well as we were able to convert 21% of page visitors (industry avg. for education is 14.2%) with our aspirational difference maker messaging. The combination of all of our upper and lower funnel efforts created a robust lead generation system for PRACTICE to build their pool of ECs and to fulfill their mission of helping to close education opportunity gaps.