Case Study - 1600.io

 

 

 

 

BACKGROUND

An SAT Test Prep Company Needed to Support their Marketing Efforts with a Strong Data-Driven Strategy

1600.io is an online SAT test prep course. They have online lessons and SAT prep material, and they're designed to help high school students perform more effectively and get into the school of their dreams.

Their challenges are that they have fans but not enough of them, and that they had a new product — a hardcover book — that they want to sell, but they didn't know how to get the word out about it.

They knew they needed to do more than what they were already doing to support their marketing efforts and drive more sales. They reached out to me because they knew my background: I've worked for a number of adtech and martech companies, so indirectly, I've worked with over 1,500 different clients. This makes me data-driven and able to apply a cohesive approach to business and marketing.

My goal was to help do more across the board. They wanted to increase revenue and get their new product into more hands.

OVERVIEW

Different Audience Concepts

Changed their mindset about audiences - not just students but tutors

The next step was to change the mindset of the team about their audience. If you’re only reaching students directly, you are recreating all of your leads in an 18-month period.

Constant lead generation is difficult to maintain and it’s expensive to continually recreate the wheel. It’s like starting over from scratch each time.

1600.io initially saw tutors as competitors in the best case, and bad faith actors in the worst. It's easy to find examples of tutors who take advantage of students and their families without returning real value.

However, once we explained our mission, and that by providing backup for these tutors we were still helping the world by helping the students, they changed their mindset.

Create new copy, and edit existing copy, to reflect the new mindset

Changing the copy on site was necessary because it was seen as too confrontational to tutors.

Getting the founders to buy into the new method required some rebranding. A lot of the copy had to be rewritten from scratch, so that the new copy reflected the company’s new values.

Changing someone’s copy is always tricky, but it’s even more so when they’re at the executive level. Usually it’s best done through methods that drain some of the emotion out of it. These include grade level, active tense, and so on. We're not saying your children are ugly — we're saying they could be better dressed. Let’s change their clothing.

Put the founders in the path of tutor conferences and direct lead gen

First, we placed the founders into tutor conferences and did direct-gen to tutor audiences. These were necessary because, well, they didn’t know who 1600.io was. They are in their own little worlds of execution.

When you’re trying to sell something to a group of people, the first thing you have to do is get them to understand what you are doing. So 1600.io was not a threat to their business, but a backbone. The user who was paying hundreds of dollars for tutoring wasn’t necessarily going to throw a tutor relationship away and say, “I’ve got this website now, I don’t need you anymore.” The website would be there as a 24/7 backup.

Our conversations were very interesting when we started to realize there was also a major audience overseas.

Test different approaches in social

Next, we tested different lead generation approaches and social for 1600.io because it helped us to understand where the market was -- and where it wasn't. With a lot of this trial and error, you learn something through the execution of different ads in these platforms. What you're really trying to do is create work that has a statistically significant level of confidence.

We would try something, then analyze the results. Was it statistically significant? What was the confidence level? What was the attachment level? What was the potential for conversion down the line?

Some of the unconventional things we did were to use parent-centric ads, tutor-centric ads, and ads that spoke to the urgency of the SAT coming. We also tried soft-sell ads, and ads that focused on the free introductory courses. It can be difficult to do this in some channels, as some social channels can limit your testing, but there are work arounds.

The creative execution was key in all of these campaigns. Some things just don't translate well to a visual format.

Create and modify business plan

Next, we created and modified the business plan.

The plan was relatively straightforward because, as a relatively small shop, 1600.io was already covering its own costs (and operating without a plan). Their goal really is to educate students, rather than monetize every penny. Everything they do is about the long-term.

However, when that's your view -- you are leaving money on the table, and even more importantly, leaving many students behind. Getting the founders to understand that marketing didn't have to make bad compromises or suffer brand degradation was critical.

Creating a business plan that spoke to their values was challenging. But once we established what was really important -- the well-being of the students, rather than a single path to educate -- we were able to protect and improve both the short and long-term outlook.

We also had to consider the future as it related to technology. We had to think about how our videos might look in 5G and AR.

Create and modify test plan in Amazon suggested listings play

Once we’d cleared the initial burst of activity following the book launch, and proved that we could move units, Amazon’s algorithms found us. They gave us the opportunity to pay for suggested search listings on competitor items.

This approach had some fairly rudimentary mechanical pieces to it. What active tense should there be? What’s the optimal length of the copy? What’s the specific selling points that we should be engaged with? And the nice part about digital marketing is that what wins in one channel (in this case, social) usually winds up winning somewhere else.

We discovered that, for a two- to four-week period, Amazon ads were a license to print money. Over time, it leveled off as the traffic became more competitive.

Inspire blogging content & publications; create copy & ideas for same

The founders are extremely active in the business. They interact directly with their clients on a routine basis and have lots of good opinions about a lot of good things. They were wasting this valuable information by having one-off conversations.

What they were doing more or less organically was collecting their thoughts into e-mails and Reddit threads, but they weren't taking full advantage of their content. They were generating a lot of content, but not getting the full benefit of it.

By working with a management platform that allowed them to take some of the drudgery out of publishing and to suggest topics, we were able to create a consistent content creation calendar. This let them work smarter, not harder.

OUTCOME

A Successful Book Launch and a Better Business

The marketing project was completed on time and on budget. The client was happy with the results, and I learned a lot about their consumer category, and marketing a content service, from the process.

1600.io now has interesting new problems -- finding reliable international shipping of products, recreating their book launch into new subjects, keeping those materials updated and working with new co-promotional partners. These are all better problems to have than being a little-known service with a single audience. In the long-term, they are also better positioned in case market forces make the SAT obsolete.