It's coming towards the end of a truly incredible year for school website experts, Schudio. I recently sat down with their Director, Ian Richardson and asked him to share their remarkable story...

Background

“Prior to founding Schudio in 2011, I’d been designing websites for pretty much anyone and everyone. I found the education sector by chance really after doing some work for a couple of local schools that were having some critical issues with their content management systems.

We ended up building something bespoke for them and then realised that we’d stumbled into a bit of a niche. We spent the next year basically building the company from scratch, doing lots of research and innovation, and creating solutions that solved schools’ particular problems.

The Challenge

In the early days of Schudio we attended several education trade shows. They were quite beneficial in terms of getting our name out there; however we found that we tended to get a bit lost in the crowd. The shows were so broad and it felt so untargeted. In terms of return on investment, there was so little and it just wasn’t sustainable.

We also focused on email marketing. We would buy in data, which wasn’t particularly good, and then send out an email asking if the school would like to talk about their website. Then, a few weeks later, we’d send out another email asking the school if they wanted to talk about their website! It wasn’t very strategic at all and we soon realised that you cannot tell a school leader when they need a website, they will come to you when they’re in a position where they want to explore it.

So, the main challenge was how to ensure we are always at the front of mind when a school decides it needs to do something about their website.

The Solution: A Full-Year Managed Strategy (Inbound and Outreach)

Inbound Solution

I’d had my eye on Sprint for a long time. I loved their output, the blogs and the sector research that they made available. The catalyst for us to finally start using their services was when they launched Campus.

The combination of having access to that great data while also being able to make use of so many useful marketing tools made it a no-brainer. It was just so much more cost-effective than spending chunks of money on data and numerous pieces of software in which to use that data. To have all that data and those tools in one place was huge for us as we’re quite a small team and being able to work efficiently and smartly is absolutely key to us.

“What I love most about working with Sprint is that it feels like a partnership. If there’s anything that we need to talk about or if there’s ever a difficult conversation to be had, the relationship is strong enough to be able to do that and that’s what makes the whole thing more successful.”

I came in for a meeting with Ben and he gave us some really valuable insights into, not only how to utilise Campus effectively, but how to improve our overall education marketing strategy. Some of it was really simple stuff like how to follow up sales leads more effectively, but it was absolute gold to me. We also came up with the idea to create an inspection-ready website guide and host this on our website as a mechanism to generate new leads for our Campus CRM.

Outreach Solution

I also went away from that meeting having signed up to Sprint’s managed services. Using Sprint to write, design and broadcast our outreach marketing felt like a big risk because it was all stuff that we could have chosen to keep doing in-house using Campus. However, I’m so glad we made that decision as their knowledge of the sector has had a massive impact on the success of our marketing.

Results

Using Campus has been great. It’s been really useful in streamlining our processes and has taught us so much about how to align all the different channels of our marketing and follow up our leads more intelligently. However, it’s been the managed campaigns where we’ve seen the biggest impact.

“I have no doubt that Sprint have played a massive part in helping us increase our turnover by 40% on last year.”

Our aim a few years ago was to get to the point where we had a certain number of walkthroughs or meetings every week. Just a year ago that target was completely out of reach but now we are exceeding that target on a regular basis!

We’ve done some really great work in improving our website and developing free apps and tools to help schools improve their existing websites; however I have no doubt that Sprint have played a massive part in helping us increase our turnover by 40% on last year. More importantly, there’s a really good profit margin there too.

“What’s great is that we’re not seeing a huge flurry of enquiries one month and then nothing the next. What we are seeing is a steady flow of enquiries throughout the year which tells me we’re at the front of teachers’ minds when they want to look at their website.”

In the past year we’ve also had around 2,000 schools completing the Campus lead generation form on our website and downloading our inspection-ready website guide and accompanying tool, which is vital in ensuring that we are able to stay at the front of teachers’ minds. Although it is too early to say what that means in terms of sales, it’s amazing that we’ve been able to give all those people a glimpse at what we do.

We’ve also been using Sprint to create follow-up emails that we can send to people that download our free website guide and these have worked brilliantly at striking up conversations with those people.

I want someone to work alongside us and enhance what we do, someone who will help us fight to get better and improve. And that’s exactly what Sprint does for us.”

What are your sales targets for 2018?

If you've set yourself some pretty ambitious targets for next year then we'd love to help you devise a strategy that smashes it out of the park for you!

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