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Educational Discovery Tours is a student travel agency. Every year, EDT is responsible for sending thousands of students on educational and performing arts tours worldwide. It is a massive undertaking in a competitive market, and one the company doesn’t take lightly. Sending our kids to far away places for the experience of a lifetime requires expertise and a commitment to safety that is unique the the travel industry.
We are proud that Educational Discovery Tours chose us to help them extend their reach online. This Internet marketing case study provides an introduction to Educational Discovery Tours, their goals and how we went about achieving them.
As is often the case, we met Educational Discovery Tours through another agency that had been struggling to meet the company’s growth objectives. Their strategy was to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to third-party landing pages. A landing page is an isolated web page created to support online adds directed at a specific customer profile or market segment.
As an online marketing tactic, landing pages can be very effective. We use them all the time. However, they need to be meticulously planned and executed to be effective. In this case, the results didn’t come close to covering the advertising costs, let alone management fees, so change was inevitable.
Educational Discovery Tours was already a very successful company, but previous digital marketing efforts had so far failed to perform. The company had worked with several online marketing agencies and not one of those had achieved a positive ROI. Needless to say, skepticism ran high throughout all of our early conversations.
The main advantages we had at that time were 1) we had just finished designing and developing a new website for EDT, which was already generating leads, and 2) we weren’t one of the past agencies that made empty promises. So, despite tepid confidence in digital marketing as a whole, we got the contract.
We were given one goal—generate a steady stream of qualified leads, so EDT’s sales staff could nurture them and close new business.
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. We spend a great deal of time working directly with the sales team to understand their goals and all of the unique markets they serve. As luck would have it, our leadership team here at OCG just happens to have a strong background working in the music education and performance industries. It’s a market we know very well, which made our discovery process with EDT very efficient.
Educational Discovery Tours serves a number of primary markets. At the highest level, these include music performance tours, non-performing educational tours, history tours and grad nights and graduation trips. These are further broken down into sub groups. For example music performance tours include vocal, orchestral, marching bands and other types of ensembles.
Trips might include anything from performing at jazz festivals to parades or orchestra events. There are hundreds of student performance events every year, and arranging travel for dozens to hundreds of students, along with their instruments, is no small feat.
We begin every project by assessing the competitive landscape and performing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. The process gives us insight into market and industry dynamics, but also helps us understand how our clients view themselves.
We excel at marketing underdog companies that take on nationally entrenched rivals. In reality, we don’t consider EDT to be an underdog. It is a long-time, successful company run by incredibly smart people. But, for the business to grow, they have to take market share away from competitors posting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.
As we assessed each of the major competitors, along with quite a few smaller ones, it became obvious that organic search rankings would be the critical. We had already addressed conversions during the design of the website, so this was going to be a major SEO effort that would likely go on for quite a while.
We also knew we would need enough early SEO wins to bolster EDT’s confidence, and keep us in the game long enough to make marketing gains that lead to increased bookings.
Additionally, we needed to make sure Educational Discovery Tours was positioned to compete as well as any nation-wide industry leader. Everything, from website design to email marketing campaigns, search & social media and user experience had to be perfect.
EDT’s major competitors are EF Tours and World Strides. Both companies are behemoths in the marketplace, but not hugely sophisticated in the digital marketing space. World Strides has, by far, the strongest website. In fact, the EF Tours website does not look like a global industry leader by any stretch. At least, in our view.
Both competitors own lots of top spots in Google searches. The experience they offer is average, which gave us a chance to stand out with visitors experiencing the EDT website.
In short, we set out to position EDT among top student educational and perforce travel companies.
The EDT message is that there is no better company to entrust with the safety and best possible travel experience for students.
It was important for us to present appropriate information and sufficient detail for each target market. For that, we have developed and refined content to speak to the goals of each area of interest.
EDT student trips fall into a few major categories—student performance tours, educational tours and specialty travel like grad nights and other events. Within each, there are many subcategories. For example, orchestral performances are entirely different than marching band events, which are, in turn, completely different than a jazz festival, for example.
Educational tours offer even more possibilities, with trip offerings to explore the history of every state, Washington DC, or destinations worldwide.
We had to create messaging to address the interests and motivations of every possible group. That meant everyone from school administrators, to program directors, students and parents. Each of these has a unique perspective with varying needs.
Messaging for EDT includes a mix of copy, images, typography and other elements. We take a hierarchical approach, similar to the buyer’s journey, but adapted to individual web page, advertisement or email view. It works like this:
Awareness: Every time an individual visits a web page or opens and email, we make a first impression. We treat all views as if the viewer is experiencing the EDT brand for the very first time. In the case of a web page, the visitor scans the page to orient him or herself and gain some level of comfort based on visuals.
The same is true for email, but with one more wrinkle—the subject line. One wrong word choice in the subject line and the email won’t even be delivered, much less opened. Through catchy images, color and type, our first job is to convince the recipient to begin reading.
Consideration: After getting past the first scan, our next goal is to keep the user engaged with interesting and relevant copy. With EDT, we use page and visitor data to make assumptions about the goals of visitors likely to visit a given page, which help us shape content for parents, vs. faculty, students, etc.
Decision: At the page or email level, the “decision” we’re looking for is any click for more information. To accomplish that, we are very clear on webpages, as well as emails, where to click for every user segment.
Our writing style is relatively casual and within reach of any age reader, without shying away from academic-toned language. We want students, parents and faculty to relate equally to any content on the website.
We have the same goal for email, but by segmenting contacts, we are better able to customize copy for individual user groups.
We approached the website design like we would any other travel website design. By relying heavily on photographs and typography, we were able to create a visual experience that builds excitement about endless possibilities for student trips. One standout design element is the unique sectional transitions and backgrounds.
It is important to accommodate different types of content, or varying messages on a webpage is a way that can be easily scanned by visitors. That way, users with different goals can easily find information that interests them. This is especially true for EDT, since students, faculty, parents and administrators all use the same website as a resource.
One obvious way to make content stand apart is to use a different background. We did this throughout the website using simple color changes, as well as images. However, sectionalizing content this way runs the risk of creating what we call “false bottoms.” This usually happens when the background color changes from light to dark, giving the impression that the visitor has reached the bottom of the page.
We avoid this by using avoiding straight line transitions except when you’ve reached the footer. We used a “torn paper” effect, icons and decorative elements to draw website visitor’s attention downward and to encourage scrolling.
Throughout the website, we used content grids much as we would any other travel site. Image selections were made very carefully, so that would underscore the nature of the trip, but also stand out without taking away from EDT’s brand.
The end result is a website that’s beautifully designed, easy to navigate and fun to explore.
Everything about the website design had to be structured to achieve top search engine rankings. At the same time, student travel websites have to be as exciting visually as any other travel website. We made it our mission to design the best website in the industry.
Strategically, SEO shouldn’t be that hard. In fact, often it isn’t, but for competitive industries and national rankings, it can be frustratingly slow. In this case, EDT’s competitors are big and tough. The good news is there aren’t as many major competitors as there are in many of the other markets we serve. That meant we could focus on onsite SEO with a good chance of scoring early gains.
We agonize over backlinks, but our initial effort was mostly onsite. That’s not usually the case for national rankings against major competitors. But, the student travel market is a lot narrower than travel in general, so our onsite strategy made sense.
Educational Discovery Tours has a fairly sophisticated pipeline, so customer related activity is well managed and documented. To gain insight into the needs of EDT account professionals, we interfaced with department heads. With that, we have discovered additional opportunities and set new goals to support them.
As an online marketing firm, it would be easy for us to hang our hats on our success with SEO. In truth, however, high rankings are pointless without a correlating increase in leads and sales.
In the beginning, Email marketing took a back seat to organic search because of the high-touch nature of EDT’s work processes. Having achieved top 10 rankings for nearly every target keyword and phrase, we’ve been able to shift energy into conversions and lifetime value. Email marketing is a significant part of that.
We plan, design and distribute email marketing campaigns one to two times per month, depending on the season and goals. We also send informational campaigns, which have been particularly important as travel restrictions and school policies have been changing rapidly over the last 18 months.
As a client, Educational Discovery Tours is very engaged in their own success. They take an active interest and participate in their online marketing campaigns. This is essential. Often, we can achieve top search engine rankings (local SEO included) without any input from the client. However, we are Internet marketing experts, not student group travel experts. EDT’s goal is to generate leads. Content needs to speak directly to the motivations of their website visitors.
We have regular (monthly at minimum) marketing and strategy meetings where we set goals and establish action plans. We focus specifically on traffic and conversion metrics, rankings, leads generated and other measurable objectives.
Education. We work to help EDT understand the organic search landscape as much as we do. At the same time, they help us better understand their market and related consumer groups.
Editorial planning. Our onsite SEO tactics have been incredibly successful, so broadening content through blogging and focused landing pages is an ongoing effort.
Through constant communication and working together in achieving the measurable goals, Educational Discovery Tours competes at the national level, in a market made up of much larger competitors.
