Insight
Workshops
Content marketing
Content strategy
Contact strategy
Marketing automation
Social campaigns
Video marketing
The brief
Promethean came to Don’t be Shy with a vision: to be the market-leading manufacturer of interactive education technology in the UKI. One that spoke directly to educators, hearing their challenges and offering genuinely valuable solutions.
“The strength of our content marketing efforts and channel engagement have transformed our brand perception. As of this year, we’re the market leader.”
The Challenge
Headquartered in the US, with offices all over the world, Promethean was a US-centric company with minimal local presence, brand voice or positioning.
To become market leader, Promethean needed a high-value, content-led strategy. One that resonated with teachers, school leaders and IT managers with communication that was sensitive to their concerns and offered thoughtful suggestions.
But that’s not all.
Even as market leader, Promethean needed to continually engage with educators across the UKI, cement trust in the brand, create user-generated peer to peer content, and build a network of brand ambassadors for the business.
Strategy
We wanted to set Promethean apart from other edtech manufacturers. That meant understanding their target personas intimately so every touch-point felt authentic.
We’ve continually reviewed the insights as Promethean’s proposition shifted and targeted different audiences with their interactive front-of-class technology. This has seen software sky-rocket from zero visibility in search to exceeding the rankings of some of the larger SEO competitors, like TES.
2 sets of personas
with goals, challenges and buyer journeys
Brand SWOT analysis
for positive differentiation in the market
Differentiators
that set Promethean apart from its competition
Brand personality scale
and character, current and future
Insight interviews
with existing and prospective customers
Ongoing messaging
to continually enhance communication
Four pillars underpin this long-term content strategy: the annual State of Technology report, Promethean’s industry-leading content hub ResourcEd, the #ClassroomStory campaign and ongoing ever-green content for funnel marketing.
These cornerstones, supported by a highly personalised marketing automation approach, were fundamental to Promethean’s content marketing framework — propelling Promethean to market leader and beyond.
Content Hub
And Website
A large part of their website had no search visibility, and the need to maintain global consistency across regional sites meant content was very product-centric.
So, ResourcEd was launched as the solution to Promethean’s web-based woes.
Don’t be Shy was already busy building a thought leadership strategy for Promethean at this point. But how to reflect that effectively in the absence of a website?
We created a new, impartial hub that would build Promethean's industry credibility, nurture customers and prospects organically, and boost SEO to market leadership.
It feels like underselling ResourcEd to call it a “blog”. It’s become a credible, authentic, genuinely valued content destination.
Key objectives:
Content relevance: provide more ways for users to customise their experience.
Subscriptions: improve the conversion rate by providing more, and simpler, ways to convert to a subscriber.
Organic traffic: increase organic visits with a new keyword strategy, an aligned content strategy, and a bolstered link structure.
Design: elevate the blog visually, and create a better reading experience.
The level of detail and depth of thought that went into redesigning and rebuilding the ResourcEd content hub was a thing of beauty.
So, we created a video for social. It outlines the process and highlights all the best bits.
Since launch, ResourcEd has grown organically to reach over 30,000 monthly users.
The calibre of content generated for ResourcEd means we enjoy a number of quality inbound links from sites such as Wikipedia, Acer and TES, as well as a number of .edu domains. ResourcEd is used for several Featured Snippets and Image Packs in SERPs.
ResourcEd has been a central component of a long-term thought leadership strategy that has helped Promethean gain market leadership. At the time of writing, we had achieved:
36,174
average sessions per month
out of over 1.7m
+38%
growth in organic traffic
(2020 vs 2021)
Over
18,500
opt-in blog subscribers
196%
growth in avg.
session duration
+207%
time on page increase
We use ResourcEd to understand the topics that most interest teachers in real-time, and back-fill our outbound strategy.
All data captured puts the reader into tailored nurtures, and our subscription centre has been replanned to manage GDPR and hyper-personalisation of content.
We’ve been part of Promethean’s State of Technology in Education Report since the beginning, researching, writing, designing and publishing this annual flagship piece of content.
The report has been increasingly successful year on year as an interactive PDF, but we decided to launch it in a new digital format. It’s 100% indexed by Google, and we used Hotjar and Google Analytics to track heat mapping and engagement, giving us visibility into how the report is being used, and which issues resonate most with readers, to inform the evolution and refinement of future reports.
We’ve evolved the report steadily over the years – the latest featured polls, live commenting, interactive email reveals, a hyper-segmented phased release, Lottie animations, Chart.js data visualisations, and a lot of GIFs.
The State of Technology was deployed using the channels we have already established within Promethean’s tech stack: Pardot and WordPress.
The depth and colour of the information presented in The State of Technology in Education Report is completely unrivalled in the edtech space.
“This is the best project I've ever had the pleasure of working on. It is, by far, the biggest and best education technology report out there — bar none!”
First, there was the Promethean Grant, encouraging teachers and pupils to share uplifting and inspiring video content to win classroom tech for their school. As an evolution of the Grant, the #ClassroomStory campaign — since evolved to Classroom Stories — was designed to keep up with P2P marketing and the growing influence of social media.
As a hashtag, #ClassroomStory was used 1,030 times over the course of the competition.
Promethean received four times the submissions than planned, and our Twitter engagement rate increased from an average of 0.2% to 4.4% over the course of the campaign, with a reach of over 7,000.
The #ClassroomStory microsite, meanwhile, received 12,000 visits, with around 30% of that traffic coming directly from social.
The landing pages created for the stories had an average read time of 1.59 minutes and the stories were also well shared, particularly on Twitter. One teacher in particular had his shared 178 times.
The winners themselves are happy to have a platform to talk about the issues that were important to them, some now contribute guest blogs and some have become influencers in their own right.
“Don't be Shy have a fantastic work ethos, they commit themselves fully to every project and to every contact within our business that they come across. Their passion and love for what they do is evident on every call, every meeting and in every campaign.”
Always-On
Content
High-value content is fundamental to Promethean’s content marketing strategy.
Outside of the key campaigns we fill ResourcEd with high-value blogs and evergreen guides that address the top, middle and bottom of the marketing funnel.
We publish regular ToFu blogs and quick guides for Promethean’s personas, addressing current issues and common challenges amongst educators.
MoFu content has centred around things like checklists and customisable presentations, and we publish BoFu specific case studies.
Marketing
Automation
Long-term CRM management and ongoing database health have underpinned Promethean’s content strategy, ensuring top deliverability of the valuable content we’ve planned. Using Pardot and Salesforce, we crafted a hyper-segmented marketing automation strategy.
At the start, we inherited a large 100,000+ contact database that lacked clear definition. It had some loosely defined segments, but there were swathes of data floating around simply untouched.
So, we undertook a comprehensive project to identify the data from all sources — both existing and new — to create a full view of the database. That meant collating 535 independent lists and all UKI form submissions into one centralised view.
With this, and the type of data available to us, we divided the database into highly specific, hierarchical persona-based segments:
IT: 223 job title keywords and the relevant job role dropdown options on forms
SMT: 136 job title keywords and the relevant job role dropdown options on forms, as well as capturing generic SMT email addresses such as headteacher@schoolname.sc.uk
Teachers: 179 job title keywords and the relevant job role dropdown options on forms
Unknown: All UKI contacts that could not be identified as the above — these receive generic versions of teacher comms
And separately, all contacts at MATs: using 699 individual MAT school names and MAT related company field keywords.
Unengaged contacts automatically enter a re-engagement campaign which seeks to renew their interest, and flags data to be removed from the system, so we only retain engaged subscribers and keep the database healthy.
Channel
Marketing
While all this was going on, we didn’t want Promethean’s partners to feel neglected. They are, after all, an integral part of Promethean’s success. We wanted to arm partners with the same high-value content we’re creating for Promethean.
As part of our content strategy, then, we craft blogs and guides specifically for channel partners. We include sales tips and ways to set themselves apart from other edtech resellers, supported by stats and trends uncovered in our annual research.
We support Promethean with content and communication for their annual partner conference, and even created a partner content hub called Atlas.
Here are our favourite results from our long-term partnership with Promethean:
16 minutes
The read time of The 2020/21 UKI State of
Technology in Education Report
33,819
The number of average visits
to ResourcEd per month
12,000
The number of visits to the
#ClassroomStory microsite, with
30% directly from social
Drop us a message and we'll get in touch at a time that suits you.
Manchester. London. Anywhere. We work where our clients do, we're not picky and we've got passports to boot. But, if you're stopping by our HQ, the address you need is: Don't be Shy, 1 Stevenson Square, Manchester, M1 1DN.
