Engagement Overview

In 2009, PMAE partnered with Blind Acre Media to address several marketing and student recruiting challenges, and increase student enrollment rates and marketing ROI.

Challenge 1:

PMAE had been relying on a mix of lead generation tools to identify prospective students. Relying on demographic databases, solon industry data houses which sold the same leads to every cosmetology schools, and traditional face-to-face recruiting, PMAE was spend over $24 per lead. Ultimately, PMAE was converting 2 out of every 100 leads into a student enrollment. The ROI was not meeting expectations, and Paul Mitchell knew it needed a more reliable, cost effective way to generate more, higher quality leads.

Challenge 2:

Each school hosted and maintained an individual website, independent from PMAE’s main website. While all of the schools largely adhered to brand standards, consistent messaging and dissemination of up-to-date information critical to student recruiting efforts was proving difficult to maintain across all campuses, and negatively impacting recruiting efforts.

Challenge 3:

While the initial project scope did not include addressing PMAE’s CRM database, Blind Acre saw an opportunity further increase the School’s marketing ROI. With each school recruiting independently of the corporate offices and each other and also maintaining independent CRM databases, PMAE lacked an efficient way to centralize, measure, or manage the student recruiting pipeline across all 88 schools. The lack of a centralized CRM was negatively impacting enrollment conversion rates and effectively increasing the cost per lead.

Solution

In response to these challenges, Blind Acre started by designing and developing a “parent-child” relational website. The site incorporates proven “best practices” in user experience and site administration by emphapsizing clean design, intuitive navigation, and a strong “call to action”.

The “parent-child” website platform allows Paul Mitchell’s corporate leadership to easily establish brand standards and create cohesive, overarching messaging while allowing each school the flexibility to add market-appropriate content. With the click of a mouse button, and new website may be created, pre-populated with standard content and ready for customization.

The TypeFrame content management system on which the website was developed allows corporate leadership to intuitively update and push new content out to all of the “child” sites at once, and also provides a simple site admin tool to individual school-level marketers.

Finally, Blind Acre developed a Social Media-based CRM system. The CRM system captures leads from all of PMAE’s recruiting sources, including every locations’ website contact form, Facebook page contact forms, and face-to-face recruiting efforts. The CRM system now provides PMAE with a powerful recruiting tool, which is fully integrated with all school websites and social media channels.

Results

The new paulmitchell.edu launched on April 1, 2010. In the month leading up to launch, the school’s websites captured 1,228 leads. In the first month following launch, leads quadrupled to just under 5,000 student prospects, and have grown month-over-month since launch

As of July, 2011, PMAE is averaging just under 12,000 inbound student prospect leads per month at an average cost of $3 lead. Powered by Blind Acre-developed Social CRM system, PMAE is converting students at a rate of 5 students per 100 leads.

URL- http://paulmitchell.edu/

The Client

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Engagement Overview

In 2010, Davis Wince redeveloped the company website, which included a new company blog and integrated the LinkedIn social media site. The new site and blogging program generated dramatic increases in site traffic, positive client feedback, and inbound project opportunities.

Wanting to capitalize on the momentum of their digital marketing program and expand awareness of the firm, Davis Wince recognized Facebook’s 750 million active users represented the greatest opportunity to engage a wider audience. Davis Wince also recognized that a successful Facebook page required more strategy than simply “starting a page and posting about projects”. They recognized they needed to stand out from the 900 million other pages living on Facebook.

Solution

Blind Acre proposed and delivered a custom designed Facebook page with the overarching goal to engage the Facebook community (Columbus, Ohio and Denver, Colorado specifically) in an “architectural conversation”. To facilitate the conversation, Blind Acre themed the Facebook page as being devoted to “Architectural Inspiration”, and asks fans to share their “Inspirations” with Davis Wince.

A portion of the Facebook page was also devoted to an “Ask the Experts” video library, where Facebook fans could post questions about architecture to the Wall, and Davis Wince’s architects would answer in 90 second video responses.

The Client

Davis Wince, Ltd. is a full service architecture, design, and planning firm serving the higher education, retail, healthcare, and corporate markets.

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Engagement Overview

Blind Acre has enjoyed a long-standing partnership with Caldwell Leasing. As their digital agency of record, Blind Acre handled design/development of the client’s full website, and also plans and manages their day-to-day and month-to-month digital marketing efforts, including pay-per-click advertising and link-building.

Caldwell likes to keep ahead of the game when it comes to their digital marketing efforts and online presence. When they realized that many website visitors were viewing their full website while on dealership lots and in their offices, they knew they needed an outstanding mobile website experience. That’s when they asked Blind Acre to take them mobile.

Solution

After working through Caldwell Leasing’s website analytics, Blind Acre identified the most highly trafficked areas of the site through mobile browsers. Browser configuration code was embedded in the full site, and mobile page skins were designed to respond with the correctly formatted page view.

The Client

Caldwell Leasing is an independent national leasing company. The Company has been providing fleet services for over 45 years. Through maintaining a network of fleet dealers across the country, Caldwell has earned a reputation for the most competitive pricing and monthly payment plans in the market today.

In addition to fleet leasing services, Caldwell Leasing also offers a diverse array of fleet management services to its clients.

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Engagement Overview

After forming exciting and unprecedented licensing agreements with the National Football League (NFL) and NCAA College Sports Organization in 2010, Victoria’s Secret began preparations to market their new sports-team product lines. Not being traditionally known as a pro-sports affiliated retailer, Victoria’s Secret knew that rollout of the new merchandise would require a multi-channel marketing approach, including traditional mediums such as their catalog and in-store promotions, as well as digital channels including pay-per-click, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Blind Acre Media (BAM) was selected as the exclusive SEO service provider for the new licensed product lines.

Solution

BAM provided keyword research, copy writing and search engine optimization for over 300 individual pages on the Victoria’s Secret website.

The Client

Sexy. Glamorous. Innovative. Victoria's Secret is the leading specialty retailer of lingerie and beauty products, dominating its world with modern, fashion-inspired collections, prestige fragrances and cosmetics, celebrated supermodels and world-famous runway shows. Victoria's Secret lingerie and beauty stores, the catalogue and www.VictoriasSecret.com allow customers to shop the brand anywhere, any time, from any place.

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Engagement Overview

Healthcarefinders.com approached Blind Acre to help take their online business plan from concept to profitable technology solution. The Blind Acre team worked closely with healthcarefinders.com to fully strategize, scope, design, and develop the final website solution.

With a crowded and highly fragmented pool of online career sites already populating the web, healthcarefinders.com’s most important competitive differentiators were known to be:

1. Simplicity and ease of use
2. Leading to attraction of the highest quality health care talent and organization

Solution

Blind Acre approached this engagement from the perspective of translating healthcarefinders.com’s straightforward career matching approach into the cleanest, most intuitive user experience achievable, without sacrificing critical functionalities.

The website features a clear two-path landing page- one path for professionals and one path for employers. The site’s benefits are featured prominently on the home page with a strong call to action to register and begin searching for matches.

In support of the site’s launch, Blind Acre was also engaged to create, implement, and manage the Company’s digital marketing and promotional efforts. Over 300 health care professionals registered within a few weeks of launch, and use has grown steadily since then.

The Client

Health Care Finders selected Blind Acre to scope, design, development and market healthcarefinders.com- a website dedicated to connecting health care professionals with employers

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