The Situation
A company specializing in SAT prep on the West Coast needed to boost sales. This market is split into two segments: private in-home lessons and in-school lessons. Though the company was excelling in the private in-home segment, they were being clobbered by the big players in the in-school market. They had tried many offers, but none had been particularly effective in enticing private schools to sign up. Company management was stumped. Now what?
The Solution
Process pays off. We attacked this problem in three phases.
- Our first move was to zero in on the decision maker. While the parents called the shots for private pay SAT prep, in-school SAT prep was much more complicated. Naturally, hiring decisions in the educational market aren’t straightforward. Our analysis led us to identify the school guidance counselors as the key decision makers for SAT prep services.
- Next, we needed to figure out what to say to get them to respond. We dove into the daily grind of a guidance counselor to pinpoint what their professional lives were like. After some digging, we were able to clearly pinpoint the benefits they really wanted, and the aggravations they didn’t want. Armed with this information, we came up with a clear, unambiguous message that spoke directly to the guidance counselors in language they couldn’t ignore.
- We now had the target market and the key selling points; the last piece was deciding on the messenger. We chose an innovative campaign using Lumpy Mail, sending small steel trash cans to guidance counselors at select West Coast private schools.
Success!
The campaign exceeded anything else the company had ever tried.
While previous efforts had fallen flat, the trash cans piqued the curiosity of the guidance counselors. Numerous prospects were receptive to campaign, and within six month, sales to this niche market rose by an unheard-of 500%.
Now if only they could increase your high-schooler’s SAT scores by that much…
