When learning is fun, children love to learn. With this in mind, LiteracyPlanet offers an online gamified learning resource designed to help school children of all ages and levels. Since launching in Australia in 2007, they have grown to provide educational tools around the world, marketing directly to schools, teachers and parents for their subscription business model. They aim to build student’s English literacy skills globally and help them achieve their full potential.

LiteracyPlanet decided to move from Marketo Engage to their CRM’s native marketing solution. Samantha Poblete, LiteracyPlanet’s Global Marketing Manager, quickly realised her small but agile team needed to return to Marketo. “Straight away, we struggled to build complex nurturing programs and felt limited with what activity we could perform with our new solution’s capabilities. We also experienced issues integrating it with our other business systems,” Samantha explained.

OBJECTIVES.

LiteracyPlanet needed a marketing automation platform that reinforced a self-sufficient and empowered marketing team so they could implement complex nurturing programs without support from developers. They moved back to Marketo Engage, where it serves the critical role of supporting the marketing and sales teams’ programs across nurturing, acquisition and onboarding. Once back on familiar ground, Samantha and her team implemented programs to drive business growth by developing and amplifying content that talks to their different audiences.

“With Marketo Engage, the basics are straightforward and user-friendly, and that’s a key benefit for us. If we have an idea for an email campaign in the morning, we can execute it that afternoon,” Samantha said.

The target market for LiteracyPlanet runs wide: from parents needing support for their children, to individual teachers managing a classroom, and school leaders wanting a campus-wide literacy program. Reaching each segment with the right content requires a robust marketing platform that boosts the capacity of LiteracyPlanet’s lean and agile marketing team. While they have found success by capturing large numbers of leads through Facebook Ads, Marketo Engage plays an integral role by identifying each lead’s segment and nurturing them appropriately.

The importance of nurture over nature.

LiteracyPlanet’s marketing team run special nurture programs for each segment. Different landing pages and form-fills identify a lead’s segment before moving them to the best-suited nurture program. For example, school leaders are a critical market for LiteracyPlanet to attract and win.

Samantha and her team developed a campaign based on research developed by Pricewaterhouse Coopers to showcase the education platform’s efficacy with proven student benefits. A Facebook campaign promotes the whitepaper to the school leader, showcasing the literacy outcomes possible through the platform. Once they’ve downloaded the paper, the school leader goes into a nurture stream, triggering sends for localised content such as case studies, along with an offer for a free trial. When a lead signs up for the trial, a sales team member makes contact and activates the account.

Promoting sales with scoring.

LiteracyPlanet use Marketo Engage to encourage transparency and collaboration between their sales and marketing functions. With most leads coming through social media channels, the business relies on Net Promoter Scores to identify when someone becomes sales qualified. Once they meet the threshold, the appropriate sales member is automatically alerted through the integration between their CRM with Marketo and prompted to call the lead and get them started with a free trial. The transparency of the system offers the sales team confidence in their leads, and also strengthens alignment with marketing’s programs.

“There’s a tendency for marketing to focus on hitting lead targets, but if you can get further down the funnel, you can produce higher-quality leads that you can help nurture and grow through the opportunity phase. That's when you end up with confidence with the sales team, while also showing your direct impact on revenue,” Samantha said. “The sales and marketing teams are working much better together now. The leads we are getting are much better quality, and only go to sales when they’re ready. Sales are much happier and more efficient.”

Once becoming a new customer, whether they’re a carer or educator, the next nurture program kicks into action, sending communications that guide new users through LiteracyPlanet’s gamified activities, features and resources. This encourages a rewarding onboarding experience that reduces churn by building confidence with the platform through a personalised experience.

Rewarding schools with a personal touch.

To encourage fun within a competitive environment, LiteracyPlanet hold regular contests between schools around the world: Word Mania. Through Marketo Engage’s custom integration with their CRM, LiteracyPlanet sends schools personalised certificates that reward students and classes for strong performance. The CRM stores the details of the personalised certificates, which can be emailed to customers through Marketo tokens.

Mastering Marketo Engage through a pandemic.

The strength of a high-functioning marketing platform proved itself when most students around the world moved to home-learning through 2020. As parents and educators globally searched for resources to support a digital classroom, LiteracyPlanet had the systems in place to scale-up their acquisition, nurture and onboarding programs with Marketo Engage. They quickly rolled out a campaign to capitalise on lower advertising costs to grow their pipeline quickly, without over-taxing their sales team.

RESULTS.

Top of the class.

Since returning to Marketo Engage, LiteracyPlanet haven’t looked back. In response to the surge of new business through early 2020, LiteracyPlanet worked to improve their position at a time when many companies struggled. They surpassed their monthly target for leads by 220 per cent and opportunities by 180 per cent. In their home market of Australia, LiteracyPlanet’s marketing efforts helped realise a 150 per cent increase in revenue against their objective for their fourth-quarter budget. The marketing team enjoys its ability to adapt and respond to market conditions and customer behaviours rapidly, backed by the flexible and scalable nature inherent within Marketo Engage.

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