GoGuardian is an education technology company founded in 2014 who’s software monitors school computers for online activity regarding possible suicidal or self-harm ideation.
There are three products within the GoGuardian umbrella: GoGuardian Teachers, GoGuardian Admin and Beacon.
Pear Deck allows teachers to connect to their students by adding interactive assessments into their presentations. Pear Deck launched the product Giant Steps which gives teachers a platform to provide their students with real time feedback.
Edulastic is a digital assessment platform that provides teachers with insights into their students’ learning progress. Edulastic launched the product Data Studio for deeper dashboards.
TutorMe is an online tutoring platform that connects students with teachers for one-on-one live tutoring sessions.
Develop a media strategy for GoGuardian, Pear Deck, Edulastic and TutorMe that focuses on each brand and product in order of priority set by the client.
This media plan will run from January through Dec 8th 2023.
Using historic media spend data, we identified 5 key budget “categories”, which informed breakout for the 2023 media budget. The allocation for each category is based on where we’ve seen efficiencies in the past (with consideration towards new brand and product initiatives).
Each category will be assigned its own media plan, inclusive of channel strategy and flighting approach.
ESM created the marketing strategy for the launch of Pear Deck Giant Steps and Edulastic Data Studio.
Launched: March 2023
Pear Deck Giant Steps
To launch Giant Steps, we dedicated a large portion of the Pear Deck budget to content partnerships, inclusive of webinars, whitepapers, banner takeovers and newsletter advertising. In addition, promotion also include Giant Steps content on social channels.
The Giant Steps product launch campaign is flighted to reflect the heaviest portion of spend at the time of launch, and tapers off throughout the year. This media plan is continuously evolving and is being optimized in real time.
Launched: April 2023
To promote Data Studio, the original Edulastic budget was repurposed to promote Data Studio to a B2B audience across social media, digital video channels and the programmatic space.
Edulastic also activated content partnerships to promote this new product, inclusive of whitepapers, and webinars.
We plan to promote Data Studio and drive B2B sales through the end of 2023.
ESM assimilated marketing strategies for three subsidiary brands acquired
by GoGuardian: Pear Deck, Edulastic and TutorMe.
Acquisition and merger of new child brands within the GoGuardian parent brand
ESM supported the rollout of a new paid media strategy when Pear Deck was acquired by GoGuardian in 2020.
ESM supported the rollout of a new paid media strategy when Edulastic was acquired by GoGuardian in 2021.
Most recently, GoGuardian acquired the TutorMe brand in 2022. ESM played a large role in the integration of TutorMe’s paid media strategy into the overall GoGuardian parent brand strategy.
Paid content partnership with education and education tech trade publications
The 2023 Content Partnerships represents the most effective outlets from 2022 buys alongside some new partnership opportunities.
Placement selection was most heavily focused on lead generation, with consideration made towards awareness around new brand/product launches.
Development of a full funnel, from lead to SQL, marketing attribution dashboard.
ESM supported the development of a marketing attribution dashboard for GoGuardian that connect the dots between every impresion, click and conversion to direct sales opportunities in GoGuardian’s CRM.
The dashboard updates in real time and allows for filtering by campaign, business, campaign, product and audience.
It combines media data, website performance data, marketing CRM and sales to give GoGuardian a birds eye view of the last touch impact of their paid advertising efforts.
Strategically flighted year long campaigns for each brand and product
Every year, ESM builds out evergreen campaigns for each of GoGuardian’s products based on the client’s goals and previous performance. To date, ESM has supported the client in determining an overall paid media budget across all brands, allocation of media budget between brands and products and the development of channel specific media strategies for each brand and product.
These media plans are flighted for the client’s full fiscal year, with regular adjustment and optimizations made based on campaign and web performance. Budget allocation by product is based on client determined priorities. ESM most often activates against paid search, paid social and short-form video channels.
The results below are a combined total from January 1 – June 30th, 2022. Overall, we were able to over deliver on total impressions ordered for each media channel, and other key metrics like video completion rate and CTR exceeded industry benchmarks. Additionally, the digital display ads had nearly 55,000 view-through conversions, while ads served on social media channels had over 316K engagements. These results allow us to believe that our ads are reaching the right people at the right time and resonating well with our audience, as they are choosing to return to the college website at a later date, and/or are engaging with the ads through reacting, commenting, sharing or saving. The success of this first, 6-month campaign, resulted in an approved budget and recommendation for the 2022-2023 academic year, which will be starting up again in October.
