Tackling a Tough Location with Digital Channels

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Kobe Digital
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A person playing the piano

Stein Music Center reached out to Kobe Digital to learn more about the different options available for marketing for their services.

STRATEGIES FOR SMALL BUSINESS:

Run as a small business by a husband and wife team, Stein Music Center had enjoyed a period of organic growth primarily via word-of-mouth referrals; however, it was clear that a proactive advertising strategy would be a necessary component of their growth going forward.

Knowing that digital advertising was on the rise—but unfamiliar with how to get started—Stein Music Center reached out to Kobe Digital to learn more about the different options available for marketing their studio online, collaborating with our team of experts to identify the best channels for their services, target audience, and budget.

Despite its high-quality offering and rave reviews by its students, Stein Music Center’s tough location—nestled in a corporate center with no foot traffic—posed a headwind to the business’s growth. The studio needed to explore creative ways to gain visibility.

 

REIMAGINING LANDING PAGES:

As a small business with a limited marketing budget, it was imperative that every ad dollar allocated towards Stein Music Center’s paid search campaign be stretched as far as possible.

This meant that nearly perfect Quality Scores would be needed on all of the campaign’s keywords, allowing Stein Music Center to outrank competing studios in the paid ad section of search engine results pages while incurring lower cost-per-click fees.

To achieve this, Kobe Digital’s web design & development team created a series of new, unique landing pages for each of the Stein Music Center’s classes, collaborating with our copywriters to populate every page with keyword-rich, action-driven content.

Having separate landing pages for each class offered allowed for content of incredibly high specificity, dramatically improving landing page experience—and boosting Quality Scores.

As a bonus, our split tests showed that the highly specific landing pages also converted at a 28% higher rate than the website’s original landing pages, further increasing the paid search campaign’s ROI.

 

PAID SEARCH PROWESS:

The high conversion rates and Quality Scores facilitated by the robust set of landing pages built for Stein Music Center allowed our PPC experts to bid confidently on the most important keywords, resulting in an average ad position of 1.2 for the campaign.

Among all paid ad campaigns, however, the top performing strategy for Stein Music Center was dynamic remarketing. Like standard remarketing, dynamic remarketing allows advertisers to serve repeat impressions of a display advertisement to search engine users who have visited the advertiser’s site before.

The downside to standard remarketing, of course, is that if an advertiser’s offering is fairly varied, it can be difficult to serve relevant ads to all users on the retargeting list. In the case of Stein Music Center, for instance, music lessons are offered for a variety of different instruments, and someone in the market for guitar lessons is not likely to be receptive to ads generic music lessons.

Dynamic retargeting campaigns solve this by serving different ads to each site visitor based on the specific pages they visited. The result: increased specificity and better engagement. These ads delivered an impressive 18x ROAS.

 

SOCIAL SKILLS:

A social campaign was created to complement Stein Music Center’s paid search efforts, maximizing the studio’s digital footprint. The social media campaign leveraged the demographic and interest-based targeting options made available by social media networks to serve relevant ads to wealthy parents with children between the ages of 5 and 17 who expressed interest in the arts.

By serving advertisements on social media networks as well as the Google Display Network—all on top of its strong paid search presence—Stein Music Center was able to achieve extremely high brand recognition in the Los Angeles area in a very cost-effective manner.

 

New student acquisition costs for the social media campaign reached as low as $62, and the studio’s high activity on Instagram and Facebook led to a sizable “organic” reach (in the form of page likes and profile followers) that resulted in even more inquiries and new student enrollments without incurring additional ad spend.