EA Ski & Snowboard Training

The
Goals

• A strong brand position communicated through Google Adwords

• Customised ads and landing pages, tailoring to each keyword, making sure each search query is being answered as relevant as possible

• Communicate all campaigns, sales and other relevant news through Google AdWords

• 20% increase in number of leads year on year

• 20% decrease in cost per lead year on year

The Approach

• Solid research to get a better understanding of the potential students and what they are looking for, how EA sets itself apart from the competition and what EA can offer students.

• Restructure all campaigns to offer better granularity and offer a more relevant ad for each search query.

• Creation of landing pages for the different markets and different resorts

• Creation of campaign and landing page in Dutch to appeal to the many keen skiers in that target market.

• Extensive A/B testing in AdWords ads and landing pages

• Rewriting the main brand messaging, focusing on being a ski instructor as a career opportunity that could last a lifetime including a guaranteed job offer.

• Seamless integration with the CRM to be able to track visitors all the way from visit to sale.

Eryn Cutler, Managing director, explains the marketing challenges:  “one of the difficulties we were facing with AdWords, was the return on investment of our lead generation efforts. Because of the highly competitive nature of the market, the cost of campaigns is very high. How do we make sure that the budget is used in the most effective and efficient way? How do we generate more leads for a lower cost per lead? How do we work with a limited budget and still optimize the result?

Riksta has completely restructured the campaign to make sure each specific keyword would serve a visitor the ad with the answer they were looking for. She has also created custom landing pages for each specific search query, meaning that someone who would search for a ski instructor course in Canada would get a customized ad plus landing page, which would be different for someone searching for a snowboard instructor course in Japan.

She also tested extensively with different messaging in both the AdWords ads and the landingpages. For example, we found that changing our message from: “we are looking for the next generation ski instructors” to: “we are recruiting the next generation ski instructors.” had a big impact on conversion rates. Changing the call to action buttons from “I am interested” to: “see if you qualify.” also greatly impacted results.

By communicating a strong message that we offer careers as ski or snowboard instructors and that anyone who is an intermediate or advanced skier and who would like to turn that passion into a career can have that through us. It created a mind-set where scarcity and a sense of urgency came into play. In combination with the relevancy of the ads and landingpages, the emotive messaging and imagery, the response was very good.

We made sure the integration with the CRM was seamless, making it possible to fully track the number of leads and the sales resulting from those leads. We used Google AdWords to communicate all our campaigns, such as our ‘ambassador program’ and our ‘book early and save program’. We also used Google AdWords and landingpages to communicate about new resorts we added, such as Niseko in Japan.

Naturally, we are very happy with the results. A great increase in leads, a decrease in cost per lead, a fantastic growth in sales and a drop in cost per sale. We are looking forward to next year. 

See Also