Unschooled: A Shift in Promotion

TL;DR: The Geben/McPherson awareness campaign resulted in the largest virtual screening in SXSW’s history.

 

the concept

When COVID-19 hit the U.S., conferences and events, as well as the organizations that depend on them for awareness, were thrown into an impossible situation. Unschooled, a documentary that was supposed to open SXSW EDU, was one of the groups that needed to rapidly pivot to raise awareness both for the schooling movement, as well and the documentary. McPherson Strategies and Geben teamed up to deliver the highest quality campaign/results with a seamless partnership.

Brought on to help raise awareness of the unschooling movement and the Unschooled documentary among parents and SXSW Edu registrants, we were tasked with three main goals:

  1. Promote the virtual screening of the documentary to SXSW Edu registrants

  2. Establish the documentary’s website, unschooledthemovement.com, as a resource about unschooling

  3. Identify the parents who would be most interested in the unschooling movement

Our team developed a comprehensive campaign to drive audiences to the online event and educate them about the promise of unschooling, including national media and influencer outreach to raise awareness along with paid social media to narrow in on the right audience interested in the movement, an SEO audit in order to ensure parents looking for the movement were finding it, and targeted Google Ads using the data learned from the social ads and SEO audit. 

the execution

Immediately following the kickoff, the team secured a feature story in Parents Magazine and an NPR correspondent to moderate the post-film discussion.

On a parallel track, we launched social media ads to promote the upcoming, virtual screening hosted by SXSW EDU. Because the client did not have the emails of SXSW EDU attendees, starting the digital awareness campaign with paid social ads was vital to the success of the project because it not only drove awareness of the virtual screening, but also allowed us to provide the client with recommendations for the types of parents that would be most interested in the documentary.

Then, Geben team began an SEO audit of the documentary’s website using a 100-point SEO health inspection to ensure the search engines could find and crawl the website.

The findings from the website audit, along with using the early keyword findings and search terms from the paid social ads, allowed Geben to develop a Google Ads strategy which focused on:

  • Serving ads to parents with children between the ages of 13-17

  • Bidding on the keywords “unschooling” and “what is unschooling”

  • Focusing both copy and visuals on those people looking for information on either unschooling education or Unschooled the film.

the result

Geben’s insights/analysis of early ad performance allowed us to identify which parents - based on the age of their children and their general interests - were most likely to be interested in unschooling through social advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This information in the hands of the client will allow them to continue to target the right audiences as the movement moves forward. As a result of helping the client to better understand their target audience, paid social drove approximately 50% of website traffic throughout the campaign duration and was the third greatest driver of email newsletter sign ups. Google Ads drove approximately 12% of website traffic, and was the fourth greatest driver of email newsletter sign ups.

The SEO audit identified key elements of an upcoming website refresh including: 

  • Structured data enhancements: code they could place of the website to help the search engines understand what the website promotes.

  • Ways to speed up the mobile site, like compressing images.

  • Defining the website’s 10 primary keywords they should try to rank for

  • Suggesting new web pages and blogs they should create on their website based on high volume search trends around unschooling to increase rankings

In a matter of weeks, the social, media, paid search and influencer strategies drove 5,050 people to RSVP for the online screening and panel, helping Unschooled build a valuable community for ongoing engagement, triple its social followings and increase website pageviews by 5,000%. We also converted 80% of RSVPs into newsletter subscribers.

The full campaign including PR, influencer, paid social, SEO and Google ads were a key component to driving the largest amount of attendees at a virtual screening in SXSW EDU’s history.