25th January 2024

Welcome to the Marketing Update

As always, we use this to communicate any national activity we want you to be aware of, any new or exciting news, reminders of important dates etc., examples of best practice and knowledge sharing.

Oliver

I think you will all be aware by now that Oliver is leaving us for pastures new. He has an exciting new role as Head of Digital at Fanattik. Oliver’s last day is Wednesday 31^st January. As devastated as we are to lose him after an amazing nearly 8 years (!), we hope you join us in wishing him all the success in the world and thanking him for his brilliant contribution to Puddle Ducks. I personally feel lucky to have worked alongside him for so long and I know many of you will feel the same. Good luck Oliver, don’t be a stranger 🙏

Key Dates

Quarterly Customer Service Drop In Session – Monday 29th January – 11am. The focus of this session is free trial conversions, sharing of best practice and Q&A. It is open to anyone in your team who you would like to attend. 

Microsoft Teams meeting

Join on your computer, mobile app or room device

Click here to join the meeting

Meeting ID: 353 471 610 245
Passcode: dfr9d4

Download Teams | Join on the web

TikTok and Instagram Videos

We wanted to make these available to you to use/share on your Instagram and/or Facebook Stories/Reels. As new ones become available, we will add them to this folder on Google Drive:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18n3_Sou_gC5lw4poIoem1fz2lDKp5RXG?usp=sharing

Apostrophes in Pool Names

We’ve recently had issues again with apostrophes in pool names and the fact that this means the URL built in autocomms for Pool Information and Pool Timetable pages, doesn’t match the URL in Umbraco meaning broken links are going out in autocomms. We have got round this in the past by putting redirects into Umbraco but this isn’t good practise. Please can you all check your pool names for apostrophes and remove them in Shark and Umbraco. We know this means the pool names, in some instances, might be grammatically incorrect e.g. St Edward’s Primary School will be St Edwards Primary School but this is better than links not working. There are a handful of pools affected across the network so please do check yours. This is detailed in the manuals and applies to all special characters (hyphens, apostrophes etc.).

Responding to  Negative Reviews

Here’s a handy blog from TRUSTist. It is a good checklist of things to remember when you are responding to negative reviews and emphasising the importance of responding in a timely manner:

https://trustist.com/how-to-respond-to-negative-reviews/?fbclid=IwAR3LwHyZtEWOCFzVayyPVLpsJ0aEgZsy3UOcD7oQxiwenvZR5mFJ_vGJ2kA

Coming Up...

Audience research is being commissioned and taking place during February. The results of this will of course be shared but the premise is for us to redefine our target audience and understand how they research brands and their media habits.

Next National Campaign: We have made the decision to not go with Sky again for the foreseeable future. The campaigns, whilst still delivering a good % of new customers (latest one was 15%), have seen the CPA creep up and we are no longer comfortable that they are providing good value for money. We are currently working with a media buyer on a proposal for delivering video content to our audience across a whole host of digital platforms. As soon as we have a final proposal, we will of course share it. We should be able to get going relatively quickly with this, with some editing to current video content.

Good Posts!

We just wanted to celebrate some really nice content that is being shared on your local pages. It absolutely hits the mark in terms of letting the visual speak for itself and not spending unnecessary time in Canva – the simplicity is key and works (engagement is good on all these posts) and they all hit the brief we gave of concentrating on your pools, customers and teachers for your local content.

Puddle Ducks Shop

Google Ads

As Oliver’s parting gift to us, he’s had two calls with Google this week to finally get Conversion data included in our Google Ads report, and on checking this morning, he’s been successful! So, in the future when you get your reports, Number of Conversions and Cost Per Conversion will be included. What Google is counting as a conversion is all of the following:

• User clicked the phone number in the Google Ad to call the office.
• User submitted the Umbraco form on your landing page.
• User submitted a Shark enquiry form (either via a Class Search, or on a Pool Timetable page)
• User signed up to lessons online (either via a Class Search, or on a Pool Timetable page)

Your report for January will include this data, but don’t pay too much attention to it as it only went live on the 25^th, but when you get your February report, it will have a full month of data in there.

Whilst this info is useful for both you and us to see how well the ads are doing, it’s prime purpose will be for Google themselves to use it’s machine-learning to put the ads in front of what it considers the type of person most likely to convert, meaning on the whole we should see the ads start to perform better.

Marketing Resources

Don’t forget you will find lots of resources on the Marketing Resources page on the website. It is a one stop shop for your essentials. If you want links to anything adding to this page, please email marketing@puddleducks.com

www.puddleducks.com/marketing-resources

The latest Marketing Webinar recording (from 17th January) is now on eLearning in the Marketing Training course.