20th November 2023

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.

Key Dates

Star Teacher

• 30th November: deadline for submissions to Head Office for National winner.
• 30th November: Head Office judging to begin.
• 15th December: national winner will be announced.

Star Teacher nominations into HQ – please send these to technical@puddleducks.com

Remarketing brief to Oliver by Friday 24^th November – please see below.

Star Teacher Nominations

This is the time of year when you have lots of lovely nominations that would make great social content and now you have all announced your local winner, there is no reason why you can’t publish the other nominations as long as you have permission to do so.

We advise that going forward, you seek permission at the point of nomination i.e. ‘Please tick to give us permission to use your nomination for marketing purposes’. If you use an Umbraco form to get your nominations this is easy. If you ask people to email them in, you might need to retrospectively get permission. If you want to use an old nomination to help inspire others to leave a nomination, this is fine – just make sure you have permission to use it. Never publish surnames of children or parents, just a first name if they have used it in their nomination.

Remarketing

We are pleased to announce that we are relaunching the Remarketing campaign at a Franchise level. For those of you who were around when we previously did this, you will remember the premise, but for those who are new, here is a summary:

A user visits the website but doesn’t perform one of these actions:

1. Submits an enquiry via the Pool Timetable page
2. Completes a booking via the Pool Timetable page

We are looking at including further exclusions and will update you as we work on these.

Because the visitor hasn’t performed one of these actions and we have gathered this data via a unique Meta pixel that you all have on your Umbraco pages, we can then retarget these people, via the Meta platforms to try and get convert them.

When we ran this last time on your behalf, the return on investment was favourable. As there has been lots of discussion about at the Regional Meetings, the climate has changed and we can’t guarantee the level of results, however, applying the same principles as before, we can be hopeful. Much like Google Ads, for those of you who buy in, your results will be communicated each month via a report and you will have opportunity to adjust your campaign for the following month.

What do we need from you to get started?

1. Your chosen budget – we recommend a starting point of £100 per month (plus £30 management fee)
2. The postcodes for the pools you wish to target (we will assume a 10 mile radius around these postcodes unless you tell us differently at the point of briefing)
3. URL – we need you to give us a landing page URL where you would like your traffic sending. We recommend a bespoke landing page with a bespoke form, which has a strong call to action as these people have already been on our site.

We require this information by Friday 24^th November and we will set the campaigns live on 1^st December.

Recommend-a-Friend in Campaign Monitor

As promised, a Recommend-a-Friend template is now in your Campaign Monitor accounts. If you or any of your team want to get one out, then here are the instructions – please forward on as appropriate:

1. Do your extract of the Marketing Preferences Report from Shark.
   • Remove all columns apart from Email, Email Address and RAF Code
   • Sort by the Email column
   • Delete all the rows with ‘No’ in (these have opted out of email contact for marketing purposes, which this is)
   • Delete the Email column so you are just left with Email Address and RAF Code
   • Save
2. Go to Campaign Monitor and build an email campaign using the Recommend-a-Friend template
3. Amend your contact details and franchise name (which are in red on the template)
4. Via the campaign summary page, go to Import Subscribers (see screen grab)

5. Import your saved list and then in the second field, select ‘Create new field’ and type ‘rafcode' (type it like this ‘rafcode’ and not ‘RAF Code’ as per the screen grab below)

6. Save and continue.
7. Preview the campaign to check the personalised import has worked and it is pulling through the correct RAF code for the randomly selected customer (you can’t test this by sending a test email, only in Preview, but also send a test email so you can proofread and view it on your mobile etc.)

Hopefully this works fine for everyone but any problems, let me know.

There was talk at the regional meetings about changing the RAF incentive, maybe to £20 for the existing customer and nothing for the new customer but this needs a) agreement from the network and b) some work/testing by the Shark team, for example, as we would change the credit amount to £20 for the existing customer and the credit amount for the new customer to £0, we wouldn’t want a credit of £0 to be visible on their account. If this change is made, I will update the template accordingly.

Capital Letters

There is a notable increase in the use of capital letters across social media, in Campaign Monitor and on Umbraco. Please don’t use them. We specify in the brand guidelines to not use capital letters – they are shouty and don’t fit with our brand. In addition to this, they don’t look good in Mechanical Pencil font – it doesn’t lend itself to capitals. Please just use upper and lower case in the way that is grammatically correct. If you are unsure, ask us.

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

Summary of New Activity

Following on from the October Marketing Webinar (if you haven’t watched it yet, please do), we wanted to just summarise and clarify the content plan and production going forwards.

Key Facts

• Organic reach is very low on Facebook and Instagram – video content (Stories and Reels) perform better than static content but you are still reaching no more than 3/10 of your current followers and no new people (unless you are sharing effectively as per bullet point below).
• It is still essential to keep these pages up to date as these act as a shop window for your business.
• Rely on Facebook Locations to ensure your pages have at least one post per day cascading down from the HQ page.
• On Instagram, use the content that is placed in the content calendar in Dropbox to take the pressure off having to create new content for little return.
• If you are creating content for your local pages, keep it focused on your customers, your teachers and your pools.
• If you are trying to reach new people on Meta, use sponsored posts and share your organic content as widely as possible (using your team if they are willing and also using local groups).
• From this week, we are relaunching a national paid social campaign, brand awareness level, across Meta and You Tube – this is top level brand awareness encouraging prospects to find their nearest class – this will run along side the new TikTok/Insta campaign which will go live in December.
• TikTok is to remain as an HQ only account

Starting in October 2023, we are working with Standby Social to produce professional video content, formatted for Reels and Stories, covering a wide variety of topics such as Lorenzo’s Swimming Story, How To Series, Franchising and more. This content is being released as part of a calendar starting next week.

Starting in November 2023, we are working with Smoking Gun on a campaign designed to increase engagement and traction across TikTok and Instagram. Every month, 3-4 new pieces of content will be produced, all in a Reels/Stories format and this will be pushed via paid-for ads. You will have seen a call-to-arms for teachers to volunteer to help and we’ve had a fab response. We are also going out to customers to be our own army of influencers. The content for this will follow three themes; Savvy Swimmer (positioning us as experts), Pool Passion (How To, Top Tips etc.) and Swimmer Stories (UGC from our customers/influencers). All of this is detailed in the Marketing Webinar.

Given the level of investment in this content going forward and to give it the best chance of succeeding, we ask that you please don’t create any new ‘brand’ content – keep your content focused on your customer achievements/milestones, your pools and your team.

Sharing of Great Content and Resources

With all this new content being produced, we are not going to continue with the Network Content Calendar (the one where you all contributed based on an agreed theme once or twice a year). Instead, we have been asked by a few franchises that we facilitate the sharing of great content between the network. We have done a little of this already via the Marketing Forum and also this newsletter but we have created a Dropbox folder called ‘Network Content for Sharing’ and we ask that if you produce a lovely piece of content (something that you notice has gained good reach or engagement, something that is fun/cute) and you don’t mind sharing it with the network then pop it in the Dropbox folder and let marketing@puddleducks.com know – we will double check any brand elements and pop it in the Approved folder for everyone to use and let them know.

As always, with content that has been curated by someone else, it’s best practise to ask if you can use the content, copy the idea or edit it for your own franchise, but by having this folder of content, you can be sure that what is in there is on brand and the creator has given permission for sharing.

New 'How To' Videos

Two new videos have been produced to help customers when fitting and buying Goggles and Swim Nappies. If you are sending any email comms to new customers (other than the standard pieces that come from HQ/Shark), you might want to include links. Here they are:

Goggles: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/882054395

Swim Nappies: we have a very small edit to make to this and will then release it

We will be including links to them in the Welcome to Puddle Ducks/Swim Academy autocomm, in the New Customer Retail email that Steph sends out to all new customers once a week and hopefully on the website.