International Society for Technology and Education (ISTE): Membership Engagement Marketing
Headquartered in Washington D.C., ISTE is a membership-based organization that originally began through the University of Oregon while promoting technology in the classroom and attempting to better understand how that process impacts education. They came to GRAYBOX because they were looking for a fresh approach to generating more engagement from their membership and to significantly increase conversions for their annual conference.
Overall Outcome
ISTE partnered with GRAYBOX’s marketing and creative practices to improve key areas of their marketing operation to meet the organization’s objectives around their conference and membership engagement.
The Results
GRAYBOX improved membership engagement by demonstrating the importance of being an ISTE member over time — thus increasing renewal rates — and revamped their lead capture strategies to generate more interest in their annual conference, at a lower cost.
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24%Increase in conference registrations over their target
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$15kDollars saved in effectively managing paid and granted advertising accounts to support goals
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4Number of new marketing channels accessible to ISTE to gain engagement through events and membership
The Overall Problem
ISTE came to GRAYBOX after a handful of their marketing initiatives had stagnated. They were looking for a partner who could support them in marketing strategy, execution of ongoing SEO and advertising iniativies, making improvements to their marketing operations, all with a keen eye towards data analysis.
Working with GRAYBOX has been a great decision for us. They are collaborative and not only provide great execution and delivery but also strategic recommendations on how we can upskill our team to do more of the work ourselves in the future. The SEO analysis and optimization project we conducted with them helped us quickly prioritize resources to make an impact on our site performance. I look forward to expanding our relationship with the GRAYBOX team in support of our business goals!
Our Solution
1. Member Analysis
GRAYBOX always starts with gaining an understanding of our partners’ users. For ISTE, potential and existing members are the key group that form the backbone of the organization. It was clear from our discussions with ISTE that their annual conference that takes place each summer, while extraordinarily successful, was typically a “blip” of engagement instead of the launching off point for engagement through the rest of the school year. GRAYBOX dove into customer personas and the organizations’s existing communications streams to determine what the gaps were, where there were ways of streamlining them, and whether or not there were opportunities for cost savings.
2. Effective Advertising Management
One of the key discoveries was that ISTE was spending advertising dollars on too narrow a set of channels and were over-spending on branded terms. We supported their team in first securing a Google Grant and set it up to effectively leverage the “free” money through the grant for branded terms, so they could spend “real” dollars on acquisition efforts from audiences who weren’t already looking for “ISTE” through search. GRAYBOX also expanded ISTE’s reach via new marketing channels including traditional text and display search in addition to targeted social on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The efforts on social reinforced communications via other channels like email to expand the knowledge base around new ISTE events throughout the year and more widespread professional certification programs throughout the country.
3. On-site Conversion Optimization
The ISTE website needed to appeal to a wide variety of audiences, from current and potential members, funders, and government organizations alike. As it does in many cases, this caused a dilution of key messages throughout the site and confusion for many users. GRAYBOX implemented a handful of key conversion optimization efforts targeted around key goals. These started with the installation and analysis of on-site usability via anonymized heat map data that, along with our recommendations, provided real insight into how ISTE users were interacting with the website. The GRAYBOX team then collaborated with the ISTE team to implement key changes to pages throughout the site — from the section selling educational publications to those talking about member tiers — to reduce confusion and increase on-page engagement.
4. Reporting & Analytics
GRAYBOX believes that you only get what you measure. In ISTE, we had a partner who already took a very data-driven approach to making decisions and utilization of technology to inform those decisions. To support new reporting initiatives, the GRAYBOX team implemented more comprehensive tracking of on-site engagement and provided new visibility into key words and phrases that the organization wanted to rank well for. Cutting across all of this, GRAYBOX utilized comprehensive reporting through tools such as Google Data Studio to report, visualize, and analyze the data for key internal audiences at ISTE.
Our Services
GRYBOX engaged with ISTE in Membership Engagement & Conference Conversion Marketing
The Results
ISTE now has a highly-optimized marketing operation that aligns goals with specific marketing channels and strategies to support the organization's goals
GRAYBOX was able to work with ISTE across multiple stakeholder groups to improve member engagement, help increase conference attendees by 24%, and more effectively utilize marketing funds to meet objectives.
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24%Increase in conference registrations over their target
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$15kDollars saved in effectively managing paid and granted advertising accounts to support goals
-
4Number of new marketing channels accessible to ISTE to gain engagement through events and membership
