.png)
Brook Fine Arts Academy (BFAA) is a private music and art school. They teach in-person and online lessons for music and art including:
Art:
Music:
They wanted to increase their market share and have a long-term strategy for gaining new customers.
Brook’s marketing strategy started with a rebrand and an updated logo to make their position more clear and include art. From there, a new website was built with proper tracking installed. We improved the SEO of the Brook site to be more competitive on organic results. Social was also used to drive more traffic to the site. From there, email, social, and paid ads were used to promote Brook’s services.
The main goals in Brook’s rebrand were:
Because most of Brook’s students are young people between the ages of 6 and 18, brook needed to target parents. The best student for Brook was someone who was a student outside of Brook. The best people to reach include:
It had been some time since the Brook brand was updated, and art was included very recently before the rebrand. That being said, there wasn’t much focus on that art aspect of things. The new brand needed to have a heavy focus on both art and music.
To make this happen, we include water-color texture frequently and make lines look like paint brush strokes and pencil strokes. While red is the primary color for brook, it is usually done on a white background. This is to mimic the look of a canvas. Pastel colors are incorporated as accents frequently.
While the music side of things was already established, it wasn’t leveraged in the visuals. We started to include dynamic imagery of sheet music and instruments throughout designs to bring the focus on the offerings. When we are promoting just an instrument, we use simple images of the instrument. When we are promoting the brook brand, we will use a painted or drawn version of an instrument to tie music and art together in one image.
Because the majority of Brook’s students aspire to go to college and university, we needed a brand that was both creative and professional. We utilized advanced variants of alignment to give a feeling of structure, but a little bit of rule breaking. Things are intentionally off-set with plenty of professional grade images, heavy use of whitespace, and serif fonts. This is made to feel mature with a child at the heart.
The logo update was simple. There was a music aspect already in the logo, but we needed to include the art as well. No major changes were made. We included a paint brush. This design worked well in the navigation as well.
There were several issues with the old design of the Brook site. It was outdated, built on a sub-par website builder, disorganized, difficult to navigate, and not optimized for conversions. Additionally, there wasn’t advanced tracking set up, so it was difficult to determine how people were engaging with the site.
To fix these issues, we turned to award winning designs on Awwwards.com. We found one for an opera hours in Ukraine that fit Brook almost perfectly. We drew a lot of inspiration from this site. We combined that site’s design with my understanding of conversion based web design to build what is currently the Brook site.
While designing the site, one of the big issues we needed to address was the organization of the content on the site. We created silos for content on the site to make things easier to find. We grouped things into three main categories:
Underneth these core pages, we added related content including categories for:
We also included the brook logo in the navigation to help tie things together.
To keep people up-to-date, we added upcoming events to the homepage. This includes camps, art shows, recitals, and any other events that Brook wants to promote. We also added the most recent blogs to the Brook homepage so people can read on the things Brook is promoting. Finally, we added all music and art lessons offered at Brook. This wasn’t previously on the site, so having this really helps drive leads.
The platform that Brook was built on was very restrictive in its technical capabilities. Some issues included:
So we made the switch to Webflow. This allowed us to build interfaces for both teachers and students. Schedules were uploaded, tasks could be added by the teachers, and cancellations and rescheduling could now be done through automated software without having to communicate with the office.
Teacher log in so they can see:
Added a student portal so they can see:
Another major factor for the switch to Webflow was the allowance of two different interfaces. There was an interface for developers to go in and make major changes to the site. But there was also an interface for editors to go in and add/remove content, update collections, and make other simple changes. This made it much easier for people to run the day-to-day without always needing the assistance of a developer.
Additionally, Webflow allowed me to go in and make technical SEO optimizations. I could upload next-gen images, manage all of the headings, and optimize the title tags and meta descriptions.
Webflow allowed Brook to grow much bigger than it was at the time by allowing for more technical functionality than before.
While I went through and optimized all of the title tags, meta descriptions, and content on core pages, there were a few things that really made the difference in Brook’s organic rankings.
These collections allowed Brook to rank for searches that it wasn’t previously ranking for.
Before, Brook didn’t have everything that it offered on the site. Of what it did have, it was just content in a grid. There were no pages dedicated to individual lessons. We added a collection that contained art and music lessons. Every item got its own page that could rank for individual and unique keywords.
There was now a page for all music offerings including violin, guitar, drums, and voice. There were also pages for drawing, sculpting, painting, and carving. All of these pages were optimized for local rankings to the point that Brook ranks extremely high for music lesson searches, ranks number one on google for local art lesson searches, and has competitive rankings for each of the individual lesson offerings.
Brook’s blogs mainly focus on sharing techniques for their music and art lessons.
These consist of how-to guides, care tips, beginner to advanced techniques, and different theories for both music and art.
These were great topics to focus on, but needed to be more planned out.
We created a content map for the next 12 months averaging one article a day. We wanted to continue to focus on the core ideas the Brook was promoting, but we wanted to release blogs 3 months before they were relevant, and then promote them at the time of their relevance. This means that the strategy was built around seasonal topics like holidays and the school year, and the gaps were filled in with general information that has consistent search traffic year-round.
Because Brook is a music and art school, the best platforms for it to promote on are Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. So that’s what we did.
Facebook was primarily used to build an audience that wanted to be engaged with lessons, long-form posts, success stories, and guides. We would also promote events a month in advance on Facebook and remind people leading up to that event.
We would build a highly-loyal audience on Facebook that was mainly built up of moms.
Instagram was used to share quick tutorials, recent works, events coming up in a week or so, and to engage with the younger audience. While moms were also engaged on Instagram, we also got a lot of engagement from our students who were in high school.
Pinterest was best used as a platform to prompt art, art tips, and quick lessons. It is a great platform to prompt the art side of things for Brook.
While we were getting our SEO in order, paid ads still appear higher than organic listings on Google, so we had to get in there and secure our spot. Most of our paid traffic would just go to the relevant organic page, but we did use landing pages when necessary.
We decided that search ads were necessary because we were getting bought out by local lessons, but also national lessons that were taught online. To stop this from happening, we started ranking our organic listings with paid ads to keep our local competitive spot.
We monitored the ads for a long period of time to see what times of day best served Brook. We found that searches during the times 9am - 1pm on school days had the highest conversion rates, with searches during the times 5pm - 8pm being a high conversion rate on work days. We also found that searches early in the day and late in the day on Saturdays also had relatively high conversion rates. To consolidate budget, we only ran our ads during those peak times.
Through our search ads, we build audiences to remarket to. The moment we started launching our display campaigns, we saw our organic traffic from brand searches spike. I believe that this is due to increased brand awareness.
While there weren’t a lot of conversions from the display ads, branded organic traffic would go down a few weeks after we turned off the ads every time. To keep the branded searches coming in, we kept the display ads running.
While Brook isn’t very big on YouTube right now, it is an excellent place to promote all of the lessons that Brook teaches. YT is both visual and audio. That means that music videos and art instruction videos perform really well for ads. We hired a professional videographer to create those ads and ran them on YT during prime sign-up times of the year.
When you need a list of contacts that you own and you want something with a higher return than paid ads, email marketing is the way to go.
We started doing simple things with email such as promoting upcoming events and reminding people of their lesson times. However, email quickly became a valuable asset. We started promoting special offers on email to get more sign-ups. We would promote blogs through email to get traffic quickly. We would also share useful tips that were relevant to the reader based on their audience segmentation.
All of the new designs and features of the Brook site were performing really well, and the new marketing efforts were driving more sign-ups, but that needed to be improved by data-driven optimizations. To do this, we set up GA4 tracking.
This included things like:
We used our page explorations to see the highest converting blogs, our reports to see what kind of actions people take on the website, explorations to see what people are trying to click on, and conversions to see form submissions, location visits, phone calls, and emails sent. We also used this to monitor some A/B tests on site designs and copy usage.
We set up GSC to see what the top keywords were, top performing pages, fix page indexing, and submit sitemaps. We also linked GSC with GA4 to see our highest value keywords from organic search and used that data to influence our PPC campaigns.
To help Brook on all fronts, I created or oversaw all graphic design assets. This included pamphlets, brochures, and display ads.
It was key that everything follow graphic design best practices, but also that everything be in alignment with Brook’s brand. Brook had a history of complicated graphic assets that didn’t convert very well.
To prevent this, we ran tests on everything.
We would make two different flyers that both said “bring this for a discount.” This would end up telling us which design performed better.
We would run a display campaign with multiple display assets to see which ones had the highest CTR.
We would create two different brochures and have people fill out a survey afterwards. Based on how people answered the survey would tell us what information they picked up on easily and what information they missed.
To help Brook with its local awareness, we started running more events. Brook was already running recitals, but there was more that they could be doing.
We started to include season related events such as fall festivals and holiday parties. We also started running an art show at Brook every 3 months. The goal was to build a community at Brook and increase our awareness by making Brook a place that was fun to be at.