Intrax
Working as a player / coach for a brand with several lines of business
Intrax has operations in more than 100 countries worldwide and offers diverse educational and cultural programs.
I was hired to lead a new content marketing team, serving five lines of business - all centered around a theme of cultural exchange. Some were mature, requiring updated branding/messaging and repurposing of older assets. Others were brand new, requiring development of personas, customer journeys, website development, and strategies for everything from SEO to social media and nurture email campaigns. The role required creation of high-level strategy and also rolling up my sleeves to execute it with my team. It was a fast-paced, constantly changing environment, and we never failed to bring value to the businesses.
Ayusa is a student exchange program matching students from around the world with host families. This animated video explains the value of the experience to both audiences.
Project for language centers
Intrax owned three language centers, in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago. Our content marketing was doing a great job of attracting prospects via SEO optimization and converting those prospects with a quality user experience on the website. However, once students from around the world placed a deposit to join our programs, it “got real.” They began to worry about questions like whether they would have friends in the United States, whether their cell phone would work there, how they would get around the city and where they would live. In this panic, many pulled out of the program and had their deposit refunded. It represented a dangerous customer churn for the business.
My team flew into action, creating a large set of content to address those questions. We wrote articles, made videos, and created graphics in a very short amount of time. It required nimble work flows and a motivated team. We killed it. Immediately after the content was deployed, retention of students reached nearly 100%.
Project for student exchange business
Ayusa was a mature business with a very messy website. As I poked around the back end of Drupal one day, I found a large set of articles about student experiences that perfectly illustrated the value of the exchange program. The stories had two problems: 1) They couldn’t be found anywhere on the front end of the website; 2) The stories had deadly boring headlines like “Student of the Month, May 2014.” Many of the stories also had sub-standard photography.
I developed a plan for my team. We read each of the articles (more than 100 of them) and changed the headlines to sell the most exciting aspect of each story. When necessary, we cleaned up the photography. We added the articles to top-level navigation and gave them splashy call-outs on the homepage. Within a week, the content went from barely any pageviews to the category with the second-highest amount of traffic on the site - behind only foundational pages explaining things like price and process. Furthermore, the pages led to conversion (actual revenue) at a much higher-than-average rate. All it took was finding old content, putting together an aggressive plan, clean work flows, and knocking it out!