Pitman Training is the UK and ROI’s leading, independent training provider, with a network of over 100 training centres.
Offering self-paced vocational courses and diplomas, the brand has stepped into the forefront of modern office training, having developed a wealth of history, stemming from the invention of shorthand in 1837. 2012 see’s Pitman Training celebrating its 175th anniversary, which is a remarkable milestone for a British brand.
Enjoy Digital has worked very closely with Pitman Training to identify its online marketing requirements for a complete digital strategy. Working across web, email and search marketing Enjoy Digital has fully integrated with the Pitman Training team, working across the company franchise network to enable a holistic digital strategy for the group.
The task
Pitman Training approached us with a number of objectives; first and foremost they wanted their website to work harder for them.
Some of the tasks we were asked to look at were:
- Increase traffic volumes
- Improve conversion rates
- Track conversions and their sources
- Make their paid search accounts more profitable
- Improve overall ROI
- Encourage the potential customer to call them
The new site needed to highlight news and information about the Pitman Training network, while pinpointing the different training locations across the UK.
Also, research showed that people needed suggested training routes to help them with their career. Finally, the new site had to integrate seamlessly with the company’s new state-of-the-art CRM system.
Our Solution
Getting the right design was critical - it had to be friendly and easy to use.
Clear call to actions were laid out throughout the site so that anyone who knows what training they were looking for could quickly choose from a list of courses or course categories. For those visitors who were in the research phase there was a wealth of news and information, as well as Pitman’s training locations across the UK with maps and directions to guide them through the website to make an enquiry. In addition to this, we added video case studies of real success stories and a Career Wizard to guide visitors towards potential training routes.
Pitman works with individuals and businesses, so the site needed two separate areas, each tailored to the different needs of the user. And to ensure everything worked in harmony with their new CRM system, all forms on the website fed into it through a series of web services (XML). All leads were then automatically assigned to the relevant training centre, so centre managers could act on them quickly and efficiently with complete trackability.
Previously, neither Pitman’s paid search campaign or analytics package were correctly tracking online conversions. We rectified this issue and ensured we set up key goals to be able to measure our success against them. We also offered the solution of tracking calls based on the online source the user has come through. This would allow us to report whether calls had come about as a result of the paid search campaigns and which paid search platform. This meant we could measure the true ROI this channel was generating.
Giving Pitman Training better visibility was central to the search marketing strategy and allowed us to more efficiently and proactively adapt the campaign to ensure the best ROI was generated from any spend. Once we’d correctly set up the tracking we then got to work on analysing their existing traffic and which areas they were weak in. We identified many ways in which the paid search was wasting money and worked to reduce this, whilst ensuring we were also expanding it in other areas to increase relevant traffic and therefore conversions. Once we identified key terms that would drive important traffic to the site we got to work with our onsite optimisation and our offsite optimisation improving visibility for key phrases and as a result increasing traffic volumes.
The Results
- 40% increase in leads (YOY)
- 54% increase in conversion rate (YOY)
- 32.69% increase in non-branded organic visits (YOY)
- 136.29% increase in organic traffic on core target key phrases
The above top level results were achieved without increasing on the previous level of budget spend. In fact the PPC cost per conversion has virtually halved whilst the conversion rate has more than doubled. On top of this the amount of traffic that has been driven by natural search has increased by a third, and overall leads are up by 54% year on year.
As well as the main training website, we also developed the Pitman Franchise, Pitman International and Pitman Ireland websites, all producing similarly impressive results.
Pitman Training saw a 40% increase in web leads year on Year
