How Wellington Community Education Centre used videos to increase profits by 78%

The main inspiration for our blog is our customers. They have always been our driving force and the reason that our#1 goal is to teach small businesses to yield the power of video marketing to grow and succeed.  However, more often than not, they are the ones to teach us valuable lessons in growth. The Wellington Community Education Centre in New Zealand used video to increase their profits by 78% and we are excited to share with you how they did it.

Wellington Community Education Centre

Located in the capital city of New Zealand, the Wellington Community Education Centre (CEC) has been a leading provider of adult education for more than 100 years. The CEC offers 700+ courses annually with topics ranging from business, foreign languages, photography, music, cooking, and a lot more. With more than 7,000 students, the CEC is the largest adult education provider in the country.

Nigel Sutton has been the director for just under three years. Sutton’s formal background is in law and political science, but he’s worked mostly in education, including three years as the Director of CEC. He’s always had “a bit of luck” with marketing, however, which now comprises roughly half of his responsibilities. Sutton aims to maintain the full capacity of students at CEC, while adapting its business to take advantage of their online presence through a vibrant and engaged social media community. His main challenges were to communicate the benefits of enrollment through digital channels in a way that resonates with his audience.

Enter Promo.com

Nigel Sutton knew he needed to use video marketing on Facebook to grow the CEC customer base. From his experience with social media, he realized that the Facebook algorithm seemed to reward content containing lighthearted video, while static and text-heavy content received much less visibility and engagement. 

One day he stumbled across a Facebook ad for Promo.com and the quality and tone of the video ad matched what he was looking to produce, so he decided to give it a try. He was particularly attracted to the ease of use, the high production quality, and the whimsical tone of the footage.

The videos

“I think people forget to be social and fun with their social media presence. The biggest misconception people have with digital advertising is that you actually want to grow community and connection first and then let them buy off you; not just sell to them on the first touch.”

Sutton’s approach to video marketing was simple—catch attention online with light-hearted, humorous videos, grow and engage his social media community, and enjoy the payoff in terms of new student enrollment. 

To start, he searched through Promo.com’s library of video templates. Rather than search for keywords like “adult education,” he opted for terms like “fun” to find the perfect template for the message he was trying to communicate. His efforts resulted in videos like these: 

These videos are aimed to gain a general awareness of CEC as well as important dates for enrollment. The approach is eye-catching, light, and memorable. The length of the videos are perfect for both organic and paid Facebook content, which is exactly how Nigel promoted them. Each of these videos was created from existing templates you can find on Promo.com using footage from our library of more than 15 million clips. 

“I like using the templates because the limit the words you can write—they force you to get your message clear and make your point, rather than waffling on. You’ve got a certain amount of characters available, which ensures the videos aren’t long so work well on social media. I find that really helps you as a marketer to just get on with saying what it is you want to say.”

Course-specific videos

As Nigel had success with his brand awareness and enrollment videos, he realized he could use Promo.com in a different way, as well. During enrollment campaigns, some courses would fill up quickly while others lagged behind. Filling a course to its capacity has a significant impact on profit margin. To generate full capacity in the less popular courses, he created course-specific videos to increase enrollment; and it worked!

Because you can create videos with Promo.com in minutes, not days, Nigel was able to support enrollment for specific classes with topical videos in real-time. Marketing strategy,  video production, and ad publishing—all done in one afternoon. And of course, done with style.

“We do a lot of things that are a bit tongue-in-cheek. For example, we deal with a lot of middle-aged learners—our customers are often thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. So we used one of a really old man deejaying for our DJ course. So we use a little bit of juxtaposition where it might get someone smiling because they don’t think of an old man being a DJ.” 

Results

In just two years, Nigel Sutton has used Promo.com to significantly grow the Wellington Community Education Centre, both in terms of their customer base as well as their online and social media presence. 

Business

During Nigel Sutton’s tenure at CEC and use of Promo.com, the business is up about 20% in enrollments. At the same time, its profit ratio increased by 78%. 

Social media

Before using Promo.com to create and publish videos on Facebook, the CEC would reach roughly 4,000 people per week its Facebook Page. Now, it reaches 50,000 people in a week. The effects of using Promo.com have been twofold—engagement is up, but its social media following is also 2.5x larger. 

“The results speak for themselves, but I feel that Promo.com has been revolutionary for us. I think that I wouldn’t teach it and offset it against other competitive products if I didn’t really believe in it. And I enjoy using it!” 

Future plans

As it stands, Nigel plans to continue using templates and Facebook ads to maintain the CEC’s spectacular enrollment and financial figures. On top of that, he plans to expand his use of the advanced customization features of Promo.com. Additionally, he plans to continue to teach and coach business owners and entrepreneurs how to create effective video marketing plans with Promo.com. 

”The school we work for is incredibly pleased. Since I came in and started using video marketing, revenue and enrollments have risen, complaints are down, and my promise about engaging with social media has actually happened. It’s definitely tools like Promo.com that just made it really simple. When I teach social media courses, I actually show Promo.com and demonstrate it. I’ve used other tools, and I don’t rate any of them as much as Promo.com just for quality and ease of use.”

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