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Kumon of North America is part of the world’s largest after-school math and reading program that helps children of all ages become self-learners with over 2,000 franchisee locations in the United States alone. SOCi sat down with Vice President of Branding at Kumon Corporate, Leah Coyle, to discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted their localized and digital marketing strategies and how they’re now embracing digital marketing, localized content, and empowering franchisees.
- How has your industry shifted in recent years?
What learning looks like has definitely changed in the last few years, but the core principles have stayed the same. The pandemic created challenges for our in-person business model and forced us into more of a digital way of business than we had before. One of the obstacles we faced with our rich history was getting stuck in our usual ways of operating, but the pandemic moved us out of our comfort zone and we now have more to offer because of it. Like many franchise businesses, Kumon has struggled to find the best way to manage digital marketing, like local listings, social media posts, and reviews, all in one place. After having to take so much online in such a rapid time frame, we now actually have more to offer students and families, and our franchisees are more resilient and empowered to succeed than before.
- What made you look for a multi-location marketing platform like SOCi and what results have you seen since implementation?
Franchisees were left to do most of their local marketing themselves, which was very challenging until Kumon adopted SOCi as our multi-location marketing platform. Since modernizing our technology stack using SOCi Social, Listings, and Reviews, we can efficiently and effectively reach local families to bring students back into learning centers and make digital marketing easier for franchisees. Kumon corporate uses SOCi to provide social posts and promotions for local centers weekly to help ease the marketing workload of franchisees. Because SOCi makes it easy for not only corporate teams, but also franchisees, to view and digest data and results, local franchisees are now empowered to post their own content about their specific locations and can make modifications to their posts based on performance. As a result in the last year, we saw a 54% increase in organic traffic coming from social media. That increase resulted in an additional 13% increase in leads for our local learning centers.
- Did the shift from in-person to online impact your marketing strategy?
The need for more virtual learning pulled us towards digital marketing and pushed our limits in a good way. We’re now having success with localized content meeting people where they are in their communities and using a stronger media mix versus more traditional mass media strategies. We are leveraging SOCi to keep all of our listings info up to date, empower franchisees to post their own personalized content, and encourage local centers to respond to their Google Reviews.
Because of SOCi, we started going more localized and have seen a huge jump in engagement because of this. Our organic traffic to the Kumon website is the highest it’s ever been and now Google Business profile (GBP) listings are some of the top channels for leads. Our overall business strategy shifted by offering more virtual options as well. Sometimes it’s more convenient for parents to join orientations through Zoom, for example. Our centers are evolving while still keeping the importance of Kumon’s core model. But overall, we as a business need to be able to evolve and SOCi has helped us do that.
- It seems like “going local” has paid off for Kumon franchisees. How do you define your digital and localized marketing success?
It’s pretty simple, managed localized content improves performance. Kumon is a tangible example that localizing digital marketing efforts leads to better results for franchisees. We continue to increase franchisee adoption across our 2,000 locations and utilize SOCi data to help business owners learn more about their local markets. This helps us improve our localized marketing strategy based on performance metrics, ultimately giving more children an educational advantage and local franchisees more business.
As part of Kumon’s corporate team, we can now keep all online business listing information accurate and up to date with SOCi, which has given us increased conversions from listings and local pages as new parents are searching online for education enhancements. In 2022 alone, Kumon saw a 57% increase in leads for parent orientations resulting from a 48% increase in traffic coming directly from our Google Business profiles.
Across the board, using SOCi has had a huge impact on our success when it comes to increasing traffic to our website and creating awareness amongst parents who are seeking an educational instructor for their children.