In my real-life job, I am the communications director for a public school district. Everything I offer through Starting Line is an extension of what I do in my 9-5, including website design and marketing. Our district has five traditional schools, one non-traditional school, and one online credit recovery program called Bridge.
The mission of Bridge is one I love. They work specifically with high school students who are not succeeding in the traditional school setting for reasons like expulsion, legal trouble, mental and physical health challenges, teen pregnancy/parenthood, financial challenges, and more. They find the students who could easily slip through the cracks and passionately walk with them to their goal of graduation.
Bridge gives me a big pond to fish in with my marketing skills, as it is open to any high school student in Indiana, but it requires a very specific bait. I recently decided that SEO and visual storytelling needed to be our key marketing strategies, and their website was not cutting it in those abilities. So, I decided to make a new one for the program through Wix.
For this project, I challenged the Bridge staff to focus on customer journeys, and we based the website structure on that. Customer journeys are a complete set of experiences that a customer goes through when interacting with a business or brand, from the initial awareness of the product or service to post-purchase follow-up. It's a way of visualizing and understanding the steps a customer takes to achieve a specific goal with your business. In more simple terms - what information do people need/want to know, and in what order do they need/want it?
Secondly, we defined our different audiences, and then I crafted sections of the site with messaging specifically for those audiences, all with the customer journeys as the framework.
I am so happy with the final result! The color palette balanced well with the fantastic photos I used, taken by Harmon Photography (my go-to school photographer!)
Developing strong customer journeys can be challenging, but doing it correctly makes a huge difference in your marketing and storytelling. Let me help you find a clear communication path for your audience!
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