Grasping global demand
What was your relationship with cocktails before you joined the company? Do you know how to make a Negroni?
As an Italian I must know how to make a Negroni. The whole bartending culture appealed to me even before I joined, because it’s fun, uniting and it’s global. I knew it would be a fascinating place to work when I came for the interview to the office that looks like a bar. We sat on barstools and spoke on the counter, with all the bottles behind us. That was the moment when I realised that the origin of the business will make the job entertaining. The business is thriving and celebrates 70,000 graduates, despite being hardly hit by Covid.
Out of these 70 000 graduates, only half had a direct intent to learn bartending and work in bars. How do you encourage the other half to try the course?
Analyzing all data about our past and current students has been crucial to understand their perfect journey. Some interesting conclusions that we have analyzed is that our students’ demographics range across 18-30 age and are mostly men. In Southern Europe for example we have two different buyer personas. The youngest ones from 18 to 21 years old in major part are high school recent graduates that are looking to shortcut university path and quickly enter a fun labor market such as the bartending industry. The second buyer persona consists of older people looking for a different professional challenge and trying to completely detour their career from the job they currently have. We also have a 3rd buyer persona who is made of youngsters from all ages looking for a short and fun experience where they can meet new multicultural people, acquire new skills and spend time traveling across sunny places. Their future in bartending is an option but probably not a goal that is set in stone.
In all these 3 cases, most of the time these potential customers do not know that bartending may be in their professional future and what do we offer. Given that, we play with targeting broad audiences to stimulate an unaware population that bartending can be the next professional bet. Another trick is interest-targeting for people already in the business looking to complete their CV. The third is the audience willing just to embrace the bartending world. Those we can find by creating lookalike audiences of our most engaged graduates.
Acquisition mix
What’s your favorite part of finding and talking to the right audience?
The part where I can have the most fun and control is obviously at the creative level. We try to leverage specific concepts in our marketing messaging and shuffle our USPs with different buyer personas to streamline learning. We’ve tried vague and exact explanations of what the course is about and generally, creatives that set clear expectations are the ones that at this stage give best results. Over time we have learned to separate creative testing and other kinds of experiments such as campaign types and audiences. We upload our creatives, for a multivariate testing across all cities, which lets ad platforms define the winners and deliver content based on its own methodology. Then we handpick winning assets to the performance campaigns and keep A/B testing them in specific cities to find those that could deliver longer.
We also benefit from being a wide bartending ecosystem. We have three tools at our disposal: first, our IBC Global Certification that is recognized all over the world. Then Matchstaff, our employment portal where we notify former students of potential job opportunities globally. And finally our school network is distributed globally from NYC to Sydney, Goa and Phuket where anyone can take our courses from 5 to 8 different languages.
The only case we do things in house is if nothing is on the market or the solutions are not customisable enough. But with the current explosion of SaaS businesses it doesn’t make sense to think of having everything in house anymore. The other way around is true too: you always need a part of internal logic and thinking on top of the tools you use.
The European Bartender School now operates beyond Europe, in many destinations across the world. What is the secret behind attracting customers with such a niche interest, globally?
We have more than 25 schools spread out across the world though we do not limit to target potential students only in those specific markets. What’s important is that our buyer is open to travel for an experience. For example we have 2 schools in Mexico and Chile but those are key references for all potential students in the whole region, from Colombia to Argentina and Brazil. The same way that Barcelona and Mallorca are great attraction schools for German, British and even American future bartenders.
If we look closer, our best-seller course is worth approximately 2000 euro and it’s not something that usually converts in a day. The conversion path from awareness to conversion is taking from three to six month. We leverage top funnel actions through digital marketing and bottom funnel efforts with our international team of in-house sellers.
How we work is, we start from an hypothesis that we benchmark and match it with our historical results. That guides us to the acquisition hypothesis that we put on continuous testing. Even though our business was fiercely hit by the pandemic, we were able to increase our testing budget and at the moment 30% of our advertising budget is addressed into experiments. To scale our learnings from experiments across markets, we keep them in tiers – similar markets that have shared behavioural and purchasing patterns. Successful experiments are being applied to other markets belonging in the same tier. For example, the UK and Latam are in different tiers that need appropriate tailored testing. But, if something worked in Ireland, we scale it to Canada and the UK. Such an approach helps us to balance between scale and granular learnings, without wasting too much budgets on similar markets.
With people taking classes in different countries, how do you structure your campaigns?
Historical data helps us to catch seasonality and learn about general trends. We look for patterns to understand which destination is preferable for students from different cities and run customer interviews to define why. As the consideration journey is long, I don’t rely on location visitor targeting. If I know that the moment of Germans planning to visit Mallorca is approaching, I A/B test driving them to the landing page with a course in Mallorca versus the general page that lists all cities. Over the years some patterns became inviolable, like Americans always interested in taking a course in Mexico and vice versa.
Your social media presence commands respect - more than 500,000 followers across many local pages in each market. How do you manage this level of complexity?
The reality is that we have 25+ schools around 5 continents, each with their own local social media profiles, alongside the global accounts we manage from the central marketing team… so all in all as a brand we manage a total of 58 separate profiles on social media.
To manage everything, last year we kicked off a new centralised approach to social media based around a Social Media Management System (Agorapulse) and defined our new digital content strategy. We have brand guidelines and playbooks, but our 25+ schools worldwide all run their own social media profiles independently. We love this local approach because it lets the individual style and character of each school and destination shine through. That said, as a global brand we need some form of governance and control, so we centralised all profiles in Agorapulse giving global reporting, social listening, content scheduling and centralised community management across all 58 profiles. For example, we can now push a post live across all 58 profiles with a few clicks.
While content production & posting for school profiles is done locally, community management is done centrally. Giving first-class customer service on social media is a big part of our brand, plus we wanted to take the strain off our schools and let them focus on the courses & students rather than answering messages on social media.
