Centre of Excellence

Centre of Excellence is an award-winning online training and education provider that gives hundreds of thousands of people access to new skills and qualifications, along with that extra bit of confidence. The website inspires people to broaden their experience and achieve personal or professional aspirations, without any pressure or deadlines.
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The Brief

What We Did

Centre of Excellence enlisted the bespoke web development expertise of Soap Media to transform their former basic website into a more professional part of their thriving business.
The website was to become a sophisticated learning management system (LMS) with an advanced sales and marketing platform.   We provided Centre of Excellence with a fully interactive and multifunctional website that serves learners through unique user-accounts. The business offers over 120 subject areas for 300,000 learners in 20 English-speaking countries, which was an exciting challenge full of complex requirements that our web developers thrived on. Transactions from organic traffic increased 491% in the first quarter after launch of the new website, proving the effectiveness of our efforts.
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Excellent First Impressions

The website created by Soap Media is a first-impression example of the ‘excellence’ that this successful online learning brand embodies.
It demonstrates strong branding, a resource-rich online learning portal serving course modules and video content, unlockable content within the portal (such as after purchases and assessments), an online business hub and multi-level marketing functionality based on referral commission. This has not only improved customer satisfaction with the brand but supported additional revenue streams and partnering opportunities, too.

Complex Bespoke Solutions For Thriving Online Businesses

Bespoke Functionality

Providing a flexible service that suits the needs of the customer is one of the hallmarks of a successful award-winning business. Centre of Excellence requested additional functionality options within the website’s admin panel that are not usually found in off-the-peg ecommerce websites.
Our developers found bespoke solutions to manage complex scenarios, such as the ability to switch courses after purchase, or to purchase as a gift. Centre of Excellence is now a fantastic example of the bespoke web development solutions created by Soap Media, with ecommerce conversion rate from organic traffic increased 16.5% since the launch of the new website.
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Advanced Search Filtering

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Perhaps the most important feature of this website is the ability of users to easily find exactly the type of course that suits them.
In order to achieve this, our developers systematically broke down each scenario that a visitor to the website might choose for searching, to ensure the filtering process was intuitive and logical. Searches always produce a good match to explore further, and visitor time on site statistics prove that the experience works very well.
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Paid Ads, Lookalikes, Re-Marketing and Cross channel Targeting

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Wowcher, Groupon and 450 daily deal websites are just some of the sales channels that Centre of Excellence courses feature on.
Cross-channel marketing strategy is a particularly valuable service offered by Soap, with emphasis on account-based customer relationship management and tracking, where anonymous user activity is analysed for remarketing and lookalike purposes in order to appropriately meet the needs of particular customer types in a personalised way.We achieve an increased presence on multiple marketing channels in this way for clients like Centre of Excellence, along with solutions for automated marketing to customers with abandoned baskets, and regular analytics reporting to fine tune ways to improve conversions.
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Competitor Analysis

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Soap Media has a big part to play in ensuring our customers are positioned well as industry leaders or in order to become one.
The teams at Soap Media contributed expertise across SEO, PPC, UX design, content strategy and user journey development for channel marketing.   We assessed the client’s current market presence, and the authority and trust of the brand in order to ensure the new website for Centre of Excellence maintained or improved performance and opportunities in its share of the market.

Designing For Different User Groups

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While the primary audience for the website is the student, Centre of Excellence also encourages involvement from guest bloggers and course resellers.
For this reason, we provided an easy to follow, step-by-step user guide that would help these user groups, as well as the website administrators, to learn everything they needed to know about using the features and functions of the website for their own purposes, without the need for formal training.
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Centre Of Excellence

Wireframing

Plannng

As with all of our work at Soap, a very high level of planning went into the UX design for all aspects of this complex build, with wireframing feedback sought at incremental stages for effective flow between interactive elements and from page to page.
We designed UX for learning portal, the business hub and the multi-level marketing platform separately, as well as for the experience as a whole. This ensured content was emphasised according to the customer’s needs and for effective monetisation of the website. Our painstaking attention to UX design and user journey planning underpinned the subsequent SEO and PPC work, providing high relevance and greater ROI on ad spend.
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Strategic Paid Search

Comprehensive assessments

Our paid search specialists provided an in-depth assessment of the best approach for the highest return on ad spend, with recommendations on how to group courses on the website to achieve better performance and re-marketed discounting activity. This strategy began an ongoing service that we provide as part of a comprehensive marketing package for Centre of Excellence.
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Enhanced SEO And Outreach For Backlinks

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Soap Media provides a white-hat backlink generation service for SEO purposes to support Centre of Excellence at the top of converting search terms.
A dedicated team invests allocated time in outreach activities, whereby legitimate opportunities are found and presented to the client for approval before being processed. The results of these efforts are reported on a regular basis in a way that makes it easy for Centre of Excellence to monitor return on investment.   The first three months of SEO work for Centre of Excellence increased the domain authority for the website by 172%, growing from 11 to 30. This increase in authority gives the brand much broader reach and stronger positioning for Search Engine Page Results.

Don’t Just Take Our Word for it

Here's what the CEO of Centre of Excellence said:

“The quality and service we’re getting are absolutely fantastic.” “Soap Media developed our website over the course of a year. We completely redesigned the software. We’ve worked on digital marketing with them since then, mainly PPC. They’ve helped us rebrand, creating a new logo and look-and-feel and helped design it from scratch. We’ve asked them to design many things for us, from the certificates we give to learners after completing a course, to the front covers of our audio courses.” “Everybody always comments on how amazing the website is. It was a massive project and a complex development process, but the new website has completely transformed our business. Our sales have gone up by 60% since launching the website a year ago. They’ve helped turn what was a small company two years ago into a big institution. They’ve helped us become a multimillion-pound company, so it’s been worth the investment.” “Their design team is excellent. The website amounts to our presence as a business, and it’s fantastic. Their designer has done brilliant work on our collateral. Soap Media is also strong on digital marketing. They’ve delivered fantastic results, which speak for themselves. The quality and service we’re getting are absolutely fantastic.” “As a company, we’re happy with everything. If there were any issues, Soap Media handled them quickly, and they were willing to listen to us.” “Clients should approach Soap Media with a clear vision of what they want to achieve. This will help them bring the product to life. Their software development and design teams are fantastic.”
Sara Lou-Ann JonesFounder and CEO at Centre of Excellence