Pearson: Building a digital marketing strategy for sustainable growth
Building a connected customer experience through journey mapping and CRM strategy
The challenge
Pearson Australia is a leading schools content, digital and publishing organisation. The marketing team was responsible for generating leads across a broad portfolio of education products and services.
While individual product campaigns were delivering results, lead generation performance had begun to plateau. Marketing activity was heavily focused on short-term product promotion, with limited investment in brand awareness, thought leadership or nurturing prospects through the full customer journey.
At the same time, marketing and sales teams needed greater alignment around lead generation targets, customer engagement and the role marketing should play in driving long-term growth.
Pearson needed a digital marketing strategy that would strengthen brand engagement, improve lead generation performance and create a more sustainable pipeline of future customers.
The solution
Transforming product marketing into a customer-led growth strategy
A comprehensive digital marketing strategy was developed to connect brand awareness, thought leadership, lead generation and sales enablement into a single go-to-market approach.
The work began by defining lead funnel benchmarks, marketing targets and performance measures to better understand how marketing activity contributed to business growth.
Key initiatives included:
Development of Pearson’s annual go-to-market strategy
Lead funnel modelling and target setting
Customer journey and campaign planning
Channel strategy across email, social media, paid advertising and web
Thought leadership content strategy
Marketing and sales alignment planning
Salesforce Marketing Cloud optimisation
A significant strategic shift was made away from short-term product promotion and towards thought leadership and brand-led engagement.
One of the flagship initiatives focused on Explicit Teaching, a rapidly emerging educational priority across Australian schools. Through audience research and market analysis, it became clear that educators were seeking practical guidance and support as education departments increasingly adopted explicit teaching approaches.
To support this need, a multi-channel thought leadership campaign was developed featuring:
A downloadable Explicit Teaching whitepaper
Expert-led online roundtable webinar
Blog and content series
Lead nurturing journeys
Paid and organic digital promotion
Product engagement pathways aligned to customer interests
Alongside campaign strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud templates and processes were redesigned, reducing email production time from approximately one hour to less than ten minutes while improving brand consistency and campaign delivery efficiency.
The result
The strategy transformed Pearson’s approach to digital marketing, creating a stronger balance between brand building, thought leadership and lead generation.
Results included:
More than 20,000 website visits generated through strategic campaigns
More than 3,000 downloads of the Explicit Teaching whitepaper
More than 300 registrations for the expert webinar series
Significant increases in qualified lead generation across priority product categories
Marketing campaigns that consistently outperformed historical benchmarks
Faster campaign deployment through Salesforce Marketing Cloud optimisation
Improved alignment between marketing and sales teams around lead generation and customer conversion
The strategy repositioned marketing from a product promotion function to a customer-focused growth engine. By connecting thought leadership, content, campaigns and technology, Pearson created a more sustainable approach to engaging educators and generating future demand.
