Digital Main Street helps Montessori Mozarts bring Montessori education into the present
Montessori Mozarts is a company built on face-to-face interactions. Music lessons, workshops, seminars, conferences: all done in person. Their marketing efforts were literally word to mouth. Founder Professor Maureen Harris would jet off to a conference or seminar with 50 of her books in tow and sell them, along with her business, in person. Of course, these types of interactions are no longer possible in the midst of the pandemic, and Montessori Mozarts had to find a way to adapt to an online format.
To their credit, the company was able to transition their classes to Zoom on their own. Their instructors had been incorporating technology into their lessons anyway, making the leap to virtual learning a little easier for them and their students. However, making necessary updates to their websites, online teacher training course, and social media accounts was a challenge, as they lacked the time and resources.
Maureen and her daughter Leah were looking to improve the customer experience for everyone who visited their website or took their teacher training e-course. Their website was outdated, and the platform for the e-course was confusing to navigate and difficult to update. Since their marketing efforts had been mostly offline in the past, they needed a new strategy that could take advantage of online channels and tactics in order to promote the e-course and their other services.
The Transformation Team successfully updated the Montessori Mozarts website, with new layouts, refreshed graphics and logos, and edited copy. The design is in keeping with the brand Montessori Mozarts has established over it’s long history, with bright colours and imagery of children enjoying music. Redundant pages with duplicate or dated information were removed or merged with existing ones, cutting down on unnecessary content. The website has been streamlined, improving the overall customer experience.
As for the e-course itself, the team migrated the content to a new platform, Thinkific, that would allow Maureen and Leah to make updates whenever necessary and even add more courses should they choose to pursue that path in the future. The pricing structure has also been altered to allow students to purchase individual units of the course, in case they are not interested in the full certification. In turn, this has provided Montessori Mozarts with marketing opportunities, where they can offer the first unit for free in order to attract more students.
A long-term, adaptable marketing strategy has been created to fit Montessori Mozarts’ needs. It contains all of the information they need to know about every platform they will be using, best practices and plans that Maureen and Leah can easily follow. Templates for social posts have been included as well as suggested copy for them, along with a list of relevant hashtags and keywords. Graphic elements have been shared on Canva as well. Everything provided to them will ensure that, going forward, Montessori Mozarts will thrive.
If one thing is clear after the program, it’s that Maureen and Leah have renewed confidence in themselves and their business. They have the determination and drive to take Montessori Mozarts to new heights. Ideas on how to improve were flowing right until the end of the engagement, and while the transformation team was unable to implement all of them, the framework is now there for Maureen and Leah to accomplish all of their goals.
Our Digital Main Street innovation partner in the Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent region is WEtech Alliance. See how they can help.
Written By James Robinson
Digital Main Street a été créé par la Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA) avec le soutien direct de la Ville de Toronto. DMS est également soutenu par un groupe de partenaires commerciaux stratégiques, dont Google, Mastercard, Shopify, Meta, Intuit QuickBooks, Square, Lightspeed, Ebay et Postes Canada.
A $42.5-million investment from FedDev Ontario brought together the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas, Communitech, Invest Ottawa and the Ontario Business Improvement Area Association to expand the Digital Main Street Platform in order to support more businesses going digital as a response to the impacts of COVID-19 in Southern Ontario.