educationwise

educationwise delivers level 2 to 5 apprenticeships across sport, professional services and beyond, for a business of around 30 people relying entirely on marketing to bring in every apprentice and every employer partnership. when soph joined, she was not part of a marketing team, she was the marketing team. social media, email, print, paid ads, brand and website all sat with one person, and everything you see in this case study was built and delivered single-handedly in under a year.

the brand was tired, the website was broken, and social media had been inactive for months. staff were raising concerns at internal conferences that the logo was unreadable on screen and actively harming client pitches, and the website was slow, broken and outdated, creating the kind of digital presence that tells a prospective client you are not serious before you have said a word. leadership were even considering splitting the brand into three separate identities, educationwise recruitment, educationwise training, and educationwise corporate, a move that would have fragmented everything they had built and confused the market entirely. everything needed to change.

the brief that became the job was a logo redesign interview. soph walked in, redesigned the logo, and ended up with significant influence over the entire brand direction. the first call was dropping the three-brand split. three identities made sense internally but created confusion externally. one brand, done properly, with personality and information doing the heavy lifting instead.

soph recommended dropping "academy" from the name entirely. educationwise is not an academy. it delivers apprenticeships and training, and the word was creating the wrong impression. the colour palette was rebuilt around shades of green, chosen not to impress procurement managers but to feel compelling to young people taking their next step. the brief was simple: make the brand feel safe, not daunting.

the owl was designed entirely by soph. every element, including the illustration, the colour, and the personality, was built from scratch. it was conceived as the logo. the client felt it was too bold and positioned it as a mascot instead. soph still thinks she was right. the owl ended up on everything anyway, and educationwise are still using the brand she built 8 months after she left.

the existing website was slow, broken, hard to navigate and visually outdated. it was actively discouraging the people it needed to convert. soph rebuilt it entirely from scratch on wordpress over six months. over 40 unique pages, the new brand implemented throughout, seo optimised, bugs fixed, and an e-commerce store added so courses could be sold passively without account manager involvement for every transaction. the team loved it. for the first time, the website was working with the business rather than against it.

educationwise serves two completely different audiences: learners looking for their next step, and employers looking to take on apprentices. the social strategy was built around that duality. instagram targeted learners with a tone that felt like a peer talking to a peer, not an institution talking down to a teenager. linkedin targeted employers with a more considered, credible voice built around case studies, sector news and the kind of content that gets shared internally before a hiring decision gets made. paid social sat under the same roof, planned, built and managed by soph herself, turning a channel that had been sitting completely dormant into one of the business's most reliable sources of new leads, going from zero active presence to over 100 leads a month.

none of this happened in isolation. the same person writing the linkedin copy was also running the email campaigns, briefing the print materials, updating the website and keeping the brand consistent across every single one of them. the social results below did not come from a specialist social team. they came from one person treating social with the same discipline as everything else on her plate.