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Marketing Learning During the Pandemic 香港开学祭:疫情催生O2O营销策略 Popular Learning adopts the “Online To Offline” marketing model to welcome a new school season. 大众教室采用 O2O (Online To Offline) 营销模式，开辟不一样的开学季。 By Jason Siu (Hong Kong) 文:萧剑丰(香港) The 15 daily gifts that were up for grabs for visitors during the "New Hong Kong School Season Festival" “香港开学祭”: 连续15日，日日有奖赏 The COVID-19 pandemic, which has lasted for more than two years, has hit the education industry especially hard. Schools were closed and students had to switch to learning at home. Learning centres like Popular Learning, formerly known as EduSmart, faced even greater challenges as everyone chose to stay home to minimise their exposure to the deadly coronavirus. Disruptions Caused by the Pandemic Despite the widespread use of smartphones, most parents still prefer to visit learning centres in person to find out more about the learning environment and syllabus, and to discuss their children's learning needs with the teachers before enrolling their children. Therefore, our marketing team has always ensured that the advertisements outside our learning centres are attention-grabbing and informative to pique the interest of the passing parents. However, the pandemic severely disrupted our usual way of business as everyone avoided social contact. Digital marketing alone is not enough to convince parents to enrol their children in our courses, and the number of parents coming in person to inquire about our courses has also decreased significantly. Hence, Popular Learning decided to adopt the “Online To Offline” (O2O) marketing model to increase awareness of our new brand while attracting the parents to our learning centres. The New Hong Kong School Season In a nutshell, O2O is our marketing strategy to drive the offline consumption of Popular Learning’s services through our online marketing campaign. One example is our first "New Hong Kong School Season Festival", held in September 2020. To further attract interest to our marketing campaign, a daily gift was up for grabs for visitors to Popular Learning's social media for 15 consecutive days. All the parents had to do was to enter the keywords in the response 16 - popularnews 139