The kids went back to school last month, much to the delight of many parents across Britain! There were also lots of parents preparing for the emotional moment of watching their little one go to school for the first time and we’ve been busy over summer helping our client, LeapFrog, reach those parents with the launch of interactive learning system, LeapStart.

To mark the launch in July, we worked with YouTubers, Channel Mum, and parenting expert, Liat Hughes Joshi, to create a series of tips and advice to help children (and parents!) prepare for that all important first day at school. The latest video in a series of four saw parenting vloggers talk about their feelings of preparing for the first day at school and what they do to teach their children certain skills needed for starting school.

The tips and video content were shared with media along with a LeapStart to secure coverage on preparing for school, with LeapStart positioned as a key item to help children build key skills for school success. To date, over 100 pieces of coverage have appeared across the likes of the Daily Mirror, The Sun, Daily Express, Closer and a host of influential parenting bloggers.

In addition to Channel Mum sharing the video through its YouTube and Facebook pages, achieving over 25,000 views, we shared a 30 second edit of the video on LeapFrog’s UK Facebook and Twitter channels. We set up specific targeting for the posts, ensuring parents with children of the right age and those with interests affiliated with primary school and child education were reached. A further 162,000 parents were reached and driven to the LeapStart landing page on the LeapFrog website to learn more information about the product.

A live Twitter Q&A was also hosted to give parents the chance to ask questions to both LeapFrog and Liat about preparing their child for school. Our pre-event activity of heavily promoting the event on social media and inviting influential parenting bloggers enabled us to build momentum around the event and reach 1.5 million people through the event.

Whilst it’s all fun and games getting heaps of coverage and creating conversation on social media, we supplemented this with Facebook advertising. Ahead of launch, we drove awareness of pre-order availability, reaching nearly 200,000 parents, 2% of which clicked through to the LeapFrog website to learn more. From launch, Canvas and Carousel ads displayed key features of LeapStart, including the Channel Mum video. This activity reached just shy of 1 million parents and results from key retailer, Smyths, indicate that 54% of traffic to their LeapStart landing page in 30 days came from this activity.

It didn’t stop there though! To keep up momentum ahead of the big back-to-school moment, we revealed the results of research by leading child development website, iChild, to media. We helped LeapFrog work with iChild to provide 200 primary school teachers with LeapStarts to use in classrooms, resulting in 97% of teachers recommending the device to parents to help equip their children with the skills needed to start school.

We’re proud to say LeapFrog has seen a successful launch period for LeapStart and we can’t wait to spread more learning fun with them as we start planning for October half term… and Christmas!