Swim School Franchise Centralizes Multiple Brands Into One HubSpot Enterprise CMS Portal

Streamline Brands is the leading franchisor of swim schools in the United States with additional schools in Mexico and Turkey. With several individual brands and over 200 individual school locations in their network, Streamline Brands is helping empower small business owners and the communities they serve on an international scale.

With several brands under one roof and acquiring new brands all the time, Streamline had a disconnected, inconsistent, and fragmented digital footprint. What they needed was centralization, automation, and consistency for their brands. They also needed someone with expertise that could help them leverage the full value of HubSpot to support their global efforts. 

Parallel Path is a Boulder, Colorado-based digital marketing agency. As mentioned on their website, they have “been crafting and deploying highly-effective marketing solutions for [their] clients since 2006”. Streamline was Parallel Path’s client and the team was in need of some HubSpot expertise to help bring their vision to life in the Enterprise CMS. They engaged Revenue River to help architect a solution that achieved all their required functionality and build it to scale for usability in the CMS.

Project Overview

Goal: Redesign 4 Separate Brands into 1 Enterprise CMS Portal

Services Provided: Website Development

HubSpot License: CMS Enterprise

Timeline: 120 days

The Job to be Done

Streamline had three core brands that needed updating: Safe Splash, Swim Labs, and SwimTastic. These sister brands combined for a total of about 134 different locations across North America. Some of these sites resided in HubSpot already and some were needing to be brought into the fold. 

We needed to rebuild these sites into a single Enterprise portal, with proper organization and segmentation of all website assets by brand. We had to craft a solution that made it easy for Streamline’s lean corporate marketing team to support all franchisees and brands — easy scalability as new locations (and brands) are added was a priority. Scalability was put to the test when mid-way through the project, the client onboarded another brand, Saf-T-Swim. Fortunately our strategy was sound. 

The Strategy

We needed to provide a cohesive user experience per location. This meant creating a type of microsite (or collection of pages) for every location, as well as the main level corporate pages. In addition, we had to deliver tailored, localized content to the user across all locations since classes, staff, and offerings were unique to each franchise. This included hours, classes, promotions, and more.

To achieve this, we created a custom global header and unique navigation menu for each location. This allowed us to present all classes and team information all related to a single location while providing access to additional locations and corporate-level pages seamlessly. If a new person was introduced to Safe Splash through the corporate homepage, they can easily navigate to their nearest location and view tailored classes, staff, policies, and offerings. They can then jump to another location and see a completely different set of localized content specific to that location. But we needed to manage all this information over an ever-growing list of franchise locations. 

The plan was to leverage a HubDB database (or 10!) to dynamically power the content of the pages.

This gave us consistent, centralized management, and allowed for easy updating for all locations across brands. By managing all location information like addresses, phone, social links, FAQs, testimonials, and more through HubDB, the client could manually update specific info, or export/import .CSV files for bulk updates easily. Replicating this success with additional data tables for classes, programs/promotions, and careers, we also made it easy for a single team member to update service offerings across all locations and easily update over 2000 pages dynamically. 

Getting a Little More Personal

To enhance the UX of the site, we implemented dynamic IP filtering that automatically recommends the closest location, as well as the next 3 nearest by distance. To do this, we leveraged Google Maps API to compare the IP address location against our database which includes longitude/latitude coordinates for every locale, then return the information dynamically to specific custom modules we developed throughout the site. This more quickly connected users with relevant content without them needing to search the site or click around. 

Connecting to a Network

Additionally, we capitalized on 3rd party integrations to further integrate the holistic platform. By directly linking to the membership platforms iClassPro and MindBody, we were able to facilitate current member engagement as well as provide easy access to enroll. Connecting to existing systems let us make a major client-facing update that didn't totally overhaul the existing business framework and processes.

Additionally, the client was using Listen360 for testimonials and SnapEngage which was an integrated chat feature on the site and connects to their back end platform. By incorporating these functionalities, we were able to reduce the impact on normal business day to day for the individual franchises and provide a stellar user experience for website visitors.

The Results

Above and beyond everything else, we were able to deliver real meaningful change to an overburdened team. By creating the efficiencies needed in order to manage everything in one platform, we were able to lift the daily weight Streamline’s corporate team felt. With the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacting business and personnel, the efficiencies were able to sustain manageability on an even smaller team. With a firm foundation in place, Streamline Brands was set up for scale and had the system in place to easily add more franchises and brands all on the same HubSpot platform. 

Takeaway

Sometimes the best way to maximize the value of software is to avoid the temptation of trying to turn it into something it is not. No software is the perfect solution to all problems; HubSpot is no different. However, when HubSpot can be leveraged for what it does best (and that list is seriously long these days), other solutions can serve to fill the gaps.