Case Study: A Multi-Year Marketing Partnership Across Parchment and Instructure
LinkedIn Conversions (K12, Year to Date)
Average LinkedIn Conversion Rate
Partnership Spanning Two Company Identities
We built a full-service marketing partnership that outlasted an $835 million acquisition.
Parchment is a digital credentialing platform trusted by more than 13,000 education organizations, handling transcripts, diplomas, verifications, and comprehensive learner records for Higher Ed and K12 institutions. In 2024, Instructure acquired Parchment in an $835 million deal, and the marketing work we do today spans both the original Parchment product line and Instructure’s broader company-wide efforts, including Marketo email operations across Higher Education, K12, APAC, and EMEA.
We didn’t just survive that acquisition. We expanded through it, growing from a single paid media engagement into a full holistic partnership covering paid search, paid social, SEO, GEO, email marketing automation, design, copywriting, web design, and program management.
We introduce Parchment and Instructure, a credentialing platform serving over 13,000 institutions
Academic credentialing is a high-trust, high-compliance category. A transcript, diploma, or verification carries legal and academic weight, so any marketing partner working in this space needs to understand both the enrollment calendar that drives demand and the compliance standards that govern how student data moves. Parchment built its business on solving that problem for Higher Ed and K12 institutions worldwide, along with organizations issuing certificates, badges, and other credentials outside traditional education.
We began working with Parchment in December 2021, well before the company became part of Instructure. When Instructure acquired Parchment in 2024 in an $835 million deal, most agency relationships in that position would have quietly ended. New ownership typically means new vendors, new systems, and a fresh evaluation of every existing contract. Ours didn’t end. It grew. Today we support marketing not just for the Parchment product line but across Instructure’s broader company-wide initiatives, including a dedicated Marketo email operations engagement covering Higher Education, K12, APAC, and EMEA business units.
Our approach combined embedded channel ownership, full-funnel systems, and continuity planning
Embedded across every channel, region, and product line
We manage Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok, and Demandbase ABM across every region Parchment and Instructure operate in, including Global, USA, EMEA, and APAC, and across every product line, from transcripts and diploma services to district records and recruiting. We keep B2B and B2C reporting cleanly separated so leadership always knows where spend is working and why.
Full-funnel systems, not just campaigns
Rather than treating email as a bolt-on channel, we conducted a full audit of the Marketo instance and rebuilt the operational foundation underneath it, including nurture programs, dynamic regional content, and a modernized global template used across every business unit.
Built for continuity through organizational change
Acquisitions bring new stakeholders, new priorities, and new reporting lines. We standardized our workflows and documentation specifically so institutional knowledge survived the transition instead of leaving with whoever managed the account before.
The partnership has spanned four or more years across two company identities.
Marketing continuity during an acquisition is not a given. Budgets get frozen, teams get reorganized, and vendors get re-evaluated from scratch. We navigated that by staying close to the people actually running demand generation day to day rather than waiting for direction from the top. That included managing a real mid-flight transition on the LinkedIn side, coordinating the migration from a standalone Parchment ad account and company page into Instructure’s unified account structure, without pausing campaign momentum in other channels while that transition completed.
Part of that continuity work has extended into the UK and EMEA market specifically, where we now run multi-channel campaign execution end to end, covering email, webinars, live events, release notes, and content syndication, standardizing Asana board templates so campaign builds that once took much longer now come together in roughly 2 hours.
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We managed paid media at scale across Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Demandbase.
Google Ads
Across a 2024-2025 flight window, we managed a full account spanning B2B and B2C search and display campaigns across K12, Higher Ed, EMEA, and remarketing pools. Total spend of $71,566 delivered 2,426,889 impressions and 320,941 clicks, an overall CTR of 13.22%, well above typical search benchmarks. The strongest single line, USA HED Issuing, ran a 44.87% CTR on its own.
LinkedIn Ads
Historically, we’ve run a large-scale program spanning 92 campaigns and 492 individual ads across Higher Ed, K12, and other product lines, at an average spend of roughly $22,000 per month during active periods. For K12 specifically, year-over-year impressions grew 270% (from 1.5M to 2.0M) while CPMs fell 71% (from $29.61 to $8.59) and eCPCs fell 44.5% (from $18.17 to $10.09), alongside 5,917 conversions year to date at an average cost per conversion of $11.74 and a 35.98% average conversion rate. LinkedIn spend paused mid-2025 during the account migration into Instructure’s structure, a deliberate hold rather than a performance issue, and campaigns are rebuilding under the new account now.
TikTok
We built and managed TikTok ad creative and campaigns for Parchment’s K12 audience, extending the brand’s reach into a platform where prospective students and families increasingly research schools and enrollment options.
Demandbase ABM
Across Higher Ed, K12, Data Automation/Pathways, Dual Enrollment, Workforce, and core ABM segments, $30,847 in spend generated 1,975,102 impressions and reached 67,173 target accounts, with 36,323 of those accounts visiting Parchment’s site, 25,680 showing lift, and 25,491 actively interacting with content.
We expanded SEO and GEO efforts to cover podcasts, product pages, and AI search visibility.
Our SEO work started with the fundamentals: improving the information architecture and on-page SEO of key product pages so Google could crawl, index, and rank them more effectively. From there, we moved into content discoverability, taking on the full SEO optimization of Parchment’s own podcast on YouTube. That work covered metadata optimization, title and description structuring, chapter markers, and keyword-aligned show notes across 44 episodes, turning what had been a purely organic content play into a properly indexed, search-discoverable asset. To date, those 44 optimized episodes have generated around 2,500 organic views, a direct result of treating a podcast as a searchable content library rather than a one-off publishing exercise.
As AI search adoption grew, we extended the SEO relationship into GEO and AEO, generative and answer engine optimization built specifically for how tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini surface and cite sources. We shared a full GEO/AEO strategy deck with the Instructure team, including a recommendation to build a structured “LLM Info Page,” a single, well-maintained page with clear differentiators, product facts, and comparison points designed to increase the odds of being directly cited in synthesized AI answers. We also proposed and began managing external brand signals, correcting outdated Reddit threads, refreshing third-party listicles, and strengthening high-authority profiles on platforms like G2, Medium, and LinkedIn Pulse, since those sources feed directly into what large language models learn about a brand.
We rebuilt Marketo from the ground up into a scalable email marketing engine.
When we took a closer look at the Parchment Marketo instance, we found the kind of technical debt that builds up over years of ad hoc campaign requests: inconsistent program structure, gaps in attribution, and workflows that had never been formally audited. We ran a full and extensive audit identifying every one of those gaps, along with the operational risks they created for lead routing, sales alerts, and campaign reporting. That audit became the foundation for everything we built afterward, rather than layering new campaigns on top of an unstable system.
From that foundation, we built 12 complex nurture programs, including a Late Renewals Nurture that Parchment’s own Renewals team identified as a major win given its measurable impact on customer retention and renewal rates. We refreshed the global email template with modern, modular components that simplify the build process and improve design consistency across every campaign sent, and we built dynamic header and footer snippets by region, which eliminated the need to build separate localized versions of every single email. With that system in place, the team can build one email and have it automatically deliver region-specific content, including an expanded LATAM Portuguese segment, saving significant time on every send.
This work expanded into a dedicated Marketo Email Operations engagement covering all of Instructure, not just the Parchment product line, supporting Higher Education, K12, APAC, and EMEA business units with a team of specialized Marketo strategists. That team enhanced webinar programs with reminder and follow-up email frameworks that improved attendance rates, and they continue to surface ongoing strategic recommendations on segmentation, nurture flow optimization, and automation as capacity allows, treating email as a full operational discipline rather than a channel that only gets attention when a campaign needs to go out.
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We delivered design, creative, web, and program management across every campaign.
Design, CRO, and copy
Across a 2024-2025 flight window, we managed a full account spanning B2B and B2C search and display campaigns across K12, Higher Ed, EMEA, and remarketing pools. Total spend of $71,566 delivered 2,426,889 impressions and 320,941 clicks, an overall CTR of 13.22%, well above typical search benchmarks. The strongest single line, USA HED Issuing, ran a 44.87% CTR on its own.
Web design and landing pages
On the web side, our monthly cadence typically includes 3 to 5 new landing or product pages, many of them custom Elementor builds for higher-complexity projects like event pages, product spotlights, and campaign-specific landing experiences, plus 2 to 3 page updates per week to keep existing pages accurate and aligned with active campaigns. We handled site-wide updates during the Parchment-to-Instructure brand transition itself, updating naming, footers, and page references across the site as the two brands consolidated.
Program management and campaign operations
None of the channel work above happens in isolation, and a meaningful part of what we've delivered is the operational layer that keeps it all moving. For the UK and EMEA market specifically, we've directed multi-channel campaign execution end to end, covering email, webinars, live events, release notes, and content syndication, delivering roughly 25 campaign programs in a recent quarter with only one minor scheduling delay across the entire batch. We standardized Asana board templates for repeatable workflows, which cut typical campaign board setup down to about 2 hours, and we built and documented a scalable content syndication workflow in partnership with Parchment's internal team, turning what had been an ad hoc process into a repeatable one.
The numbers reflect steady, full-funnel execution across every channel we touched.
Paid media and ABM
13.22% blended Google Ads CTR, 5,917 LinkedIn conversions (K12, YTD) at 35.98% average conversion rate, 270% LinkedIn K12 impression growth year over year, 71% decrease in LinkedIn K12 CPMs year over year, 67,173 target accounts reached via Demandbase ABM.
SEO & GEO
44 YouTube podcast episodes fully SEO-optimized, 2,500+ organic views generated from those episodes to date, a completed GEO/AEO strategy deck delivered and adopted as a 2026 priority for brand visibility in AI search.
Email marketing and Marketo
12 complex nurture programs built and launched, 1 global email template refresh adopted company-wide, dynamic regional content system covering every active market including a new LATAM Portuguese segment, 1 full Marketo instance audit completed and used as the operating foundation going forward.
Design and program management
1 to 2 day average turnaround on ad creative sets, same-day turnaround on page updates, roughly 25 campaign programs delivered in a recent quarter with only 1 minor scheduling delay, campaign board setup time cut to approximately 2 hours through workflow standardization.
The partnership proves that full-service ownership survives even the biggest transitions.
Marketing partnerships are easy to maintain when nothing changes. This one was tested by exactly the kind of change most vendor relationships don’t survive: a full ownership transition inside an $835 million acquisition, including a live mid-flight migration of the entire LinkedIn ad infrastructure. What kept the partnership intact was full-funnel ownership across paid media, SEO, email automation, design, web, and program management, plus a deliberate focus on documentation and workflow standardization so the work didn’t depend on any single person’s memory.
The results reflect that continuity. LinkedIn K12 impressions are up 270% year over year while CPMs have fallen 71%, Google Ads delivered 2.4 million impressions and a 13.22% blended CTR across a two-year window, and Demandbase ABM efforts reached over 67,000 target accounts. Underneath all of it, the Marketo instance has gone from an unaudited legacy system to a documented, scalable foundation with 12 active nurture programs supporting every Instructure business unit, not just the original Parchment product line.
For any EdTech company navigating growth, an acquisition, or simply a marketing team that’s stretched thin, the lesson from Parchment and Instructure is the same one we’d give any client: the agency that survives organizational change is the one that made itself genuinely useful to the people doing the work, not just the people signing the contract.
