Friday Brain Building Club education marketing case study

Local PR | Social Media | Paid Media | Blogging

Weekly fuel for curious thinkers - a screen-free activity sheet helping children build thinking skills, one Friday at a time

Friday Brain Building Club is a weekly subscription service delivering a single, carefully designed activity sheet to children aged 7–11. Each sheet mixes numeracy, literacy and problem-solving challenges, designed to be printed out and solved by hand, away from a screen.

The sheet is emailed out weekly, with children completing it at their own pace across the week rather than in one sitting. The brand was founded by Joey, a Cambridge alumna with an MA in Education and over 15 years' experience in the UK education sector, who built the sheets around a simple idea: learning that fits into family life, without homework, apps or screen-time battles.

This was a brand-new launch. When I began working with Friday Brain Building Club, the brand had no marketing, no social presence, and no brand awareness whatsoever — all that existed was a single-page website. Everything else had to be built from a standing start.

The challenge

Friday Brain Building Club needed to go from a one-page website with zero digital presence to a functioning, trusted subscription brand: there were no social accounts, no paid traffic, no press coverage, and no audience of parents who knew it existed. For a brand-new, subscription-based product aimed at parents, this represented a particular kind of challenge, as parents need to trust a brand before they'll subscribe, and that trust had to be built from nothing, across several channels, at the same time.

The opportunity was strong: a genuinely different, evidence-informed product in a category most parents associate with generic worksheets or screen-based apps, launched by a founder with real education credibility. It simply needed a proper launch.

"I can’t recommend Joanna highly enough. She has been absolutely brilliant in helping me launch Friday Brain Building Club from scratch and has felt like a genuine extension of the business from day one. From building our social presence and running paid campaigns to securing fantastic local press coverage and our partnership with Bath Children’s Literature Festival, Joanna has helped give a completely new brand real visibility and credibility incredibly quickly."

Joey James, founder Friday Brain Building Club

The strategy

My brief was to build Friday Brain Building Club's entire digital presence and launch it into its target market of parents of 7–11 year-olds, across three channels working together: social media, paid media, and PR.

Joey's preference was to soft-launch locally first, in Bath and the surrounding area, rather than go national from day one, enabling testing of the brand, the messaging and the product with a smaller, more manageable audience before scaling wider. This shaped the PR strategy in particular, with coverage and partnerships targeted at local and regional titles and a local audience, rather than a national press push.

To do this, I:

• Set up and launched the brand's social media presence from scratch, including Instagram and Facebook

• Designed on-brand graphics and reels to introduce the product and bring the weekly activity sheet to life

• Ran a paid media campaign focused on building keyword intelligence — identifying which search terms were actually driving qualified traffic, so future spend could be targeted with real data rather than guesswork

• Led a local PR launch to secure coverage across major local titles and build early domain authority and brand awareness

• Secured a partnership with Bath Children's Literature Festival, giving the brand direct access to a highly targeted audience of parents while building trust through association with a respected, established festival

• Helped kick-start the brand's blog, giving it a long-term content and SEO foundation to build on beyond the launch

Social media

Because the brand was starting from zero, the first job was building the social foundations: setting up Instagram and Facebook, developing a visual identity for posts and reels, and creating a steady stream of graphics and reels that showed parents exactly what their child would receive each Friday.

The aim was to make the product tangible before a single sheet had landed in anyone's inbox — showing the puzzles, the "word of the week", the crossword, and the moments of a child working through a sheet at the kitchen table.

Paid media

Alongside social, I ran a paid media campaign built specifically to generate keyword intelligence for a brand with no prior search data. Rather than launching a "spend and hope" campaign, the goal was to find out which search terms parents were actually using to look for a product like this — laying the groundwork for a more efficient, better-targeted paid and SEO strategy going forward.

PR and press coverage

I led a local PR launch for Friday Brain Building Club, in line with Joey's preference for a Bath-focused soft launch, securing coverage across major local titles and, critically, a partnership with Bath Children's Literature Festival — giving the brand a genuinely targeted audience of parents already engaged with children's education and reading, alongside the trust that comes from association with an established festival.

PR outcomes included:

• Coverage in the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald, reaching a wide regional audience

• Coverage in The Bath & Wiltshire Parent, reaching parents directly in the brand's core audience

• An online news article and social media collaboration with Total Guide to Bath

• A partnership with Bath Children's Literature Festival, including a sample activity sheet placed in 500+ goodie bags at the event's opening night, reaching a highly targeted audience of parents, alongside a wider collaboration that positioned the brand alongside a trusted, established children's literature event

• Coverage secured in The Bath Magazine, including a print article, online news story and newsletter placement, reaching an audience of 15,000+ a month in print, plus its newsletter subscribers.

Blogging

To give Friday Brain Building Club a foundation for organic growth beyond the initial launch, I helped kick-start the brand's blog, creating a content platform where parents can find tips, tricks and thinking behind the weekly sheets, while building long-term SEO value for the site.

Recommendations for the next phase

Friday Brain Building Club currently runs as a single-page site, which served the launch well but limits how much of this early momentum can be captured long-term. As part of my ongoing work with the brand, I've recommended building out the website into a fuller site structure — dedicated pages to support ongoing SEO, giving the Friday Brain Building Club real foundations to compound on.

Need help launching your brand's digital presence? I specialise in supporting small to medium-sized founder-led lifestyle brands. Contact me to learn more.