The Opportunity

Pitman Training has been training people since 1870, through a network of franchised centres across the UK and Ireland. Every centre ran its own social channels, its own way. Some had strong in-house marketing. Some had none at all.

The result was a brand that looked and sounded different depending on which page you landed on, and a head office audience that had fallen well behind the competition.

Pitman's brief was clear. Bring the brand back together, grow organic social, and give every centre the tools to do it well, whatever their starting point.

Project
Social Media Strategy & Rollout

Client
Pitman Training

Expertise
Strategy
Brand
Training
Community Management

Activation
Social Audit
Social Brand Playbook
Canva Templates
Network Training
Head Office Channels
Franchise Content


Our Approach

We started by looking at everything. Our audit covered Pitman's head office channels, four competitors and a sample of franchise accounts, so we could see where the brand was holding together and where it was coming apart.

The problem wasn't effort. Centres were posting. It was consistency. A franchise network only works on social when every centre looks like part of the same brand, while still sounding local enough to matter to the people nearby.

So we built the system before we built the content. A social media strategy for head office, a social brand playbook for the whole network, including a set of Canva templates any centre could pick up and use, whether they had a marketing team or not.

The Creative

Our brand audit found that Pitman didn’t have a weak brand. It had a diluted one. The guidelines were strong on print and centre signage but stopped short of social, so every franchise filled the gaps its own way. If every centre looks different, the brand feels smaller than it is.

So we didn’t rebrand. We took what Pitman already owned and made it work on a phone screen.

We adapted the logo so it stays legible at small sizes and fits a circular profile picture, keeping the lettering exactly as it was. The curve became a consistent signature across every template. Headlines follow a simple two-line structure that reads in a glance mid-scroll. Photography moved away from stock clichés towards real staff, students and spaces. And heritage moved from headline to proof, so the creative leads with outcomes and lets nearly two centuries of history back them up.

All of it lives in a social brand playbook, with one rule: every post is made from an approved template. We then took it to the network with live training sessions, so teams could create their own local content in Canva.

Every centre, more than 65 of them, now has the same toolkit: the playbook, the Canva templates, and a regular supply of Pitman Priority posts made by us and ready to share. Whether a centre has a full marketing team or nobody at all, looking like Pitman on social is now a few clicks away.

What We Delivered

Head office went from 33 posts between April and September 2025 to 163 over the same months in 2026. Impressions more than doubled to 88,674, link clicks rose 154% to 4,261, and engagement rate climbed from 6.9% to 7.5%. LinkedIn became the standout channel, hitting an 8.7% engagement rate in September.

Most importantly, social is now sending people to the website. Monthly sessions from organic social rose from an average of 72 before we started to 133 in September, an 85% increase. And those visits are turning into enquiries. Social brought in one enquiry between January and March. In our first three months, April to June, it brought in 24, and it has kept that pace since, with 21 more from July to September. 

In fact, the whole website is converting better. Between April and September, Pitman's overall website conversion rate rose 73%, from 3.42% to 5.93%. Social isn't the only factor, but it's where people go to check Pitman out before they enquire, and it's doing that job better than ever.

  • A full social media audit across head office, competitors and franchise accounts

  • A head office social media strategy, with KPIs tied to business outcomes

  • A social brand playbook for every centre in the network

  • Canva templates so centres can create on-brand content themselves

  • Live training sessions rolling the playbook out across the network

  • Day-to-day management of Pitman’s head office social channels

  • Pitman Priority posts, created centrally and supplied to every franchise to share

  • Monthly reporting against competitors and website performance

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