This interview is with Eric Olsen, Chief Marketing Officer, Fusion Academy.
To kick us off for Connectively readers, can you introduce yourself—your role as Chief Marketing Officer in education management—and the kind of accredited, personalized-learning schools you support?
I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Fusion Academy, the national leader in one-to-one personalized education. We primarily serve students with learning, social, or emotional differences at our 80+ personalized schools across the U.S.
I have spent 15 years in education, running marketing teams in higher education, EdTech, and K–12 education.
What’s the story behind how you came to lead marketing in education management with a focus on personalized learning?
Academic research is clear that one-to-one time between a teacher and a student is the single biggest difference-maker when it comes to student outcomes.
Not only is Fusion Academy the only school that designs its whole school day around one-to-one time, but it is also impacting students who have been historically underserved in traditional school environments.
Your Learning Differently podcast unexpectedly became a B2B growth engine; if you relaunched it today, what would you change to deepen both student engagement and clinician referrals?
There is no trade-off: parents want to understand their childrens learning differences, and clinicians want to learn how to better serve families with learning differences. The content serves both audiences without compromise.
You’ve shifted to an organic-to-paid social pipeline; what’s your process for identifying organic winners and adapting them for paid while staying sensitive to families and students?
We test all our creative on our organic channels first. When a piece of content proves itself in the organic algorithms, we know it will work in paid as well.
So before our ads get in front of families, we know they are already winners.
Operating across many campuses, what incrementality method—such as marketing mix modeling or geographic holdouts—has most improved your channel decisions at the campus level?
We use marketing mix modeling and geographic holdouts to understand channel incrementality at the national level, which informs media decisions across all 80+ campuses.
This helps us determine which marketing channels are truly incremental versus simply taking credit for demand that would have occurred anyway.
You’ve said the best AEO strategy is still SEO; what is your content playbook for earning both search rankings and AI answer inclusion on topics like learning differences and accreditation?
That content strategy is the playbook. We’re focused on answering the real questions parents have about learning differences and alternative education options.
We create original, research-backed content on topics like ADHD, dyslexia, processing disorders, and more. It ranks because it’s actually useful and authoritative, not because we’re optimizing for search.
When that content ranks well in Google, it naturally gets cited in AI answers.
Drawing on your interest in behavioral economics and books like Outliers, what insight about how parents make decisions has most changed your messaging for personalized learning?
Switching schools is a big decision. The struggle has to be significant, and the promise must feel substantial enough to make it worth the switch.
That understanding has changed how I think about messaging. We’re not marketing a “better” school. We’re speaking to parents whose current situation isn’t working. They’ve tried other things. They’re looking for proof that an alternative actually exists.
So our messaging focuses on two things:
- Validating the struggle.
- Showing the hope and proof of what’s possible when school is designed around your student.
Looking 12–18 months ahead, which market trend do you think will most impact accredited, personalized schools, and why?
School choice is expanding dramatically. Policy changes, funding shifts, and new models are emerging faster than ever. AI promises to change everything, but technology in education has yet to prove itself the panacea for student outcomes.
The schools that win in the next 18 months will be the ones with the clearest brand promise and the strongest proof.
What single 90-day experiment would you recommend CMOs at accredited schools run right now to increase student engagement and qualified inquiries?
You need to be testing ten times the creative you’re currently running. Play around with a ton of formats. Draw outside the lines. Break a couple of your own brand-police rules.
Watch what wins organically. Move the winners to paid. You’ll have completely different winners at the top of your paid leaderboard.