Newport Academy

Founded in 2008, Newport Academy dedicated to empowering teens and restoring families by providing the country’s most comprehensive therapeutic, experiential and academic treatment to heal adolescents and their families suffering from mental health and co-occurring substance use disorders. In 2015 Newport was just a regional facility located in Southern California on the cusp of an East Coast expansion into the New York tri-state region. Taking over the reins from another healthcare marketing agency, neta was retained with one simple objective to help Newport alleviate the stigma surrounding teen mental health disorders.

Pioneering the application of testimonials by featuring faces and telling the stories of teens and their families, neta brought to light an incredibly personal digital presence that became the industry gold standard.

To create Newportacademy.com, we distilled the essence of the organization down to its core elements, a visionary founder, expansive campuses and an integrated therapeutic approach to personalized healing. We tailored a digital design system to the overall brand look and feel, including the evolution of its school crest, into the now iconic Newport Academy logo inspiring layouts and typography selections within its holistic expression. Elegant motion design and original scenic video footage align to create tranquil transitions that mirror one’s arrival at a Newport Academy location.

As Newport expanded its reach across the country, its digital and content teams grew. The challenge was keeping consistent design across all touchpoints. We worked with Newport to build a refreshed design system as a WordPress CMS-friendly component library for global button styles, iconography and CTAs, while optimizing user interaction patterns and motion libraries, resulting in a +170% increase in mobile site speed. Components strategically added and removed over time created a flexible design system treating the CMS as a product that will never stop evolving, while simultaneously maintaining universal brand alignment.

ushered in the dismantling of a tremendous challenge facing the mental health industry. Fostering admirability for seeking help while honoring the desire for anonymity, our strategy to extend Newport’s mission was capturing genuine firsthand stories from the leadership. They opened up about personal struggles that resulted in their commitment to providing the highest quality care in the country. Featuring the son and father team who founded Newport Academy led to a deep understanding of the definition of “What is Newport Academy.” Inviting Newport to lead by example and put faces to traditionally closeted stories giving humanity, vulnerability and hope to one of the most challenging moments a family can encounter.

Once Newportacademy.com was a living, breathing platform connecting treatment teams with parents and clinicians, neta carved out various funnels from Google and search, social channels and referents from Newport Academy press. The collaboration created the #1 newsletter in the teen treatment industry. Dependent on user location, neta’s analyst and content teams conducted comprehensive performance reporting, which guided UX quick wins, SEO opportunities and CTA optimizations for the user’s digital journey. Our comprehensive approach to data-driven design optimization led to deeper page engagement facilitating more connections between individuals and care through a fluid user experience.

A rapidly growing Newport engaged neta to define and deliver the digital vision for its corporate umbrella site, Newport Healthcare and its burgeoning young adult program, Newport Institute.

Suddenly the COVID-19 crisis hit in 2020 and as the core publishing arm for NewportAcademy.com, neta fortified the vital role Newport has played in national awareness of the teen mental health crisis during a national healthcare pandemic. More than one billion media impressions were achieved and maximized through an integrated content strategy catapulting Newportacademy.com’s Domain Authority while fostering content that served the families struggling to function in unprecedented times.

As Newport Academy’s business development team continued to ramp up in-house so did its data definitions from top-level page events to enterprise-level Salesforce and other key marketing software API integrations. Platform architecture allowed the neta and Newport teams to strengthen respective areas of execution and align over-arching digital and KPI objectives of success.

In the world of Google, with its ever-shifting algorithm of mobile site speed to responsiveness to Google core updates, there were three major updates over the lifetime of the newportacademy.com site architecture. Our front-end developers collaborated with our SEO team to maximize existing infrastructure and promote the evolution of CMS-enabled templates.

As Newport broadened its reach to city centers and all regions of the United States, its content structure and off-page tactics needed to enter new markets to hit collective KPI goals. To reach its target audiences most effectively, neta collaborated by providing national oversite and kickstarting a regionalized approach to maximizing marketing efforts, converting local facility programmatic marketing to in-house operations to include Google SEM, Google’s display network, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube campaigns.

We helped educate the Newport team on the CMS and new brand guidelines and provided training as each content vertical was transitioned in house. We introduced and deployed best practices to accommodate efficiency and stability.

A single project to provide a future vision definition for digital transformation grew into multiple tracks of work, helping Newport Academy achieve sustainable growth.