Design Manager with Adventus.io
The organization and its targets
Adventus.io, is a B2B SAAS company, with a mission to help students make confident study decisions through a trusted marketplace that connects institutions to student recruitment companies across the world.
When I joined the organization, their targets were
To get more student recruitment agents to sign up to their SAAS platform
To get more institutions to partner with the platform to serve their student recruitment targets
Use the above two targets to make the student dream of study-abroad hassle free and successful.
The Challenge
To achieve these targets, the organization needed to reach out to a market that at the time had gone through major restructuring and was struggling to get operations back up and running due to the pandemic.
THE SOLUTION
The solution I worked out with management involved us running a brand new awareness campaign establishing Adventus.io as a turnkey solution to get a diverse group of students to the platform as an institution and do the same on the student recruitment side.
I worked with management to highlight the geographies we needed to focus on for student recruitment (South Asia - India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan; South East Asia - Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore) and then reached out to recruiters and account managers in the region to conduct a survey and understand the content we could create for these regions.
This led to our initial awareness campaign consisting primarily of informational and social proof content. I led the efforts with the pre production through to the post production of video content like explainer animations and social proof video. I also helped collect interviews that led to blogs, whitepapers, landing pages. We also held major events and through the efforts of the C-Suite staff, we acquired a brand ambassadorship with the cricketer Ricky Ponting.
For this campaign, I was in-charge of the design management. I helped ideate the deliverables as part of the campaign, and broke each one of the assets required into requisite chunks.
The key to making sure the awareness and future campaigns worked effectively required a major overhaul of the look and feel of the brand. Working with the design and managerial team I helped lock down new design systems for motion, animation, video and statics by organizing design sprints, communicating the results of my research and inviting them to brainstorm with me on the results.
With the new design system in hand, I built schedules for each design project in the campaign (GANTT charts) and assigned them to team members in order of expertise. The schedule took in risks associated with equipment malfunctions, health issues and gave ample time for each designer to be creative with their projects.
I also worked parallelly to help templatize and automate a lot of the content we were creating. The schedules and templates led to a significant reduction in the turnaround times for the design team from 1 week to 1 day. We used Figma libraries and component systems to build templates for UI, Emails, Animations, Flyers and more
One major challenge we did face was being able to make quick reaction content for the sales teams to capitalize on instant acquisitions. For this, I ran a short design sprint and got templates created on google slides and acrobat which are fillable and editable, packaged the fonts and shared it with the global team in a bid for design democratization.
The Results
Thanks to the efforts of me and my team, we generated an over 200% increase in lead generation and a 100% increase in recruiter signups to the platform during the awareness campaign.
Through other campaigns that were run and executed across all stages of the marketing funnel, we managed to retain 80% of the recruitment agent and 100% of the institution partners we signed and continue to increase the signups on both the recruiter and institution side of the business.
Each campaign run included the workflow we followed above and we achieved great succe. ss using data and research to dictate our focus and continue to evolve our design language to stay up to date with market trends.
Our most recent overhaul of the brand’s design language and tone of voice in b2b collateral has led to an increase in email open rates and click through rates by approximately 159% QoQ.
Examples
Social Proof Videos
Ability Education - Case Study
Events
Valued Partner Event - Case Study
Adventus Recruitment Fair - Case Study
Learning Lounge - YouTube
