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Overview
Huzzle is a comprehnesive career companion for the ambitious. The app helps students and people early in their careers connect with jobs, internships and university societies where they can gain meaningful experiences that will help them succeed.
Challenges
Approach
Huzzle raised their pre-seed round from a major European VC in early 2021, and I was recruited as their first non-tech hire to start growing the product using agile growth tactics. Working directly with the founders, I developed a growth marketing strategy comprising:
- Guerilla tactics and organic growth
- Paid media acquisition
- Content & SEO
Value Proposition Development
Over a period of 1.5 years, we used continued testing, and customer listening in order to develop the brand's value proposition and messaging, meeting and connecting with the target audience where they were, and responding to their wants, needs and pains.
This included conducting user interviews and surveys, and by spending time speaking with students on campuses. We attended yearly Freshers Fairs, and spoke with our target audience–listening to their problems, learning about how they had searched for solutions, and what they saw as the main shortcomings of existing solutions to their pains.
Organic Growth
Huzzle solves a real problem for users. University students are often directionless, and woefully ill-prepared for the brutal job market. They also suffer from a lack of vision and clarity, are unsure of where they want to go and what they want to do, and tend to apply to the same roles at companies they might not find interesting just because their friends are doing it.
It was therefore important to get Huzzle in front of students, and meet them where they were. To achieve this, we developed and executed content marketing and guerilla marketing tactics. One successful example was the Huzzle Love Letters campaign, which was picked up by a major publication, leading to PR visibility.
Paid Media Acquisition
As the key marketing person in the team, I was fully responsible for paid media strategy, execution and optimisation, and worked on all aspects of the company's paid acquisition strategy, including:
- Building high-level and detailed campaign strategy including budgeting and creative direction, and presenting to the founders for approval
- Working with development teams on event mapping and tagging solutions (including AppsFlyer) for optimised spend
- Developing the copywriting framework and honing in on value proposition
- Directly designing creatives
- Building experiments that answer key questions including about creative direction and value proposition
- Executing on audience segmentation and targeting strategies
- Analysing results, reporting to stakeholders and adjusting campaigns
Content & SEO
As part of my responsibilities, I also took on the challenge of the business's content. As a jobs platform, Huzzle was bringing together the most relevant job positions for students using a team of content specialists to build a base of up to date entry-level jobs larger than any other platform.
As head of content, I managed this team of 4 people directly, and was responsible for setting and executing strategies to ensure high quality and up-to-date content.
In addition to the day-to-day operation of content curation, I also worked with a cross-functional product and development team to integrade Huzzle into the Google Jobs API, which created massive visibility for the brand in search results, and became one of the strongest drivers of growth in user acquisition.
Product Growth
In addition to working on acquisition, I worked with the cross-functional product team to enhance user onboarding, activation and retention. Diving into the data and analytics of real user engagement, a key focus of my role was extracting trends, finding pain points and drop off points in the product experience, then working with UX designers and product teams to improve the user experience. This included:
- Copywriting changes
- A/B testing variation
- Conversion rate optimisation across the funnel
A central focus was finding the activation moments, and driving users towards their "Aha!" moment. Using product analytics tools such as Heap, I was able to map user journeys, and identify key issues with the UI, working as a product manager to improve and develop the features on an ongoing basis.
Customer Engagement
I also led on the company's customer engagement initiative, using enterprise-grade CEM platforms to create audience segments, build campaigns and journeys as well as trigger-based notifications aimed at maximising customer activation, retention and engagement.
This strategy used three channels: email, push and in-app notifications. By using the existing data and analytics and integrating into CEM platforms, I was able to fine-tune customer segmentation and create distinct user groups and campaigns built specifically for each user group.
Trigger-based emails and notifications also nudged users to re-engage with the app, learn about what they can do with it, and achieve their personal and career development goals.
Results
Working closely with the founding team, I was able to scale the app's users to more than 50,000, starting essentially from less than 1,000. This rapid growth in a short period of time gave Huzzle the ability to raise additional funding, scale the business more quickly and expand to the US, as well as focus on the B2B side of the marketplace, with a focus on monetisation.
In addition to growing user acquisition, I was able to drive additional results such as:
- Additional funding round of £1.5m raised
- SEO strategy generating 2,000 clicks per day
- Month 3 retention increased by more than 200% (from an already high base)
