A b2b SaaS company and leading edtech brand owned by LEGO®. Known for its engaging products for K-3, 3-8, middle school science, and ELL classrooms, reaching 25 million students in 2/3 of US districts annually.
Over the course of five years, I evolved from managing a team of copywriters to building foundational brand and content strategies aligned to our company’s growth and retention goals. I created playbooks that enabled the launch of our inaugural brand campaign (reaching 22.8 million people organically), crafted new brand positioning with our executive team and CEO (it immediately lifted homepage free trials by 44%), and tested and launched new content formats (like an ebook that doubled email collection rates). I also built an integrated content strategy that increased search traffic by 50%, inspired thousands of customer stories, built trusting relationships with current and prospective customers.
BrainPOP’s 25th Anniversary | 360° Brand Campaign
Skills: Creative development, organic social campaign, channel strategy, copywriting,
cross-functional alignment, front-to-end project management
“Moby’s Silver Anniversary” was an inaugural brand campaign celebrating 25 years in edtech, activating all channels across social, blog, email, and search. It was leveraged by sales and success teams to engage with current and prospective customers and featured a first-of-its-kind collaboration between our marketing and animation team.
It all started with a simple April Fool’s prank on Instagram…see what happened here:
Brand storytelling fueled by UGC
Part of our strategy was to also leverage this campaign to generate engaging, user-generated content (over 1,500 teacher stories, to be exact). We used this UGC to fuel our blog and social content strategy for the rest of the year, driving 30k visits to the blog and creating content for social. Bonus: we were also able to provide testimonials for successful sales and renewals conversations, directly supporting revenue goals.
“The Best Part of Learner’s Day” | Brand identity & messaging strategy
Skills: Audience and market research, brand strategy, user testing, creative workshopping,
executive and stakeholder alignment, cross-functional project management
After 25 years on the market, BrainPOP had a strong relationship with teachers and students. But the company’s perception with district leaders and curriculum heads was very different. These decision makers struggled to understand BrainPOP’s product values, and had an outdated perception of BrainPOP’s brand as simply animated movies for young kids.
Our goal was to evolve our brand and product positioning to tell a more cohesive and competitive story. I led a year-long, deeply cross-functional project to conduct persona research, develop new brand positioning, validate it through user testing, and align our entire company and executive leadership around it.
Brand homepage lift
Within a month of launching our new brand positioning on the homepage, we saw a lift in key conversion events including a 14% increase in contact sales clicks and a 44% increase in free trial starts.
Paid social testing
After launching a test of new creative assets against a control group of old creative assets, our new brand positioning and creative increased click-through rates by 37%.
Building a “Trust Generation Engine” | Integrated Content Strategy
Skills: Audience and market research, SEO, full-funnel content strategy, channel strategy
and distribution, content writing, cross-functional alignment, process implementation
I helped build a fully integrated content marketing framework that leveraged blog, social, email, and paid ads to fuel brand reach and increase traffic and search.
In one year on blog, we published 44 articles, drove 350K total visitors, ranked on page 1 and 2 of Google search respectively, and from scratch, established a steady month over month readership baseline of 20K.
Blog strategy
I focused on building content-rich resources filled with downloadable assets, images, and strategic links. We ensured the right keywords were integrated, differentiating our “right to win” with target audiences. This developed an organic trust engine that met our audiences where they were and guided them through our funnel from awareness towards conversion and retention.
In one year, we captured x4 more branded organic keywords, tripled our branded search volume, and strengthened the perception of BrainPOP as the go-to learning brand for educators.
Read samples of blogs I’ve written:
The Story of BrainPOP: A Leader in Building Background Knowledge for All
Reflections from our Day One Employees
Give Active Learning a Boost with Background Knowledge
Building Background Knowledge Can Help Address Your Biggest Classroom Concerns
Teacher Wins and How BrainPOP Came to the Rescue
Teachers Tell All: You Shared Your Proudest Classroom Achievements with Us!
Why Background Knowledge is an Essential Part of Literacy Learning
Engagement and Retention: How BrainPOP Boosts Student Motivation
Organic ebook strategy
After launching an organic ebook strategy designed to target district buyers and curriculum leaders, we doubled email collection rates on our site and increased email click-to-open rates by 5x within two months.
Coming soon:
Strategic blog hubs
Email content
Sales enablement content
Paid content
Jinn Liu 