Big wins, when creative leads
Chegg Small Steps, Big Wins Campaign
With the product in flux, and potential subscribers increasingly turning to free AI tools for homework help, 2024 was a time when the company needed to reinforce its ability to not just help students find the solution, but to connect with them on an emotional level and develop brand trust.
Having just completed a massive expansion of our brand guidelines, the creative team took the opportunity to step up to the plate in a bigger way than ever. In collaboration with creative and cross-functional partners, I was a key player in initiating the company’s first creatively-integrated 360 marketing campaign in many years. Bolstered by our new persona and mode frameworks, we took a bold new approach especially to top of funnel assets, leaning heavily into humor and addressing student challenges in specific, connective, emotion-forward ways.
Say hello to a 304% increase in conversions
The results of this campaign were unprecedented. Our work achieved significant increases in conversion and click-through rates across most channels, including a whopping 304% increase in conversion rates via YouTube compared to the previous year.
The campaign was also lauded by our CEO as “the clearest articulation of a campaign in 10 years.” But the best part by far was the creative satisfaction experienced by the entire creative team. It was incredibly rewarding to see this satisfaction align with results.
My role: Creative strategist & lead copywriter
As both a campaign and copy lead, I spearheaded cross-functional negotiations to achieve buy-in for the campaign, led foundational creative concepting, guided the team to expand thinking via the new brand framework, and led and wrote for individual assets.
A journey from awareness to conversion. Let’s go.
DIGITAL OUT-OF-HOME ADS
Results: Students enjoyed seeing these on-campus ads as much as we enjoyed making them.
54% ad recall (way above the 38% average)
9/10 success in brand likeability (key metric)
Our finals out-of-home ads performed even better.
59% ad recall
26% lift in purchase consideration
PAID SOCIAL
Snapchat
Results:
+10% conversion rate
+16% click-through rate
The “wormhole” ad was momentous in finally outperforming a prior ad’s two-year stronghold.
YouTube
Results: Since last year…
+91% more views
+73% click-through rate
+304% conversion rate
Massive success! The creative team’s push to carve out a specific creative strategy for very upper funnel YouTube assets allowed our partners to diversify to a two-prong YT strategy with exceptional results.
Results: +23% conversion rate (the cat crushed it most)
Meta
Results: +62% conversion rate
Display
Results: Since last year…
+73% conversion rate
+39% click-through rate
Considering the fact that marketing had struggled to move the needle in the display channel for years, these results are a big deal and point directly to the value of the creative team’s taking a leadership role in the campaign planning process and the success of our expanded brand guidelines.
LANDING PAGES
Results: +31% click-through rate
Non-subscriber browse abandon
Results: Way above benchmark:
+19% stat-sig lift in conversion rate
+11% stat-sig lift in click-through rate
Subscriber winback email campaign
Results: Um, awesome?
+43% stat sig lift in conversion rate
How “big wins” became a big win
The key factors identified as having driven this campaign’s success related directly to our recent brand work:
Investing in generating very upper-funnel awareness & creatively focusing on audience emotional state and mindset rather than product education at this point
Framing product value drivers very specifically through the lens of the student in the moment we are connecting with them
Cross-channel creative consistency that improved brand recall