Appen
Let's break it down. Appen isn't just another name in the industry; it has been THE name that's spearheading the global AI revolution with unmatched data quality. You've probably heard the buzz around AI, especially with game-changers like ChatGPT and Generative AI. Believe the hype—it's all real.
What Was Done
The Project: Revitalize a brand shifting models and growing marketplace competition
The Challenge: A brand sitting among industry leaders, but seen as an aging brand with new competitors growing and nipping at its heels.
The Solution : See below
Modernizing the Brand
When evaluating our competition, it became evident that there was an opportunity to enhance our design elements. Our focus landed on amplifying Appen's growth potential in the marketplace, both as a crowd work opportunity (think gig workers) and, an enterprise solution for AI-driven businesses.
To streamline this process, I hired and collaborated with a highly skilled creative director and designer duo from the beauty industry with whom I had previously worked. They infused vitality into our marketing assets, contributing to the noteworthy 10% overall enterprise growth in 2022, as highlighted during Tech Day 2023.
These revitalized assets played a significant role in supporting our:
- Brand Style Guide
- Business Cards
- Presentation Decks
- Event Assets, including backwalls, videos, sell sheets, and swag
- Sales Enablement Assets, such as one-pagers and case studies, infographics and white papers
- Digital Content, such as our blog, webinars and demos
- Demand Generation Assets, spanning social media pages, landing pages, emails, and display ads.
An Updated Website
Leding Appen's Marketing team, We spearheded the strategic revamp of Appen's website with the goal of significantly boosting the number of high-quality enterprise leads captured and the number of and capability of the overall requests for crowd work.
My initial assessment pinpointed the site's failure to immediately capture the attention of our target audience with a compelling message, a critical oversight given the tight schedules and myriad of priorities of the targeted audience.
Recognizing the need to engage visitors within the first 5 seconds, I championed a design overhaul that prioritized clean, user-friendly interfaces, clear content, and cohesive storytelling.
The revamped website immediately communicated, above the fold, the benefits offered, and the brands that trusted Appen to do it. This marked a pivotal shift in the client engagement strategy and the successful model has been replicated across our market-specific sites including:
Improved Lead Generation
In addressing the inefficiencies of our previous lead generation model, which often resulted in 'dirty' data collection, we refined the client/customer journeys on our website and enhanced both the placements an promotions of the sales and work enablement assets.
A prime example of this approach is the
Appen State of AI and Machine Learning Report , a standout thought leadership piece in its eighth year. Recognizing its influence and the emergence of similar reports from competitors and analysts like McKinsey & Company, we innovated further.
Under my direction, we introduced an early access tease to the 2022 State of AI report and developed a digital, interactive landing page for its release. We also provided supplements after launch targeting specific industries like the State of AI in Automotive.
The results of these efforts led to the report exceeding our MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) goal by over 800% and attracting high-value MQLs previously unseen.
This initiative was part of a broader strategy that also involved improved SEO, webinars, whitepapers, one-sheets, and other assets to drive conversions.
