In a world saturated with video games for children, Smartick is an artificial intelligence based application with a different purpose – to help children 4 to 14 learn math. Using gamification, Smartick helps children master maths, improve their mental agility, concentration, study habits and reading comprehension.
Entering the USA market
As the company began attracting customers from all over the EU with their free 15-day trial period, their next challenge was to enter the US market. However, the inbound strategy that was successful in Europe, did not show the same results in the USA.
Smartick was entering a market dominated by longstanding competitors like Kumon with majority market presence and traditional paper-based learning methods. Smartick had to communicate their differentiator and innovative way of emerging artificial intelligence and education to the right audience to drive sales.
This is when Smartick hired Alto Data Analytics to help form a data-driven strategy to attract qualified leads.
Identifying Influencers
Using our proprietary software, the Alto team data mined information about edtech in English from November 1st to December 31st, 2016. Then our data scientists, conducted a typological analysis to understand the sentiment tied to educational services and tools.
Five major communities appeared with different discourses, each revealing the most associated topics to and shared content about education apps like Smartick.
As communities began to form, our data scientists identified the key influencers driving the conversation about edtech tools and apps. These influencers were considered experts and had highly engaged audiences.
Influencer Marketing
Once Alto identified the key influencers, Smartick was able to formulate a new inbound lead strategy, using influencer marketing as their primary tactic and directly reached out to each influencer to offer the free trial.
Influencers agreed to try the trial and, impressed with Smartick’s service, wrote blogs about how much their children loved Smartick and the positive results they saw in their learning. One influencer we identified, My Little Poppies, with nearly 7K followers on Twitter, said “my kids have fallen in love with Smartick” in her blog.
A powerful and organic buzz started to grow about the Smartick brand within each influencer’s extensive network of followers. The influencer strategy was working. Smartick began to attract leads ready to use their service. The ROI of their campaign resulted in an increase in free trial users of 39% and lead to fives times more sales in just 5 months. The increase in sales was a direct result of the highly qualified leads Alto was able to identify in our analysis.
Using Alto’s big data software to identify and analyze the digital conversation about edtech, which lead to identifying influencers, Smartick was able to implement an inbound lead strategy using influencer marketing that increased brand awareness and attracted qualified leads who are now loyal customers.
Create your own strategy
To view the full analysis or to discover how to use big data analytics to create an influencer marketing campaign please contact media@alto-analytics.com. To learn more about Alto Data Analytics’s articles and ongoing projects, please sign up to our newsletter below.