Irshad Daftari

As a marketing team, we had a huge audience and needed to optimize our marketing efforts.

I led a cross-functional team of marketing managers, data analysts, and data engineers. We began by creating a data lake and seamlessly piping all data into a single Google Cloud container. From there, we built a stack using different technologies, ran complex ML algorithms, and determined factors for each user, such as lifetime value, revenue, and churn. Finally, based on the predicted lifetime value, we created 30+ segments and exported them to activation platforms, including Meta, Google Ads, and Salesforce.

The top segments provided us an ROI lift of 5-6x across a single campaign, which is a return of $5 on every $1 spent.

I led a cross-functional team that included digital marketers, content marketers, and data analysts to launch ApplyBoard into a new market.

The overall campaign lasted four weeks after the launch, with lead-generation activities after the awareness phase. The prospecting phase for the leads was at least 3-4 weeks, with several different channels and touchpoints, including paid and organic social, blogs, landing pages, social media, webinars, and white papers, to ensure that all MQLs eventually became SQLs before sales onboarded them.

In three months, the blended CAC for an MQL dropped from $100 to $50. The revenue pipeline generated post-launch from Nigeria alone was the third highest after being outside the top 10 contributing regions.

ApplyBoard is a B2B SaaS solution for higher education, connecting students to the right school.

I led ApplyBoard’s digital marketing team. Keyword analysis showed we had 600+ keywords ranking on page one for Google Search. We optimized 10,000+ pages, fixed major issues on the search console for mobile optimization, cleaned up the URLs, and undertook a major backlinking process to get more inquiries and MQLs. Besides this, we also used search console data to understand what users were searching for and not finding on our site—shaping our content strategy based on keywords we could rank for.

We generated several MQLs monthly, and the overall page view count was consistently higher than 3 million monthly.

INTO Study is an education services company that provides students pathways to academic programs in the US, UK, and Australia.

Student acquisition was a long-drawn-out process, with several different channels used and no clear insight into the optimal funnels.

With help from the data science team and over 100 customer interviews, I worked with the growth team to reorient the funnel and specific journeys. For instance, we moved away from doing paid acquisition and awareness and drove prospects to webinars, events, and brochures. Immediately, lower funnel conversions improved, and we could reduce and optimize channels.

Overall, the team was able to focus on just 1-2 large campaigns at a time rather than having a scatter gun approach to acquisition.

Snippet is a learning app with a freemium model. After undertaking extensive customer interviews on how they’d like to learn and the benefits from this, I formulated a marketing strategy and channel mix. Targeted at audiences in their late 20s and early 30s, we narrowed down on a value proposition of “be the smartest person in the room.”

This formed the crux of the GTM strategy, which involved paid and organic channels, email marketing, and push notifications. Using variations of this key message, the CAC reduced by over 90% over three months, with new customers acquired for under $2.

To understand if The Morning Context had a product-market fit, we knew it was important to learn audience attributes—who the audience was and whether they would pay us money for a news subscription product.

Using email triggers based on web and app behaviors, we built automated funnels for users who were “most likely” and “less likely” to convert. These funnels had built-in offers and different positioning messages.

Without spending any money, we converted 400+ users in the first month. Over five years, this became 20,000 subscribers by testing and iterating different value propositions on email and social media.