Positioning on-demand contracts training for a corporate audience

Company: Praktio, Legal EdTech Startup
Stage: Customer-funded
Responsibilities: Customer and competitor research, product positioning and messaging, website redesign, website copy

Background
Praktio wanted to develop their corporate training products into a bigger part of the business, alongside their primary market within large law firms.

Up to this point, they knew the product was solving a problem around training non-legal roles within a given organization but didn't have a clear picture of the buyer or a consistent understanding of the way they were describing the problem at hand.

Research
To properly position Praktio's corporate training in the market, we needed to better understand the customer and competitors in the space. I conducted in-depth competitor research, mapping out similar companies and products as well as analyzing their messaging and marketing materials. In addition, I held conversations with existing and potential corporate customers about their internal processes around contracts training and their use case for the product. I then synthesized those learnings into a positioning framework that served as the foundation for subsequent messaging and marketing efforts.

Testing audience and messaging
After creating the first version of our messaging strategy, I wanted a way to test if it would resonate with one of the newly identified end users: contract managers. I also wanted to see if there were any commonalities in the industry or company size for our target customer since our experience thus far showed a wide variety in both.

In order to learn and iterate as quickly as possible, I ran a tight ad test on LinkedIn, targeting junior to mid-level contract management roles. I advertised the flagship product, an on-demand commercial contracting course, and sent traffic to a landing page I created specifically to promote the course.

Throughout the test, I ran various combinations of creative and copy, targeted at different segments of our target audience. We immediately saw engagement with a number of our messages, coming primarily from those who classified their role as operations or legal. We also saw strong engagement from a number of core industries.

Adjustments based on learnings
Based on learnings, I made minor adjustments to our messaging, target industries, and subsequent plans. For example, our ads seemed to resonate within the governmental administration industry, which is not a fit for this product. This signaled a need to add more clarification around the details of the product. It was also clear that industries involving physical products seemed most engaged, which I incorporated into the profile of our target audience.