Engaged.AI is the dominant Instagram analytics platform in Taiwan, empowering businesses to make data-informed decisions and drive revenue through social.
role
product leadership
product design
product marketing
user research
team
gary chen, engineering lead
ball chen, engineer
ben wang, engineer
molly lee, marketing
ryan liao, data scientist
peng-jieh wang, data scientist
problem
Alongside the prevalence of local businesses leveraging Instagram to promote their brands, we saw an increasing need for an Instagram analytics solution that could enable these business owners to make data-informed decisions and drive lucrative results through social.
We wanted to understand why existing solutions were not satisfying the need. Through conversations, data, and research, it became clear that these existing solutions were not suitable by design.
01. Low-to-zero localization
Most of these analytical platforms delivered their service in English, and their social-trend analysis and insights were limited to North America or European regions.
02. Seasoned social marketers only
Existing solutions set out to increase social marketers' productivity when carrying out marketing strategies on Instagram. However, because of the difference in data literacy, these solutions were too complicated for local business owners who are social marketing novices to fathom and leverage.
03. Unfriendly Pricing
Catering to enterprises, existing products mostly had their price point set high; thus made small and medium business owners with less budget challenging to adopt.
Grow Your Business with Data, Effortlessly
We had a single message to drive home: Engaged.AI makes growing your business with data effortless. Our vision for Engaged.AI anchored critical design decisions throughout the entire product lifecycle and molded the product into the data empowerment that drives significant and tangible impacts across businesses regardless of size.
Emphasis on the Mandarin
To fill the lack of Mandarin-based solutions, Engaged.AI has its service – interfaces, customer support, learning community, and data collection – delivered Mandarin-first and makes it easy for users to start harnessing the power of analytics.
Solutions:
- Mandarin-first for interfaces, customer support, and learning community
- Accurate and up-to-date data collection ensured for Mandarin-speaking regions
One of Engaged.AI's most beloved features: Best Time to Post, providing suggestions on users' content schedule to ensure maximum reach and impression.
Performance and Audience Insights Captured
To empower users regardless of their data literacy, Engaged.AI extracts insights into their audiences and performances from much data and visualize them in a constructive yet straightforward form.
Solutions:
- Demographics, geolocations, and engagements insights about one's Instagram audience
- Holistic and in-depth performance measurements to help optimize one's content strategy for business impact
Trends and Intels Uncovered
Engaged.AI helps users unveil competitive insights and emerging trends by tapping into social data of competitors, hashtags, mentions. The essence of these insights and trends are then distilled via AI and statistical models.
Solutions:
- AI-powered hashtags and mentions monitoring to grasp the latest social trends
- Extensive competitor and industry benchmarks to gauge one's performance
- Opportunities and potential brand advocates identified to amplify one's business reach and influence
Engaged.AI's recently-released feature – Industry Benchmark – help users benchmark their performance against industries and grasp latest content trends in industries.
Engaged.AI's current pricing page
Afforable Pricing
Realizing that price is typically the most upfront and most significant barrier for users to adopt an innovative solution, we design Engaged.AI's pricing to make its value proposition affordable.
The platform goes with a freemium pricing model and has premium plans starting from the price half of a Netflix monthly subscription.
Learning Community to Support
Aiming to not only empower businesses but also increase their ability to harness to power of analytics, we establish an online learning community for social marketing and analytics.
Besides exchanging inspirations and creatives with peers, we also provide free courses and online boot camps to facilitate users' growth in these domains.
Witnessing Impacts
Engaged.AI acquired over 3,000 customers within just one-quarter of the product launch in March 2019, with 58% of the early adopters being small businesses.
Currently, Engaged.AI is serving over 15,000 brands ranging from small and medium businesses to enterprises.
Moreover, we continue to hear success stories from local florists, pastry chefs, non-profit organizations, and other small business owners on how they leverage the analytics provided and take on actions that drove lucrative results through social media.
Personal Reflections
This was my first time driving the entire product lifecycle from inception to building, launching, and scaling – a process where I was in charge of managing the product vision, leading product development, steering marketing experiments, and designing the E2E customer experience.
I firmly believe that Engaged.AI's incredible outcome was contributed significantly by the inspiring teamwork and the adherence to the product's mission – how might we democratize data empowerment?
I worked closely with engineers, data scientists, marketers, and customer success; we together ruthlessly prioritize, rigorously develop, and ship to learn. Sometimes we hit the mark, but often time things didn't work out as expected. But it was for these challenges that we were able to grow and thrive as a team. And all of these attempts were to build a product we believed that can meaningfully impact people.
This journey elevated my abilities and perspectives as a designer beyond the level of interfaces and experiences to encompass design at the level of business, strategy, and systems. But most importantly, it was truly fun.