We had a chat with Riccardo Ferrari, Performance Marketing Team Lead at GoStudent. Find out more about his job role, why he joined the team and what makes working at GoStudent so great.
How long have you been working at GoStudent? What has your experience been like to date?
I started working at GoStudent in May 2021. I joined as a Performance Marketing lead for Italy. Since then, I started working on the Italian market mainly and other markets whenever other resources were needed for them, like the Spanish market, South America, and the Turkish market for a little bit. I also speak Spanish so it was easy to adapt my knowledge to the Spanish-speaking market.
Since January this year (2022), I’ve been promoted to a new position within the Performance Marketing team as a lead team. I’m leading a team of around six people, comprising a few different markets, including Italy and Spain.
Since I joined, the company has been on a super-strong growth trajectory and I’ve grown together with the company. I had the chance to be a driver of the growth of the company. I could see the results of my actions in the daily numbers. I got the chance to learn how to move in a super fast-paced environment.
I learned that it’s a good thing to take ownership of what you want to do. Everyone is very encouraged to take ownership of their projects and actions.
What are your responsibilities at GoStudent?
Basically, our team is leveraging channels such as Facebook and Google in order to buy traffic on our site and convert this traffic into leads. The leads are customers that are interested in having tutoring lessons. Then they are contacted by our sales team to organise a free trial session.
GoStudent is expanding very fast into many markets. The company where I was working before was focused on just four or five markets. At GoStudent there are way more markets to manage, more things to localize, and more cultures to accommodate.
When I joined, the Italian market for example was just a couple of months old. Since I joined, the market has grown around 8-10 times. This is in less than a year. There’s definitely very explosive growth going on.
Can you share some of your experiences when it comes to team growth?
The Performance Marketing team is composed of around 15-20 people. We’ve been trying to hire people from all different backgrounds. We want to make it so that everyone can help each other. We hire people that are all specialized in different fields.
There’s no specialised team, everyone is managing every channel for their own market.
We’ve done this because the education market is very fragmented from country to country.
Another reason is that we work with sales teams. Sales teams need a reference person for their specific market.
We communicate a lot on Slack. I would say every market has its own communication pipeline. The teams they deal with are composed of different people. We work a lot with country managers and they all have different needs.
Can you give us an example of one of your biggest accomplishments at GoStudent?
There are quite a few processes that didn’t exist when I joined the company. These were the first things I implemented when I started and are still widely adopted across the whole marketing department and the whole company. That’s something I took ownership of and this accelerated the progress of everything by about six months. The fact that these processes are still used makes me feel that they were needed and they made sense in the way that I did them.
How do you see yourself developing further?
This year we have a lot of interesting things going on. There are going to be further expansions. I’ve recently been promoted and I’m really happy and curious about learning more in my new role. It’s going to be a big change compared to what I was doing before.
I’m also excited to learn more about other people’s potential. I’m really keen on driving the innovation of the marketing team. I’m a SciFi and History fan so I’m into innovative things. I want to help take the marketing team to the next level.
I don’t want my team to consider me as their boss, more like a mentor. I’m still finding my way in my new role but I’m very willing to learn and figure out my best approach.
As we continue to grow and conquer the world of tutoring, we are looking for bold, creative & passionate individuals to join our team and build the no.1 global school with us. Check out our current vacancies here.
