Continuous improvement through experimentation — Meet Anjela Geerlings, Senior Online Marketing Manager
Today, we’d like you to meet Anjela, originally from the Netherlands, she has done quite a tour around the world before relocating to Barcelona last year. We asked her about the most challenging part of her role, team’s ambitions for 2022, and how she would describe her time at Preply so far. Find out what she said and much more in our interview below!
🟢 What do you do at Preply? What’s the scope of your role?
I am a Senior Online Marketing Manager with the Paid Marketing Squad at Preply. We mainly focus on managing and finding new tactics to advertise Preply to new users. As for my personal scope of work, I mainly focus on driving people to the app through paid marketing initiatives. Besides that I also help execute the Brand team with their branding initiatives through video advertising.
🟢 What do you enjoy the most about your job?
What I love about my job is that I work in the Paid Marketing Squad but I get to interact every day also with the App Activation Squad. Together with the senior product manager, engineers, and developers we’re working towards constantly improving the app experience. Preply is very focused on constantly running experiments, which means we get to see the impact of our ideas and hypotheses on a daily basis. This gives me the feeling that we’re improving the app round the clock from a marketing, product, design, data, research and development perspective.
🟢 What has been your career journey before joining Preply?
Before joining Preply and relocating to Barcelona, I lived in Berlin for 10 years. I’m originally from Rotterdam, the Netherlands and did my studies in International Business that allowed me to live in Munich, Vienna and Paris for some time. After that, I moved to Berlin for an internship in Online Marketing. My initial plan was to stay for 6 months but I ended up loving the city and the company so I actually stayed for 3 years.
After that, I made the decision to join foodpanda (red. Delivery Hero) as a Display Manager and stayed here for a while — 7 years — and left after heading up the Display Marketing team for a few years. Next, I freelanced for a bit but felt that I was missing the enthusiasm and drive that comes from actually being in a company and working towards goals together as a team.
🟢 What motivated you to join Preply?
After having worked in a few companies that grew into very big ones, I wanted to experience the thrill of being part of the earlier stage again. The part where you can still make a visible impact on the direction and processes, where teams are still close together. Of course, that also comes with the task of having to do more ground work but that is expected and understandable.
Above all, I love Preply’s product — language learning really empowers people, presents them new opportunities and helps them to connect with others. In addition, moving for a new job in a new country makes me also a perfect Preply customer to learn a new language.
🟢 What has been your biggest challenge you’ve experienced so far?
The mobile marketing landscape changed a lot last year with Apple and Facebook changing the way we track the outcome of advertising. The landscape will change even further this and next year when Google will also focus more on privacy. If we can’t track like we used to, then how can we show that we are making an impact by running paid advertising? Previously, we primarily focused our efforts on the website only, meaning that we also have little historical data for our app to compare impact. Obviously, there are still ways but it’s just not as straight-forward as it used to be, so we need to find new strategies.
🟢 And what has been your proudest moment at Preply?
It’s probably this quarter! In Q2 2022, we are seeing some of the hard work from previous quarters paying off and this makes me really proud. We had some insightful user interviews that led us to thinking how we can make ads better. Our teams are also improving our analytics and tracking, exploring users in different (previously non-focus) markets, running many experiments, seeing numbers improve and working better together as a team. So lots of things to be excited and proud about!
🟢 Tell us a bit about your ambitions for this year for yourself and your team?
Soon we will start the planning for the next quarter and our roadmap for the second half of 2022. We definitely want to continuously increase the share of app users for Preply and I would like us to try out different initiatives across marketing partners with a focus on short-form videos. The next few quarters the focus will be on seeing incremental growth of each performance marketing channel by running tests thanks to enormous collaboration between paid marketing and data teams.
🟢 How would you describe your experience at Preply in one sentence?
A challenge where I am given the opportunity to constantly learn.
🟢 What do you like to do in your free time?
I like to believe that I’m a true city girl and my inner Dutch wants to cycle everywhere. Usually, I like to wake up early, cycle somewhere I don’t know to watch the city as it wakes up while sitting down for a coffee, reading a book and just enjoying being in the moment. I also go through phases of being into street photography and in particular architecture. Growing up, my parents always told me to look up, and there have been so many beautiful things to see in my daily city life and all travels.
Another favorite hobby of mine, even though it’s not so city-like, is sailing! Of course, moving to Barcelona made me closer to the sea so I’ve already gone sailing a couple times this year and I absolutely love the feeling.
🟢 Lastly, in the spirit of our continuous learning mindset at Preply — What are you learning right now?
Spanish! During the first 2 years living in Berlin, I did not make any effort to really improve my German beyond my high school level but I also didn’t think I was going to stay that long and could just get by with some basics. So I wanted to do better this time because who knows, maybe I will end up living here for 10 years or longer!
We hoped you enjoyed meeting Anjela and finding out more about another of our fantastic Preplers working behind the product. If this story resonated with you and you’d like to be part of a team that values data-driven experimentation and learning through solving challenges and innovating — then Preply might be the right place for you. Check out our open vacancies to spot a perfect role for you!
