About the company:
Aila Money is on a mission to close the gender wealth gap, by giving every woman a personal trainer for her finances, so she can be comfortable, confident and in control of her money.
Aila helps users achieve their life goals and creates lasting behaviour change, by leveraging behavioural science, hyper-personalised data and AI, as well as human expertise. Aila assists users with budgeting, saving and investing through providing bespoke insights and actionable plans tied to their life-goals, as well as connecting them to a community of others that share the same life goals to support and hold them to account. Unlike other solutions, users also have access to human experts - financial coaches and a network of financial advisors if things are complex.
About the project:
Aila is a start up that offers users a digital financial personal training solution, coupled with human guidance and advice when needed, so that they can unlock their financial potential and achieve their life goals with confidence. The Aila team have a beta version in the market and are keen to start ramping up marketing efforts to demonstrate an effective take to market strategy that can attract paying customers. Doing so is not only a requirement for Aila's growth but also acts a preparation for a future investment round.
So far the beta version has been growing organically and through referrals. It is time to hone in on one or two customer segments and demonstrate that through targeted, (potentially) paid advertising growth is viable.
Company objectives:
The project is a mix between research, consultancy and marketing plan development.
The key objectives are:
- To determine up to 5 sets of well defined target audiences that would find the product useful
- For each target segment to provide some key messaging ideas
- For each target segment to determine where / how to best reach them (channel / timing / media / type of content etc)
The deliverable is a presentation/ report outlining the audiences (who), associated messages (what) and communication channels and supporting material for each. Recommended actions and prioritisation would be desirable
Company Statement:
What do you think the students brought to the business? Were their ideas different from what you could have achieved if you have conducted this project in-house?
Aila Money is an early stage fintech company and the LSE MALP students provided us with capabilities, ideas and inputs that we did not readily have available in the team.
The students brought a rigorous approach and methodology to the problem statement; namely creating target persons for social media and providing recommendations around content.
The results the students were able to achieve by using both quantitative and qualitative research (cluster analysis and interviews) were very insightful and useful and would have stretched the in-house team. It helped us quantify some of our intuitions and provided greater nuance on the options we had. Their impartial perspective was also very useful.
How do you think the Business Projects have helped your business?
As a result of the work done by the students, we have two well defined target audiences and a much more detailed understanding of the pain points, messaging and usage of social media. The research also provided several thematic focus areas for us which now defines our social media content and has allowed us to create a much more structured calendar.
How will you use the outcomes in your business going forward?
We have already begun using the recommendations to shape Aila Money’s social media strategy and marketing content;
- Varying the type of content across different platforms
- Opening another platform that better targets the Aila audience
- Varying the timings of posts to meet users’ needs
If you have a concrete problem that needs solving, then I can only recommend the MALP initiative. The student’s interest and dedication was exemplary.
