Helping merchants grow beyond brick-and-mortar with powerful marketing
2021 - 2023
Marketing Manager
I had the privilege to build a self-serve marketing tool from ground up. Our goal was to empower Grab merchants to create impactful marketing campaigns that drive sales and enhance customer engagement within the Grab app ecosystem.
My role in this project includes research, product design (ideation to prototyping), and content strategy.
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Goal
Building a comprehensive platform for ad campaign creation and management across all marketing channels and objectives.
Why it matters to the users and businesses
Here is a diagram illustrating how the ads platform will benefit everyone on the Grab’s ecosystem.
💚 More ads created on Grab help consumers discover merchants, driving higher engagement and conversions. This, in turn, empowers merchants to create more engaging ad content on the platform, ultimately leading to increased ad revenue for Grab. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
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How?
Creating a robust, user-friendly marketing tool tailored to meet the needs of every merchant.
The challenge was to design a marketing tool that caters to a diverse range of expertise, from seasoned professionals to beginners. To gain deeper insights into our target audience, we conducted extensive research and usability tests with merchants to understand their marketing needs.
Our research findings revealed significant differences in user preferences:
Highly savvy users prioritize efficiency and convenience, favoring advanced features and complex interfaces that boost productivity. This group typically favors desktop over mobile.
Less experienced users value simplicity and clarity, seeking intuitive interfaces with straightforward language to ensure ease of use over technical complexity. This group tends to rely more on mobile than desktop.
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Ideation
Based on our research, we defined key design principles to align with the business strategy and drive platform adoption:
Mobile-first for Beginners: The Marketing Manager mobile app is designed as the primary tool for less experienced users, offering a simple and intuitive interface.
Empowering savvy users on Desktop: The desktop version caters to more experienced marketers, offering advanced features that prioritize efficiency over simplicity.
Guided experience for new users: Even for advanced users, it's essential to offer a seamless onboarding process and personalized recommendations throughout the campaign funnel to support those new to the tool.
Early explorations
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Other challenges
Building a design system.
While building Marketing Manager, one of the key challenges we faced was the absence of a unified design system. Grab's diverse ecosystems led to various design teams using different approaches, causing inconsistencies across the platform. Although we reused components from other teams, unique scenarios arose that required us to establish our own design principles.
To address this, I collaborated with cross-team designers to document key design patterns and principles, which led to the creation of the merchant design system we use today.
Component structure
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Outcome
A self-serve marketing platform empowering merchants across Southeast Asia to engage customers and drive sales.
After months of dedicated effort, we successfully launched Marketing Manager Beta in April 2023. Within the first 3 months of launch, Marketing Manager has garnered over $60,000 (USD) in ad spend and onboarded more than 10,000 marketing accounts.
