New Course Hero users have the option to pay for access, or, if they don’t want to pay, they can contribute content they created, such as study guides, lecture notes, etc. To do this, we have been working to build the biggest and best digital library of course-specific educational content and effective tools to help facilitate the mastery of a course.įrom the very beginning, the strategy has been to leverage the power of the community. How has this business model affected your content and marketing strategy?ĪN: Our vision is to help any student and any educator ask and answer any question in any course. Our marketing department is rapidly growing, but in addition to our community and partnerships teams, we are scaling five other teams that include content marketing, digital media, product marketing, brand marketing, and PR/communications.Ĭ5: Course Hero is a really unique brand because, in a way, the content is the product-and the bulk of the content is created by your community. Build the love: C reate awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, and repeat usage of the product through efficient highly targeted marketing campaigns.Connect the magic: Translate user research from feedback groups into actionable insights that can lead to future product development.Know the user: U nderstand the user, know their needs and wants, and conduct research to provide meaningful user insights to the product teams.We also work with our content marketing team to amplify our biggest advocates’ success stories.Īs it relates to partnerships, I help lead the research, identification, and collaboration with many different types of partners that range from universities to large brands.Ĭ5: What are your overarching goals as a marketing team? How is your marketing team structured?ĪN: We break our marketing team’s mission into three parts: Using their feedback, we’re able to collaborate closely with the product team and deliver actionable insights to continually improve our platform. One of the things that makes the community team unique is that we engage with our users every single day. For example, in 2016 we executed 1,200+ local events to help build brand awareness at universities across the United States and Canada. It has been fun to see the impact the community team has had in cultivating relationships with on-campus ambassadors for the Course Hero brand. We also manage Course Hero’s social media channels to promote campus events and solicit feedback from students to see what pain points they’re encountering in their studies.

We focus on everything from conducting user testing and piloting on-campus initiatives to awarding scholarships and interviewing students whose academic performance has been positively impacted by Course Hero. That being said, I work on the overall strategy for our internal team of community marketing managers. We caught up with Nesbit to chat about the power of leveraging a user-generated content (UGC) business model and building a community of students and educators both online and on campus.Ĭ5: Can you give an overview of your role/responsibilities at Course Hero? Or, in layperson’s terms, “What would you say you do around here?”ĪN: My favorite thing about my role is that every day is different. Nesbit drew from his experience in the venture capital industry to help scale the company’s explosive growth and to oversee several of the company’s large-scale initiatives-from creating Course Hero’s proprietary content department (check out their literature study guides and infographics ) to leading and expanding the community and partnership teams. The online platform, which started on CEO Andrew Grauer’s flash drive in 2006, has now become a thriving community of students and educators collaborating and uploading thousands of educational resources every day. Today, Nesbit-who now serves as Course Hero’s Vice President of Community and Partnerships-has seen the company more than quadruple its staff to support the growing needs of its 10 million+ members. When Andrew Nesbit joined the Course Hero team as a product manager in 2014, he was employee #38 to come aboard the burgeoning ed-tech startup in Silicon Valley.

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