Cleeroute x The SquarePeg
Case Study: Building Strategies With AI for Small Business Marketing
About the Client
Cleeroute takes regular YouTube playlists or videos and turns them into organized and interactive curriculums. Students simply put in a link to whichever YouTube video they want to take as a class, and the platform organizes it into a self-paced course with an AI tutor who assigns quizzes, timestamps the lessons, adds visuals, and even generates notes.
All the answers by the AI tutor are also tied to specific points in the original source video, enabling students to go back to the video and verify the information that the AI gave them. Currently, more than 20,000 students worldwide are using Cleeroute to learn everything from academia to professional topics.
The startup is part of a growing list of AI learning tools that aim to disrupt the educational space.
The Challenge
Cleeroute already had a product that students loved; their reviews raved about the magic of converting YouTube videos into courses and declared that the AI assistant worked like an engineer beside them. What Martins, Cleeroute’s founder, did not have, however, was an answer to the much more challenging question of how Cleeroute’s offering differed from Google’s NotebookLM and the other competing AI learning tools.
In short, Martins and his team did not have a competitive positioning, messaging, and market prioritization strategy that would allow them to create the kind of go-to-market plan that would be realistic for a small team on a limited budget. General marketing advice would not help them; they needed research and a strategy built upon that research.
The Solution
CMO on the Go completed a two-part engagement with the startup: conducted a competitive analysis and developed a marketing strategy based on the findings.
First, the team identified Cleeroute’s direct competitors and evaluated them in terms of positioning, strengths, discovery, visibility, and overall messaging. This was not only a feature-based analysis but one that helped Martin see how his product differentiates and can prevail over others and define the competitive position with the clearest value proposition instead of relying on vague assumptions.
Next, CMO on the Go, The SquarePeg’s proprietary AI-powered marketing solution for small businesses, developed the marketing strategy for Cleeroute and laid out recommendations on content marketing, social media, SEO, AEO, positioning, and growth based on the findings from the competitive analysis. The tool also prioritized them according to the resources needed, so that the team would concentrate their efforts on the most impactful ones first.
Results
Cleeroute exited the engagement with a very clear strategic vision as well as an understanding about how it was positioned within the industry. The information CMO on the Go gave them helped them understand their place vis-à-vis the market landscape, and their team now has more confidence in their approach to targeting their end users and explaining their product’s value to them.
Above all else, Martins was impressed by CMO on the Go’s depth and thoroughness, despite the limited budget The SquarePeg team was given to work with.
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Looking for the same clarity for your own startup? CMO on the Go by The SquarePeg delivers competitive intelligence and marketing strategy to get your product into the market fast. There’s no need for the cost, complexity, and risk of a traditional marketing team or agency.
