Mike Phu is the Director of Growth at GOAT where he leads the growth team to execute on all mobile user acquisition and retention strategies. GOAT is the largest sneaker marketplace to buy and sell sneakers. One aspect of Mike’s marketing mix is influencer marketing where focus is placed on influential people—for example athletes and rappers—rather than the target market as a whole. Learn more about Mike from his Mobile Hero profile.
Every mobile marketer uses a range of technologies and services to help them market their apps. We catch up with our Mobile Heroes to learn what’s in their mobile marketing growth stack.
Google Universal App Campaigns (UAC) were launched in mid-2015 as part of Google’s efforts to utilize machine-learning in the advertising product offerings. The objective was for the machine-learning system to analyze, in real time, millions of signals to put your app in front of the best possible users.
IMVU started testing UAC campaigns in early September 2017, a few months before Google officially forced all AdWords mobile app campaigns on Google Search, Display, and YouTube to transition over to UAC. The biggest challenge for us was giving up control and transparency into optimizing our campaigns vs. trusting Google algorithms to do that for us.
In June 2015, MyTona released the mobile game Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery. Seekers Notes is a hugely popular hidden object game with millions of downloads. It’s famous for its carefully designed levels and beautiful artwork. This was the company’s first experience self publishing a mobile game, as well as promoting the game ourselves.
In the last three years we’ve been met with many tasks and questions requiring us to clarify, understand and solve. Today I would like to share with you 9 things that I learned from the Seekers Notes promotion journey.
You went to school for marketing but aren’t artistic enough to make ad creative. You love data and technology, but you don’t write code. Sure, you can settle for a job as a social media specialist or maybe tap into your inner sales manager, but there is another option out there; mobile user acquisition (UA) marketing. For those not familiar with the job title, it’s our fancy phrase for mobile advertising. Also referred to sometimes as performance or growth marketing.
The artists, UI/UX designers, product managers, producers, QA analysts, release managers and engineers have slaved away for the past 6 months to bring the company’s new mobile app to life. The founders and equity holders are excited to see the app in the hands of the masses. The board of directors are anxiously waiting to see the early traction, retention and monetization results. And the investors are wondering what the ROI of their seed round investment is going to bring. What now?
Over a year has passed and the shockwave from the 2016 election is still running its course through the newsrooms and political parties.
Beyond the well-documented Russian campaign to interfere with this process via social ads and content postings, the regular attacks from the Commander-in-Chief against “mainstream media” reporting “fake news” are making it harder for reporters, media executives and news apps to exist.
As a newcomer in the news space, I came onboard at SmartNews with the mindset that our company mission is to “deliver (…) quality information to the people who need it” a strongly inclusive message.
Launching a new app can be a stressful time with many unknowns. You need answers for all the different stakeholders involved (brand, product, c-staff, board of directors) let alone for your own sanity to have the confidence that your actions are correct and will bring the most value to the company.
At launch, the task of managing the flood of Slack one-offs, email update requests, drive-by meetings, and stakeholder presentations can feel like a full-time job if you are not prepared. I could do an entire post on “new app launch stakeholder management,” not because I am some genius, but because I have a lot of experience.
Esther Hwang is the Director of Growth at Poshmark, where she manages mobile marketing campaigns and tests new mobile and web channels. Prior to Poshmark, Esther worked at Zoosk and Adobe Systems, providing great learning grounds to become a top-tier mobile marketer.
Facebook has been a boon for many mobile marketers – it has a treasure trove of data, access to TWO massive channels (Facebook and Instagram), a sophisticated ad editor UI, and of course, immense scale. However, these benefits making Facebook an advertisers’ favorite also invites a lot of competition and expensive CPMs.
Helene Trompeter got her start at Digital Advertising in Atlanta nine years ago.
Helene’s passion for digital shines in her current role as the head of U.S. media at The Weather Company, an IBM Business. She leads paid and organic media promoting the company’s profile of mobile apps and websites, which includes supporting The Weather Channel, Weather Underground and Storm Radar. She’s happy to share her best advice as an app marketer below.
Applying an A/B testing framework is perhaps one of the most frequently discussed items by marketing teams internally. With a seemingly infinite number of combinations of ad copy, creative, and landing pages in the mix, it becomes critical to have a disciplined approach to testing creative using the A/B testing methodology. Here are a few things I learned having tested creatives on paid search, display, app push, and several other channels at scale.
