See the video transcript below:
What is the most important question you should be asking your app marketing company?
You can tell a lot by the style of business based on the kind of initial questions that they pose for a vendor, particularly for anyone looking for campaign management or app growth general support. Based on some of these discussions we’ve actually built out a pretty good framework for what we think app success is. A question catered around the foundation of that is probably a good place to start for businesses; that question is how do you push towards sustainable growth. Additionally, what are the activities you should be focusing on to promote a long-term vision?
The foundations of app marketing: The top areas to ask your app marketing company about
The app marketplace is already very saturated. There’s so much competition and we’ve seen a boost in mobile activity in pretty much every vertical, quite astronomical actually with lockdown. Engagement and conversion on mobile have both also increased immensely. With that in mind, it is essential to actually have the skill set, as well as the strategy, to execute sustained growth, not just for a Big Bang launch but for the long-term to survive in the app marketplace.
When looking at the foundations of app marketing, the best place to start is to understand the marketplace, this includes the myriad of tools that gather app intelligence, from an acquisition perspective to App Store Optimisation (ASO) all the way through to engagement and retention metrics. On top of this, you can gather information about what the competition is doing and build out benchmarks for your app. This will enable you to really evaluate what you should be setting in terms of targets and is a good place to start.
That leads to the second point. Setting realistic growth targets is one of the key aspects that will help you to build a roadmap for your app. So it is important to ask what the key metrics you should be focusing on should be. Take note of whether the metrics provided are purely top of the funnel. This is something that we recommend not to do, instead, a focus on a full-funnel approach is going to be much more effective.
It is important to consider all the metrics that would indicate continuous and recurring revenue for your app company. Additionally, an app marketing company that will help you get into the growth mindset will be key. This means thinking about growth in a very holistic way.
Finally, getting the right experience to help you on your app growth journey is essential. Whether that’s building an internal team of highly skilled app marketing specialists or turning to an app marketing agency or consultancy, like Yodel for example. Being able to leverage those skills will help you on the way to actually achieving that sustained growth.
What should app businesses be looking for in an agency partner?
Let’s start at the last point in regards to getting the right skill set. It is important to first think about the finite amount of resources that you have. The division of time and resources should be guided by the growth targets and metrics that have been set right at the start. It is also important at this point to identify any gap in skill set. You could have a team who are incredibly good at marketing on the web, for example, they can build out really amazing creative strategies, but when it comes to ASO there’s a bit of a gap. You can really lean on a partner for this.
That’s the great thing about looking to an agency, you usually have individuals who work across hundreds of apps and who may even have 60 years of combined experience as Yodel does. That’s something that we say with our team, we have our Heads of Growth, who have been doing this for seven years plus in the app growth space so being able to leverage that and inject those strategies into your own app model would be a really good thing for the long term.
A key secondary piece of advice would be not to rush. Sustainable growth is a steady process. It’s a process that is set up in phases. It is about validating the product before it hits the market and slowly bringing in users as well as testing and gathering feedback. When it comes to acquisition, it is also important to increase budgets sustainably to bring in users that are good value for your cost and apply test-and-learn methodologies to ensure incremental growth. For start-ups that have received investment, it is particularly important to balance this against the pressure of hitting certain vanity metrics.
Finally, it is essential that your app marketing company make data informed decisions. The mobile ecosystem is pretty good at doing this. Being able to have data on hand through a good MarTech stack and leveraging your attribution, analytics and marketing automation tools to pull insight will be really key to driving your app marketing strategy. Use this data to define what is working for the app. Questions to keep in mind are:
- What channels are working particularly well for bringing in those high value users?
- What creative set is bringing in highly engaged users?
- What are the engagement strategies that are bringing in the highest conversions?
Funded companies and hitting investment: The questions that would reveal how an app marketing company could help scale quickly and hit targets
It is essential to really foster a transparent dialogue with your partner. Be open with them about your targets and why they are important. You can work together to create a plan to achieve those targets sustainably. It is important to dig deeper into the vendor to see what their experience is. Have they worked on the styles of product that you’re looking to launch for example?
For businesses in a similar position, being able to see some kind of proof that the app marketing company will be able to aid in the same will be very useful for any business to look into ahead of engaging a growth agency.
Asking the right questions is what this whole video is about but we’ve been asked a good few interesting questions that could be useful. One of them was actually ‘what were our biggest failures as an agency with some of our previous clients?’ I thought that was a really interesting question because it helps to define what the mistakes are that have already been made by an agency that can be taken on board and that can be improved upon for your business so that you don’t have to make those same mistakes. It also shows how reflective your partner can be on all the things that they’ve executed in the past.
Aside from this, it is also important to look at the team, look at their experience, who’s going to be leading your project, and who will be on the project. Get to know them in order to build a more personable relationship. You want them to be an extension of your team, so being able to find that fit, and understanding that someone highly experienced is going to be manning your project is probably something that a lot of businesses will find comfort in.
Make sure to sign up to our newsletter to get notified when we release a new blog post. Want to find out more about optimising your app and incorporating advanced growth metrics? Make sure to subscribe to our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series. You can also get in touch by visiting the Contact Us page. Follow us on LinkedIn, chat with us on Twitter @yodelmobile, and join our #AppMarketingUK LinkedIn group.
