John Koetsier is a journalist and analyst. He's a senior contributor at Forbes and hosts our Growth Masterminds podcast as well as the TechFirst podcast. At Singular, he serves as VP, Insights.
Earlier this year an M&C Saatchi executive told me that ad-supported CTV represented just 18% of TVish video ad spend, while good old-fashioned linear TV was 57%. That probably hasn’t had much time to change yet, but one massive part of the whole streaming TV, connected TV, and OTT world just did. Yesterday Nielsen reported that streaming TV captured a record 38.7% of all TV viewing in July while broadcast and cable TV dropped below 50% for the very first time.
Included in that streaming TV record: sources such as …
YouTube
Netflix
Hulu
Prime
Disney+
Max (formerly HBO Max)
Tubi
Peacock
Roku
Paramount+
Pluto
In fact, the story is stronger than 38.7% for streaming TV.
In an abundance of caution, Nielsen offers a big 11.6% slice of TV labeled “Other.” Look a little deeper, and you find that “Other” includes:
Unmeasured video on demand (VOD)
Streaming through a cable set top box
Audio streaming
Gaming
Other device use (DVD, Blu-Ray)
All other tuning from unmeasured sources
It doesn’t take a massive leap of logic to think that if you add up that VOD and set top box streaming, you’re likely significantly north of 40%.
A caveat on streaming’s big win
There is a caveat on streaming TV’s big win, however. While it is true that linear TV fell below 50% of TVish viewing for the very first time — and it’s true that the trend will continue — linear TV could very well take a temporary U-turn and pop back below that 50% mark over the next few months.
Nielsen explains:
“With kids settled into their summer breaks in July, they continued to have an outsized effect on TV usage. While overall TV usage was up just slightly from June (0.2%), viewing among people under the age of 18 increased 4%, and viewing among adults 18 and older fell 0.3%. These trends resulted in increased streaming and “other” usage, which is primarily attributed to video game consoles.”
In other words, with kids going back to school in August across much of the United States and in September in Canada, some of that streaming will drop. Plus, July was a slow month for sports: football is not yet on, ice hockey and basketball are off as well, and only soccer is in season.
Still, July 2022 to July 2023 still showed a drop-off.
In July 2022, broadcast TV captured a 21.6% share of TV watching, while cable captured 34.4%. In July 2023, broadcast slumped to 20% and cable dropped to 29.6%. Streaming TV, on the other hand, grew from 31.4% to its highest level yet, 38.7%.
More room for ad campaigns on streaming TV
In April when we asked hundreds of marketers in our CTV-focused webinar about user acquisition on streaming TV and other forms of CTV, 45% said they were already running user acquisition campaigns on CTV platforms. (Note: yes, that’s a biased audience.)
Now that old-school TV is less than half the full TV-viewing picture, streaming and CTV and OTT advertising is likely to keep growing. Connected TV ad spend is forecast to be around $39 billion in 2026, but with news like this — and continued focused by streaming platforms on ad-supported tiers of service — that could be an underestimate.
How do you get your first million users? Money is definitely part of that equation, but it’s not where you need to start.
The cold start is a major challenge. Not everyone has multiple billion-user networks to kickstart your new Twitter competitor, after all. And while most have some funding, few have the ability to blow millions of dollars on massive ad campaigns. As an extra challenge, early in your app’s lifespan your product is also young, probably incomplete, and likely not as mature and polished as it will be in a year or two.
As all startup founders know, building the plane while flying the plane while also advertising for tickets on the plane is a significant challenge.
Your first million users: start with the real problem
I recently spent the better part of an hour with Hannah Parvaz, a former growth mentor at Google and Business of Apps app marketer of the year. She’s helped dozens of mobile app publishers grow and runs her own agency, Aperture.
It starts with something that sounds very simple and obvious — and it is — but that most of us impatient builders and founders brush past because we assume we know:
“The very first thing that’s important for us to pin down together is understanding our customer and understanding really what the problem is,” says Parvaz.
The challenge is not only that we assume we know (which is always a perfect barrier to learning) but also that there’s so much to build, so much to make, so much to market, so much to manage. The result of all the busy-ness is that some founders refuse to come to grips with actual customer need. But the ones who get “stuck in” to understanding their users, customers, and players are the ones she’s seen win.
Don’t forget the recursive why
Parvaz is a fan of the recursive why.
Except she doesn’t like to use the word “why.”
The recursive why is important because, as one theory says, all of your answers are 5 why’s deep. Our real reasons — and our app users’ real reasons — are often buried under justifications, pat answers, rationalizations, publicly acceptable reasons, or other misleading answers.
That’s one of the lessons of The Mom Test.
“Everyone is accidentally lying to you without them knowing it,” Parvaz says. “It’s an accident; they don’t realize.”
One example: users of the Curio audio journalist app said they used the app because they wanted to learn. A few why’s later, it emerged that what they actually wanted was to be socially interesting and to appear smart. Multiple conversations over months of customer interviews yielded the same finding, resulting in a change of the app’s tagline from “intelligent audio for busy people” to “becoming the most interesting person in the room.”
Keep reading: more in the full transcript about finding your first million users
See the full transcript below with much more insight and more details on key app growth topics to help you find your first million users:
2 forces that increase demand generation
2 forces that reduce conversion
Digital drug dealers and little hits of dopamine
When to use awareness and when to use direct response ads
Starting at the bottom of the funnel
Experiments and why even the failed theories are useful
When to add an MMP
Boosting retention from 20% to 52%
When to not advertise (!!)
When to start advertising
Doing the work that others won’t do
Why many app publishers spend 80% of their time on the first 2 minutes of app use … and why you should not
North Star metrics
The subscription app formula:
cadence
action
revenue
Avoiding the churn cycle so many apps are in
What to build a brand around
The 3 key drivers
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
One campaign that went insanely viral
One campaign that completely flopped
And … how to find your David under the block of marble
But first, subscribe to Growth Masterminds!
Don’t miss this Growth Masterminds episode, or any of the others …
Power shifts in the ecosystem with guests like InMobi’s chief business officer Kunal Nagpal
Generative AI in games with Unity CEO John Riccitiello
Massive games growth with Dive’s Elad Levy (who sold his games company to Playtika)
Privacy Sandbox on Android
Targeting in the era of privacy
Reducing app subscription cancellations
And … so … much … more!
And now, the full transcript: Hannah Parvaz on getting your first million users.
John Koetsier: How do you rock the cold start?
Hello and welcome to Growth Masterminds. My name is John Koetsier.
I’m starting a new series in Growth Masterminds and the Singular blog, it’s Zero to Hero. It’s a startup story. It’s about getting early growth, not just your first hundred or first thousand, but maybe your first million, maybe your first hundred thousand, first 500,000 users.
There are huge challenges, we all know, for really big apps and real big brands to continue to grow, right? But they’re different. They have some resources, they have some brand, they’ve got users or players or customers or whatever they’ve got starting from zero or very small is a different challenge.
I actually think there’s a lot to learn on both sides of that for the other side, but this series will focus on early stage growth to kick it off. We’ve got an all star. She’s literally an app marketer of the year. Also biz strategy consultant of the year. She’s worked in tons of growth roles and now runs her own growth agency called Aperture.
She’s helping apps grow, helping mobile businesses work. And I noticed speaking all over the world. Her name is Hannah Parvez.
Welcome to Growth Masterminds, Hannah.
Hannah Parvaz: Thank you so much, John. It’s really nice to be here and I’m really excited to have this conversation with you today. So thank you.
John Koetsier: Awesome.
I love it when people say that … it’s often true too, but it’s late, you’re in London, it’s Thursday night and you’re hanging around in the office to chat. I really do appreciate it.
https://youtu.be/GSAowSXl5oU
I wanted to start with a little bit of personal stuff because you’re one of the UA consultants that runs your own agency. That’s an exclusive group, right? We talked earlier. You got Thomas Petit. You’ve got Felix Braberg. You got 5, 20 others. There’s not hundreds or thousands of people like you.
What’s your life like?
Hannah Parvaz: Actually, last year, my life took a big change. I have been living in London for the last 11 years, since 2011.
And last year, actually, I ended up going completely remote for the year. So my life has been a bit atypical over the last year. So I went to a lot of different places. I’ve met a lot of different kinds of interesting people from interesting companies. I was speaking in many different places and countries and cities all over America and Europe.
And at the moment I’ve come back to London just for a couple of months, just to, I mean … the idea was to capture some of the summer, but in a true kind of British style, it’s not been exactly what we were expecting.
John Koetsier: Your summers are probably like San Francisco summers.
Not very good.
Hannah Parvaz: Ah, yes, I saw a heat map of the US recently where it was like 100, 100 and San Francisco was 62.
John Koetsier: Yes, exactly. SF summer is not so great. It’s great in the spring, great in the fall. So working as you have with companies in a head of growth or head of UA role, those sorts of things, and then transitioning to working with 10, 15, 20 companies, maybe at a time, what’s that like?
Hannah Parvaz: Whenever I was working full time in house for my last kind of three or four companies, I had been doing a bunch of coaching and consulting and freelancing on the side. And that was always something that I’ve been doing a lot of. And it was also something that kind of comes with the package.
I wouldn’t have been able to work with a company unless I was also able to do that and had the freedom to do that because. For me, having those additional challenges on the side and being able to work on all of these different problems at the same time was really beneficial for my personal growth.
And so transitioning over to having Aperture and working on this full time, I left my last full time in house company. I disappeared off the face of the earth for a month. And then I came back better and faster and stronger than ever, like ready to go ahead with Aperture. But it did feel very seamless and it did feel like the only possible next step for me after being at my last company.
So it was good. It’s been great.
John Koetsier: I’m always so tempted to take the month off or the three months off or something like that, but I don’t trust myself. I’m not sure if I’ve ever come back. So that’s why I haven’t done that.
Okay. So somebody comes to you, they’ve got a new app, they’ve got some budget, they have big plans, they want to grow.
What do you do? Where do you start?
What is the core problem you are solving?
Hannah Parvaz: If they’re right at the beginning of their journey versus, even a bit farther in, I’ve worked with companies at all kinds of stages from being, the second higher and a company’s not even launched yet to joining later or working with kind of larger kind of commercial companies and so on, more corporate styles.
But really the very first thing that’s important for us to pin down together is understanding our customer and understanding really what the problem is.
Because a lot of the time we’re doing this supply side thinking, we’re thinking about what we want and what we think is the problem and what is so important and what I spend a lot of time talking publicly and also with founders and with other people is just centering the customer and centering what their needs are, as opposed to what you think their needs are. And that’s something this is just the bread and butter for every company, it’s not just for mobile apps, it’s not just for a specific kind of subscription, this is for every business. You should truly understand exactly what your customer wants and needs. And this is my favorite topic, so I’m happy to spend all day on this if you like.
John Koetsier: Nobody wants to do that really. I mean, everybody wants to …
I got to build something. I got to make something. I have to market something. I have to buy a campaign.
I have to … all that stuff. I’m talking for myself right here, just myself. I mean, this is the sort of thing that you just … it’s hard.
Hannah Parvaz: It really is hard. And a lot of people are very resistant to doing it as well, because it’s really facing what the problem is head on and potentially, you’re potentially …
John Koetsier: Wrong solution.
Hannah Parvaz: Yeah, maybe what I think isn’t correct, I don’t want to have to face that and what I do see time and time again is that it’s the founders that are happy to get stuck in that are the ones that succeed.
And I’ve worked with some founders who are: I’m not going to join these customer conversations … I don’t want to. (I always call these customer conversations, by the way, rather than user interviews, because “user” … it’s obvious we can use this term sometimes internally, but we need to start thinking about them as customers. They’re buying something from us.)
https://youtube.com/shorts/UI61jFl9NeY
And obviously you can have a really great interview, but what we want to do as well is just have a proper conversation and get to the bottom of who they are, what they are.
There’s a theory called the four forces which I’m sure you’re familiar with, but …
The four forces of demand generation
John Koetsier: Tell me about the four forces. I want to know.
Hannah Parvaz: There are these two demand generation forces, which are pushes and pulls. So what’s pushing you towards the solution and how is the solution pulling you towards it?
And then there are these two forces which are reducing demand, which are habit. So what am I already doing? And anxiety, what is my fear of what is this product?
And a lot of the time companies focus a lot on the demand generation, what, how are we pulling people in? How are we marketing ourselves? But they don’t focus enough on those other two.
And the customer is inside all of these four forces, these, all of these anxieties trying to work out what’s the best solution for them. Where are they? And they’re experiencing all of these. I mean, we’re people, right?
https://youtu.be/3K96zOFZiX0
We’re constantly experiencing emotion. So they’re experiencing all of these forces and emotions at every point of their customer journey. So from being problem unaware to problem aware to, they’re actually now buying and now they’re using it. They’re experiencing and thinking about these things the whole time.
So for us, it’s our job to understand how they’re thinking and how they’re feeling at these different stages of their life cycle.
John Koetsier: You’ve seen hundreds of apps and hundreds of businesses, and you said, this is your favorite thing.
So I want to ask you a question about it, because I know that in some of the startups that I’ve done, I’m somewhat resistant to that. Maybe somewhat I’m being kind to myself, and I’ve seen that elsewhere and companies that I have advised and consulted with or that worked in.
Speak to that person who wants to go do something, build something, create something and not spend their time on all this kind of squishy stuff that is hard and is not the way they typically think because they’re a creator, they’re a doer, they’re a builder, not this philosophy and all this stuff.
Speak to them of the apps that you’ve worked with, the ones that have been successful. Is there a correlation between their success and their willingness to do this upfront work?
The Mom Test: everyone is lying to you
Hannah Parvaz: I would say absolutely there is unless somehow you are wise beyond human realms and you can predict all of these things. I speak to a lot of companies, for example, and they, and I ask them, do you talk to your customers?
And the first thing they say is, yeah, I send out surveys, all, I send out a lot of surveys.
We do this, we send out quarterly surveys and don’t get me wrong. I think surveys are fantastic for some purposes, but if you’re trying to get to the bottom and to get to the real truth, then you’re not going to be able to get that in the survey.
So there’s this really great book called The Mom Test. You might’ve heard of it. It’s about a hundred pages long, so you can read it very quickly or get an audio book and listen to it while you’re on a walk. But the kind of theory behind this book is that everyone is accidentally lying to you without them knowing it.
It’s an accident; they don’t realize.
For example, I was working with one company. I’ll tell you a story if that’s all right.
I was working with one company called Curio and this is an audio journalism product. And I was working with them five, six years ago, and whenever we started, they had a tagline, which was “intelligent audio for busy people.”
This was on all of the ads, very kind of functional, great. It’s audio journalism, you’re listening to it. So great. And when I started to talk to people and talk to the customers, I was asking them, how come you’re using this product? And they would say I’m really busy and I want to learn.
And that makes sense: intelligent audio for busy people.
So then I would ask them. Okay, if you’re so busy, why do you want to learn so much, and if you’re learning … how have you ended up using this? And they say I’m commuting. And so I want to listen, in case I’m standing up, or I want to be walking.
There was a huge kind of commuting use case here. And I want to feel like I’m using my time wisely.
And I would say, why, but why is that? Why do you not want to just sit on the tube and pick your nose and play Candy Crush? You could be doing anything.
John Koetsier: I’ve always wanted to do that.
Hannah Parvaz: Easy, the path of least resistance.
And they would tell me then, but I want to understand the world better. Okay, so now we’re getting somewhere. And so then I would say, why do you want to understand the world better? This is where the gold comes. And so then they would start to tell me stories about … I go around to my mom’s house and she’s married to a new man and he’s a professor and he’s always talking about all this stuff and I have no idea what to talk to him about, so I always seem, I always feel like I’m not very clever.
I want to seem more interesting.
And again and again, this phrase, I want to seem more interesting.
And so this is the power of simply talking to customers. And it’s not like I pulled out this theme out of two conversations. It was, I spent, as soon as I joined that company, I spent the first three months with one of my main focuses on talking to customers.
And so then we started experimenting around this messaging, see more interesting, does this seem smarter? Does it seem interesting? Is it interesting? Is it, and we tested out a lot of different messages and we ended up landing, after hundreds of iterations, on “becoming the most interesting person in the room.”
Which is a line of copy you might have seen around, like some of the biggest apps in the industry now are using this same headline after we used it at Curio.
Because it’s something that really taps into your ego and it’s something that again and again performed, not just in the UK and the US, but in every country that we tried it in, this was effective, and this is why now you’ll see this line which came out of a bunch of different conversations being used all over the place, because it’s just effective, it taps into something in turn in deep inside you.
The 5 whys and the recursive why
John Koetsier: Love it. I absolutely love it.
Who doesn’t want to be interesting and have people interested in you … it makes a ton of sense.
One of the things I took from what you said was you’re a recursive why person. You keep asking why. You get an answer and you ask why.
That can get you punched in the nose sometimes.
Hannah Parvaz: It can, but you just need to do it with a smile. And also I did, I know I said why a few times there, but I actually tried to keep away from the word why itself too. And so I usually would say something like, how come, how come you ended up doing this?
And this is because the word why actually upsets a lot of people because deep down they feel like they’re a kid being told off. Like, why did you do that?
And this is something I spent a lot of time looking into as well, just to make sure I was able to have the best and most effective conversations possible. And so I usually keep away from why, even though there’s a theory called the five whys, so all of your answers are five whys deep it’s still good to use some different words instead of being that kid, which is fun as well. And you have to come at these things by building a sense of rapport with the person.
I always say at the very beginning of any of these conversations, get to know them a little bit first. Don’t just jump in with kind of very extreme technical or personal questions, share something about yourself, if you can, how are you relating to them and making them feel your customers feel human and safe in this conversation.
John Koetsier: Love it. Love it. I’m glad we had a chat before we started recording.
Hannah Parvaz: Yes, we built some rapport.
John Koetsier: Exactly. No, that’s awesome.
So we’re going to get to all the hardcore growth stuff. So for everybody who’s listening and saying, okay, I got to ask why, I got to talk to my users, got my customers, my subscribers, all that stuff … we’re going to get to the hardcore questions about what tech and how I start campaigns and do I need an MMP right away and my metrics and all that stuff …
But I got to dive just a little deeper here on this, knowing your customer, knowing your user, is this even the case?
Let’s say somebody says, I’m building a game, it’s just about fun that is common to 97. 83% of humanity. I don’t need to have these conversations. Are they right? Or are they wrong?
Games and little hits of dopamine
Hannah Parvaz: I would say that it’s still valid and relevant because with your game someone is still trying to do something and trying to achieve something and that might be just feeling dopamine hits.
That might just be feeling again and again I’m completing these levels but that’s why there are so many kind of tricks of the trade that work so well for games, and I think a lot of the time we can learn a lot from how games are produced and how games operate, letting someone experience a win very quickly even though it’s a very easy level, how can we transfer that learning to our apps and to our kind of other products as well?
What are we doing to get people to that kind of activation threshold as quickly as possible, because that’s what games are mastering. And I see a lot of people going from games to out of games now or gambling to out of gambling, because they’ve got so, so good at this. And now they know how to translate for and translate this knowledge across.
John Koetsier: I like those little hits of dopamine. We’re all digital drug dealers, right? Absolutely. Okay, here we go. Let’s dive in.
That same person comes to you, this new app, some budget, big plans, right? They want to grow. You’ve gone through this process. They’ve identified, okay, this particular person, this segment, that’s who we’re aiming for.
Here’s their challenges, here’s their problems, here’s what we can solve. Here’s what we’re gonna do and here’s how we’re gonna approach it. Okay?
So now they want to actually. Grow and they’re going to start investing some budget. Where do you kick off? Where do you start?
Levers and metrics
Hannah Parvaz: So once we’ve understood our customers, the problems that we’re solving, what are our levers as well? So what are the key areas that we can focus on? And usually these are going to be something aligned with acquisitions.
So something like installs, something aligned with activation, something aligned with retention. So we want to be able to establish these and then figure out what’s the first area that we want to impact, really.
And so for a lot of companies to begin with, that might be acquisition. And so we will think about how does your product work? What are the kind of natural acquisition lanes that you have. And so a lot of the time it’s a bit like sorting, you don’t get to choose your lanes, they choose you in a way.
And so if you’re a kind of D2C subscription app, probably you’re going to want to start with doing some advertising. But if you’re a super social viral network effect product, then probably you don’t need to do any advertising to begin with … what we’re going to do is work out how we’re getting people activated as quickly as possible and how we’re making it as shareable as possible.
And of course, we always need to bring in all of these elements into our product.
It’s just about if you’re a small team, where do you focus first? And it’s about how are we aligning everyone in the business around this main focus? So whether that is activation or acquisition or retention or whichever awareness to begin with.
I would normally probably not be starting with awareness for a very small product because we still want people to come through with my companies. We’re spending 1% of our budget roughly on awareness ads. We’re spending everything else on direct response because we need to get the people in, we need to be able to monetize.
Experimenting, theories, hypotheses
And so after we’ve decided our lanes, then we would start experimenting. Let’s say we’re going to go after a paid ads channel. This is where things start to get a little bit hairy. And so what we want to do is go back to this kind of … what are people trying to achieve and start testing our messaging?
So we’re always going to have some hypotheses. We’re going to have some rough theories about, I think this message will resonate with these people, but also in this kind of post May 2021 world where we’ve got a bit less visibility we want to make sure that what we’re doing and what we’re bidding on is right.
And yes if that’s the route that we’re going down and we’re thinking that we want to have visibility on any of our ads, for example, then we should be implementing an MMP, a mobile measurement partner so that we can see that traffic so that we can post it back and so that we can keep our app a little bit lighter so we don’t have to keep bothering our developers about every new SDK that we want to add in.
Yeah, you want me to continue?
Start at the bottom of the funnel
John Koetsier: Yes, absolutely. But I’m going to interject for half a moment.
Because what I love about what you said is you didn’t start with, okay, we’re going to buy ads on Meta. We’re going to buy, we’re going to invest in TikTok. We’re going to go and do some programmatic and stuff like that.
It reminds me of when I was chatting with Rory Sutherland, it’s got to be a year ago or so.
Famous … infamous Ogilvy marketing guru, if we want to call it that way. And he said, start at the bottom of the funnel, start at the bottom of the funnel. What’s happening there? What’s happening there?
Work your way back up and you just follow that exact path.
Hannah Parvaz: Exactly, and I, there’s a lot of companies and some of the ones with the fastest growth that I’ve seen are ones that aren’t caving to this, sometimes if you see pressure to just turn the tap on, turn the tap on and see what happens.
It’s companies that are, maybe they’re spending a little bit of money at the top of the funnel just to get a few people trickling through if they need to, but not spending a lot of time optimizing on it, but then seeing how these people are performing.
3 months on retention: from 20% to 52%
One company that I’ve been working with for the last year, we had started with some acquisition work. We were getting people in, it was performing, but what we were seeing was that our day 30, for example, was like 20%. So we knew that, but with a free product, a free social product, we can increase this.
So what we did was we spent the next kind of three months focusing on retention. How are we increasing our day 30 retention?
And by the end of that, we got up to 52% day 30 retention, which is very high.
And then we moved to activation. So we were like, how can we make sure people are going to go do this action, these actions that we need them to do.
And then we fixed this, we did a really great job with that. And then we were in a good place to be able to turn on our paid ads properly and really start putting a lot of people through this funnel. And yeah, it’s been going very well ever since with obviously as a free app as well, you can build in a lot of virtual currency, social viral features, yeah …
John Koetsier: I’m a trillionaire in multiple currencies that don’t matter.
Slower and harder and longer than you think or want
But I want to draw out something that I’ve heard now twice that you’ve said, and I want to highlight it because I think it’s really important. I’ve worked in Silicon Valley. I spent 3 years commuting into San Francisco every other week.
I’ve worked in startups or assisted or advised or consulted with startups for the better part of, I want to say a decade and a half, maybe two decades. And everybody wants instant, everybody wants results now or tomorrow or this week. And now three times, maybe twice, you’ve said: “I took three months,” right?
And here you just said, I took three months to examine what was happening to users who were in the app and what they were doing and how, and you increased the retention there.
And earlier you said you took three months largely talking to customers.
And I just want to bring that out because … yeah, you might have a Threads story and go to 100 million users instantly, (but there’s more to that story because the engagement is dropping, obviously) and you might have a Pokemon Go and you get a billion users, and it just keeps going and going and going, but for most people, the real story, the actual story is slower and harder and more involved and more effort and more knowledge and processing.
That’s a really strong insight for people who are super impatient, like me. To have sink in.
Hannah Parvaz: Yeah, there are 160,000 apps released every month. So there are always these anomalies like Threads, Pokemon Go, which have of course come from these giant companies where there’s been a lot of kind of brand awareness, let’s say, up front, but with companies that are potentially category creating.
I was having a call yesterday with someone who’s doing a product, which is absolutely category creating, no one is doing this yet, there isn’t awareness for these solutions.
Problem unaware vs solution unaware
People are often probably “problem unaware,” but they’re 100% solution unaware because there hasn’t been a solution like this before.
And so whenever you’re exploring these areas, you need to understand the landscape and actually with the companies where I’ve spent, when I’ve been working internally with them and we’ve spent two, three months working on something … it’s by that kind of time that the founder is like, why is nothing happening?
But it’s by that time that you’ve understood everything and then you can turn things on and then it works. And so I was working with one company which had been around for two years when I joined. And whenever I joined, they were doing about seven actions, like seven redemptions per week … seven uses per week.
A year and a half later, we were doing 7,000 per week, which is a fairly big increase.
And this is the process.
You understand your customers, you understand how they operate, what is on their mind, what are they actually trying to achieve? There’s a theory called Jobs To Be Done which is an amazing theory about just what people are actually trying to achieve. So like with the audio journalism company I mentioned before, the functional jobs to be done are, keeping my brain occupied while I’m commuting, making my commute a bit more entertaining.
But an emotional job to be done is I want to seem more interesting.
And we need to understand the landscape of our users’ mindsets as well as the market and so on. The market’s very important too, but our customers and what they need is really the most important part for our business.
Your superpower: do the work that others won’t do
John Koetsier: And I just wonder that maybe for some of the people who are founders or early stage employees at smaller apps right now, who are listening right now, maybe that can be your superpower.
Maybe this can be your superpower.
Do the work that others aren’t willing to do. Do the work that others don’t don’t even know to do.
Do that work before you spend the $500,000 that you raised in seed funding or the $7 million you got in, Series A or something like that, and do that work and get that kind of growth. After you’ve slogged for some time, okay, let’s talk a little bit about metrics.
What are the metrics that tell you something’s working here?
Metrics madness: Don’t spend 80% of your time optimizing the first 2 minutes of app use
Hannah Parvaz: That, I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, the kind of main metric is how many people are purchasing my product. So that everything starts from there. What’s the lifetime value of someone that’s coming in?
And I’ve had lots of discussions, especially with developers and data people around … at one company I worked, we were running a lot of experiments and they were saying the success of every experiment should be measured based on lifetime value …maybe an estimated lifetime value. You can’t necessarily look at that when it’s a week-long experiment, for example. And so ultimately lifetime value is a lifetime value over customer acquisition cost is key.
But also what we want to do is look at our North star metrics. So for the majority of subscription app businesses, I have a handy little formula that everyone can jot down, but it’s for a subscription app business, for example, we want to have a cadence, then an action, and then a revenue associated metric.
And so this looks like something like:
Weekly listening
Subscribers
Journaling
Subscribers, or purchasers or, and so on. And this helps represent you as a business and your needs. So that has the subscriber side. And then you also are representing the customer. So they are coming back. They are getting value from using your product.
That’s why they keep returning.
And a lot of the time I’ve worked with companies and they’ve said, subscribers is our North star metric. And adding subscribers at all costs means that within those companies, they spend 90% of their time optimizing the first two minutes of the product because 80% to 90% of trials come up within the first two minutes of someone downloading your app.
And then the rest come up later and they long tail out over forever, but the majority of these will come from the first two minutes of someone downloading your app and signing up.
And time again, I’ve seen companies who are revenue, subscribers at all costs just spending time on there and getting great numbers of trials through but then everyone’s just churning out. People aren’t renewing, people aren’t sticking around because the product itself hasn’t been worked on because they’ve just been … I’m spending money on ads, so I need to get subscribers to pay for my ads to get more subscribers to pay for my ads and they forget about everything else, which is how are the customers feeling and how are they being retained?
Like, how are they receiving value from you?
You can’t build a brand around building the best funnel
John Koetsier: It’s so interesting because if you take that insight and you bring it back to the very beginning of our conversation, who am I serving? What are their needs? What do they want? What are they trying to avoid? All that stuff.
If you get that right, then you’re more likely to get this end part right as well and optimize your product and your product experience and your user experience rather than like … your job … your goal in life is not to be the best at getting people through a funnel.
I mean, that would suck. That would really suck.
I mean, hey, you’d make a lot of money probably, but would you really be fulfilled? “I make the best funnels.” Okay. Maybe some people think that’s their gig, but maybe you want to make somebody’s life better.
Maybe you want to make them have a little bit of fun.
Maybe you want to help somebody create better habits or be the most interesting person in the room or something like that.
Those are things that you can build a brand around. Those are things that you can build a team around. Those are things that people can sign up for as a mission to join your company and maybe stay with your company because it’s meaningful.
It has something to it.
So if people get that first part they’re more likely to get this part, right?
Talk to me about when you start knowing that the snowball is rolling downhill. You’ve talked a couple of times about, I took three months to do this, I took three months to do that. We’re doing seven activations a month and now it’s 7,000 …
When do you know that the snowball, which is just sitting there and then maybe moving a tiny little bits in the beginning, is actually starting to go downhill?
Hannah Parvaz: We look at the numbers … so you can’t grow what you don’t measure, so we track everything
John Koetsier: You can’t grow by accident?
Three key drivers: acquisition, activation, retention
Hannah Parvaz: You can, but you don’t know, and so what I would say is obviously we’ve got our North star metrics.
We also have these three little things called key drivers, usually. So these are the metrics I was referring to before, usually acquisition, activation, retention, but there’s usually a real kind of solid metric associated with them.
So once we start to see that these metrics are reaching our targets then, we can move to another metric or lever to impact. And then, and then hopefully, we started right at the bottom, we’re moving up to the top of the funnel. Once we start seeing that we can put money in and we can start getting that sweet money back, then it’s time to turn that tap on, so with some of the companies I’ve been working with, it has taken six months or so to get them to be able to reach kind of day zero payback with their monetization.
You’re not going to get a positive ROAS on day one instantly
But we say to everyone at the beginning and most people know, for example, with performance, you’re not going to get a positive ROAS on day one straight away.
It takes a bit of time. It takes learning. It takes experimentation. And so I’ll say the time at which we know that the snowball’s going is when we hear people talking about it, when we don’t understand where the people are coming from as well. I ran one campaign, which you can talk about later last year, which went viral five times.
And it ran for two weeks and by the end of the two weeks, I was walking down the street and I heard someone cycling past talking about the campaign and I was like this is success …
John Koetsier: Wow. Wow. That’s awesome. Let’s transition that because this has been great. I could chat for another half an hour. We have limited time, it’s late for you. And there’s other things on my calendar. I mean, as much as I like to spend all day here, can’t do it, but might have to have you back, there’s so much more we can chat about.
I wanted to end with just a couple of more lighthearted things.
One campaign that rocked
One campaign that totally blew it out of the water … absolutely went nuts. Completely rocked in and you already hinted that we’ll hear more hopefully. And then one campaign that you thought would be so awesome, but completely cratered. Go for it.
Hannah Parvaz: Absolutely. So the one that blew us all away was last year, with a company called Uptime, we launched this campaign called Quit Social Media.
And it was a campaign around a study to get people to quit social media for two months, and we would pay them £2,000 pounds to quit social media for two months. And so we promoted this and sent it out as a PR story. We were accepting one person.
And so we sent this out, it got picked up by all kinds of British national press.
Great. we thought, we’ll get a couple thousand applicants. That’ll be enough, it will give us some backlinks.
So then I had some, an amazing lady on my team. We scripted out a video for her. She read it, and we posted it on TikTok. We put about £10 pounds behind it, very minor amounts. And this was a couple of days in, and we had a kind of Google form, I think, that people were submitting.
And, by this point we had a couple thousand applicants. I was like, sweet. We’ve hit our goals. So we boosted this post and just as I was about to go to bed, I decided to check the applicants and all of a sudden there were about 50,000 applicants and I was like, huh, like Scooby Doo. And I immediately added a question, which was, how did you hear about this … so that we could try and understand.
And we started to get people coming in and saying, this campaign has caused a controversy in my country. And we started seeing Twitter accounts with millions of followers were posting about it. It was on Sky News Arabia. It was on Newsweek. Anyway, an Instagram page called Puberty posted about it as well, which has … maybe they’ve got 30 million followers, quite a few followers.
We ended the campaign anyway, with a quarter of a million, 250,000 ish applications to take part in the study. And we spent about two grand on the cost of the study, and then a hundred pounds or so on boosting because we did a small boost on TikTok, a small boost on Facebook and a small boost on Instagram.
It was to the extent that with a company called Uptime it was uptime.app, there was another company called uptime.com … Uptime.com were writing to us saying, we’re getting hundreds, we’re getting thousands of support tickets asking how to apply and how do we … we don’t know what to do.
And we were like we didn’t tell them to go, we can’t really do anything about that. And then on one of the last days of the campaign, someone was cycling past me talking about, did you hear about this campaign? You can get paid £2,000 pounds to quit social media. And I was like, this is so funny, it just started out as something small and it just kept growing and growing.
We then managed to, trying, working very closely with the product team the whole time, it’s very important to keep aligned there … we were able to build out specific flows in the app. We built collections around social media. We sent offers to people who were applying, we got tens of thousands of downloads and subscriptions and so on from this campaign as well.
So they really transferred from what was, I hope we get a few backlinks to this is a substantial marker on the company overall from a very kind of silly, small, expectedly small campaign. So that one I’d say really blew up.
John Koetsier: Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. It’s so incredible when something that you do becomes part of the zeitgeist, becomes big like that.
And it probably only happens a few times in most people’s careers. So we love chatting about our children that grew up to be millionaire models, sports heroes, titans of industry, all this stuff. Have you had any redheaded stepchild?
One campaign that flopped
Hannah Parvaz: You’ll know that every person in growth’s whole career is built on things not working, really.
That’s the first thing to know. I’m constantly running, I mean, with one of my companies on my own, I ran over a hundred experiments in one year by myself without thinking about all of the other people in there and all the experiments that they were doing.
And within that, we had about 45ish percent of them were successful, which means that more than half of them weren’t successful.
But that’s still a great success rate for an experiment. And, one thing that I actually sent out an email to the company about this and said, 55% of these were failures. And someone replied to me this was about five years ago and it changed my mindset a little bit saying, none of these were failures because we learned something from all of them.
So they weren’t failures. Your hypothesis was just not right. And that really helped me reframe things. Even when things aren’t completely right, that’s fine. We learned from it. And so we did recently.
John Koetsier: That’s what you tell the CFO when you spend a million dollars on an ad campaign and it gets you nothing.
“We learned a lot from this.”
Hannah Parvaz: But you know what? If you do accidentally spend a million dollars or you accidentally send out an email to a hundred thousand people, like what do you learn from that? I remember one company where a CRM person accidentally sent out a push notification to the entire user base that just said “dot.”
John Koetsier: Could have been worse, could have been worse, could have said something nasty!
Hannah Parvaz: This was the best open push notification that was ever sent.
And people, we learned like people probably clicked on this ‘cause they had no idea what was going on. They were like, I’m intrigued. And so we had our most kind of active user day ever and things like that.
But I’d say, a recent one was we spent … with one of our companies we had tried out something with one kind of famous influencer for one product that the company has.
And we were like, cool, it’s working with this one product. So it will work with the other products. So we then sprung for an expensive deal with this creator for the other product … that didn’t work. But you know, we learned that … align this creator with this product, not this one.
And, at the end of the day, everything’s an experiment, so as long as you’re learning from it, I think, and you’re owning it, that’s very important, taking ownership of these things too, and saying, this is why something worked, or why something didn’t work and documenting it, then, I think it’s all good.
John Koetsier: I one hundred percent agree and we can joke about it and I’ve joked about it a little bit here, obviously, but realistically, the biggest failure is always being so scared to try something that you don’t do anything or you don’t try enough because guess what: that one campaign years that blew up, it was probably one of 50 or one of a hundred or something like that.
99 didn’t blow up.
But if you stopped at 98 and you didn’t do the 99th or the 100th, you wouldn’t have had the massive success.
You can’t really account for virality. Sometimes you just have an ad that just beats everything else for a year. I’ve heard about that. That’s your hero. That’s your champion ad and you can’t beat it for a year and you get really pissed off about that, but you should also be happy about it because you made something great.
And sometimes you do 50 campaigns that don’t work, but you keep trying and somehow the magic pixie dust of the internet just spreads on it and good things happen.
Hannah Parvaz: Absolutely. You need to just keep to the process. There’s a process there for a reason, like around experimentation, around validation.
And it’s so important to just keep to that process because once you do, and that’s your muscle memory, then that’s where you find the gold, if you want to be chipping away at that block, trying to find your David underneath. Because it is there. You just need to keep on trying …
John Koetsier: love it. Hannah, this has been such a fun 40 minutes longer than I anticipated. Sorry for keeping you longer. I’ve really enjoyed it. I think I’ve learned a ton. I’m really impressed.
Thank you so much for your time.
Hannah Parvaz: It’s been such a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. And thanks everybody for watching and listening.
1400 people signed up for our recent webinar on aligning organic and paid user acquisition. Of those who answered our polls, 11% have zero organic user growth and 38% have minimal organic growth: less than 25%.
So how can you maximize your organic user acquisition?
Here’s a start: go sign up for that webinar and watch it right now.
Also, given that we have the recorded insight from 6 experts on maximizing organic growth, aligning paid and organic user acquisition, and maximizing the organic multiplier of paid user acquisition, let me summarize some of the best pieces of advice they provided.
Organic and paid user acquisition panelists
Our experts have decades of combined experience in running paid UA campaigns and fostering increased organic growth. They are:
Eva Juretić, Growth Marketing @ PocketWorlds
Mary Kim, Head of Growth @ GameHive
Ben Shore, Senior Customer Success Manager, Strategic Accounts @ Data.ai
Mike Grguric, CEO @ Udonis
Stuart Jarvis, Sr. Partner Manager, Solution Architect @ Luna (Unity)
Emre Bilgic, Senior Sales Engineer @ MobileAction
Top advice and insights on maximizing the synergies between organic and paid user acquisition
There’s far too much in the webinar to summarize in one blog post, but these are a few of the highlights …
Sometimes you hit a home run with a viral ad “We once made over $300,000 on a $300 spend during a three-day span.” – Mike Grguric, Udonis
Privacy is a key driver of focusing on organic “I think the key reason we see marketers switching focus to organic in the last couple of years is … the switch to iOS 14 and the whole privacy thing.’ – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
Better organic presence = higher ATT opt-in “We also started because we wanted to build trust within our players to convince them more to consent to ATT. And the thought process behind that is if you have a better brand, probably players will be more willing to share their data.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Organic multipliers can be massive “When we first started UA on Tap Titans 2, we saw a large uplift on organics, almost about 3-to-1 …” – Mary Kim, GameHive
But organic multipliers are more commonly in the 25% to 50% range When we polled attendees on organic multipliers …
54% said they achieved a 25% organic multiplier
30% said theirs was 50%
Only 7% achieve an organic multiplier of over 100%
App Store optimization teams and paid acquisition teams rarely chat “There are some surprises from the ASO folks when I show them reporting that indicates they’re also bidding on some of their top organic terms.” – Ben Shore, Data.ai
And acquisition teams for sister apps often make the same mistake “We often see other apps within that brand’s portfolio bidding on top organic keywords for their sister apps, and the organic team doesn’t even know about it. They’re caught off guard.” – Ben Shore, Data.ai
Leading organizations are consolidating ASA and ASO teams “We made the switch because ASA performs very differently than other UA networks. And so, we decided to make that switch to be handled by our ASO manager, and I see some great synergies.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Tracking and measurement is a challenge (of course) “The main challenge with organic is that it’s not directly trackable as paid user acquisition is.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
Creative fatigue differs by channel “TikTok is kind of unique, you know, we see creatives fatigue a lot faster.” – Stuart Jarvis, Luna
Paid is quick, organic is slow “Organic typically takes longer, but it tends to be more cost effective and more sustainable over time.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
Today, you usually have to pay to go viral “My experience with going viral is mostly on the side of paid ads going viral … you can actually engineer for it, not in a sense that you can force it, but in a sense that you can actually position the ads and do small things to kind of leverage it if it happens.” – Mike Grguric, Udonis
Your best users are your best organic marketing channel “Engaged and loyal users are an important part of our organic contribution, through word of mouth and the buzz and user-generated content.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
Live in-app events can be huge, especially on Google Play “We’ve been seeing a lot of success with LiveOps cards and, yeah, we actually saw that some of our LiveOps cards that actually got boosted really saw a huge impact.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Ad integrity matters for both paid and organic UA “You need to make sure that the ad that you’re showing and generating the interest with … when they come to the store specifically and see your page, they should not be disappointed.” – Emre Bilgic, MobileAction
TikTok rocks “What channels are working for us? So big one for us … end of last year and this year has been TikTok, for sure. Significant growth driver for us.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
Good ASO drives both organic discovery and paid conversions “ASO is important to us because not only does having an optimal ASO page really benefit UA when it comes to increasing conversion rates, but it helps us to rank for keywords, which also is important when it comes to visibility on the app stores.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Influencers can be very … flaky “A lot of influencers are interested in promoting your product, making a quick buck without real engagement.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
But influencer marketing is still growing fast, hand-in-hand with UGC “We’ve seen a significant rise in the past 12 to 18 months looking across multiple channels, multiple clients … UGC is winning and graduating it cross-platform. – Stuart Jarvis, Luna
Organic vs paid user acquisition quality: it’s complicated “We’ve noticed whenever we run a MAI campaign, usually organics outperform UA. And when we switch that to an AEO or even a ROAS campaign, UA performs far better.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Deep is good, when it comes to events to optimize on “The deeper you go end-of-funnel, in terms of which event you’re gonna optimize for, the higher the quality is gonna be.” – Mike Grguric, Udonis
Vertical really matters for organic user acquisition “We do see for games which are heavier, the RPG, strategy, and in general, more complex games … organic can be very, very strong.” – Mike Grguric, Udonis
Organic is … unpredictable “Organic is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get, though it still plays an important role in app growth.” – Mary Kim, GameHive
Communication is critical in boosting organic and paid user acquisition “Make sure these teams aren’t operating in complete silos. Bring them together. Make sure everybody’s sharing their learnings. Create a holistic optimization strategy. Make sure that you’re not missing any key takeaways from either side.” – Ben Shore, Data.ai
If you’re making ads, you’re doing it wrong “I think my number one advice is don’t create ads, create content.” – Eva Juretić, PocketWorlds
The best creative is a data-driven mash-up “Allow the UA team and the creative teams to have left brain and right brain conversations driving better creative production that is based on data and has a better chance of success.” – Stuart Jarvis, Luna
Get the context and the details
Get the context of each quote and the details — including how Udonis made over $300,000 on a $300 spend in just 3 days — by checking out the webinar.
Singular now supports Meta Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) for app promotion campaigns as well as AEM for app engagement campaigns, which Singular released support for earlier this year.
Meta’s Aggregated Event Measurement is a protocol that allows for measurement of web and app events from people using iOS 14 and later devices.
For mobile app promotion campaigns, marketers can enable AEM in parallel with SKAdNetwork to get maximum signal and to be able to view apples-to-apples (no pun intended!) performance across multiple channels.
The benefits of Aggregated Event Management include:
Near real-time reporting
1-day click and 7-day click reporting for campaigns that use app event optimization and value optimization.
Access to longer 7-day click attribution windows
Delivery to Audience Network for campaigns that use app event optimization and value optimization
To support AEM for App Promotion campaigns, Singular sends all conversion events to Meta to ensure optimal campaign performance. This should help advertisers make faster decisions and understand customer/user behavior better over a longer period of time. A recent Meta internal study of 3,529 apps across multiple verticals suggests that marketers who use AEM will see approximately 9.5% more conversions on Meta ad campaigns while not impacting your cost per install or cost per action.
For best results, Singular recommends that marketers do enable AEM. You can still access SKAN data for channel comparison purposes in both Meta and Singular dashboards.
Modeling is increasingly important post-IDFA (and soon, post-GAID) where signal is missing or partial. Meta is evolving and enhancing its tools, just as Google, Snap, TikTok, and other major platforms.
That fits into Singular’s vision of hybrid measurement as the future of marketing measurement. No single number will give you all the information you need for all your optimization and allocation requirements. Each has its value, and Singular’s goal is to simplify your access to accurate and digestible insights to drive growth.
We just broke the news about a SKAN 4 CV reset bug on the Singular blog 2 days ago, on August 2. Today Apple’s system status page says there was an SKAdNetwork bug that was just resolved yesterday, on August 3 at midnight.
One challenge: Apple clearly has a time machine, because iOS 16.6 was released 10 days ago, on July 24.
(My best guess on that interesting timeline: Apple typically slow-rolls releases to see if anything blows up or there are any major issues. Then, after a week or two, Apple starts increasing release volume. Likely what happened here is that Apple was still in the initial stages of the roll-out when they learned about the SKAdNetwork bug, paused it, fixed this very minor issue, and will be continuing the 16.6 launch.)
The real SKAdNetwork bug fix challenge: timing
The real problem here though is timing and iOS versions.
As you can clearly see on Statcounter’s global stats for iOS versions, the current big boy of iOS versions is 16.5 at about 55% share. After that you have “other” around 16%, 16.3 at 8%, and so on.
In one sense, the only part of the chart that matters for our purposes is the far right where we see current iOS version share: July. In another sense, the months from April to July are really important, because you can see the growth of iOS 16.5 over 4 months:
April: .33%
May: 2.72%
June: 43.17%
July: 54.62%
April and May are slow-roll launches where Apple is monitoring bugs and issues. In June the spigots open up, and iPhone users flood onto the new operating system. In July, the early adopter crowd that checks the Automatically Update Me box starts to run out of steam, and the pace of upgrades slows. The numbers will continue to grow over the next few months, but at a much reduced rate.
That’s a problem for the mobile attribution space.
iOS 16.6 might have the updated code that fixes the SKAdNetwork bug: great. But it won’t get into all devices instantly. In fact, it could take months. Apple absolutely has the ability to open the floodgates wider and faster — they clearly did for iOS 15.6, which breached 50% in just a month — but will they for an issue that approximately zero of their end users will ever know or care about?
We’ll see.
Problem #2 is all the other iOS versions.
In many cases you have Apple users who are on older devices, and they’ve maxed out the OS upgrade cycle for their hardware. That often means that only critical releases make it out to that crowd. That group is probably around 30% of all iPhone owners, as you can see by the high-water mark of iOS 15.5 at near 70% in July 2022.
True, this is less of an issue than it might seem, however, because a big chunk of the cohort of people with older phones is well … old people. They don’t install a ton of apps, and they’re not a big user acquisition target. It is important to remember, however, that very young people and teens often get hand-me-down devices, and they’ve an important early-adopter market.
So where do we stand with SKAN 4?
When it’s all said and done, a few things are clear:
The bug is fixed: this is good
The fix is going to take some time to get out to the majority of the market … and that “some time” could easily be 3 months
Part of the market may NEVER get the fix
Ad networks that rolled out SKAN 4 support and kicked off the SKAN 4 inflection point I wrote about just 10 days ago are being forced to revert back to SKAN 3 (so much for my glorious inflection point)
Now they’ll have to wait 30 to 120 days and gauge iOS upgrade cycles before being able to re-release SKAN 4 support
Ad networks that haven’t rolled out SKAN 4 support can sit back, chuckle, be happy that they were late, and continue finalizing their SKAN 4 optimization code at their leisure
We have all said it many times: what a wonderful crazy ever-changing world of mobile marketing and adtech we live in. There is always something to keep you on your toes!
Growing mobile apps has never been harder. If you’re just starting your mobile app growth campaign, you need an MMP in 2023 to navigate that journey to your first million users. And if you’re already big, the right MMP will fuel your path to continued growth and predictable profitability.
Every growth marketer knows that their growth stack is critical to success.
Employing the right growth tech in the right ways will feed your decisions with data, protect you from underperforming campaigns, and help you build your LTV models. Putting the right MMP at the center of your growth stack will also provide essential data from the world’s biggest ad networks and platforms that you simply can’t get anywhere else.
Measuring marketing results You have many campaigns with multiple partners and huge numbers of creative elements. Measure them all in one place with an MMP.
Capturing and aggregating spend data across every ad partner Growth rookies don’t know how hard it is to capture and aggregate your spend across platforms, geos, currencies, time zones, and campaigns. They also don’t understand how important that data is to feed your models and your future investment.
Calculating lifetime value (LTV) of users, players, or customers It’s pretty hard to know your LTV if you don’t know your costs or your revenue. It’s also hard if you can’t connect specific costs with specific revenue from specific campaigns and channels. But getting all these answers from an MMP like Singular makes it easier.
Simplifying integration, compliance, and optimization for emerging mobile attribution models like SKAdNetwork and soon Privacy Sandbox for Android SKAN is complicated. Privacy Sandbox for Android is more complicated. You need to focus on your app and your app’s growth, not every single detail about how these new marketing measurement privacy frameworks operate. Let your MMP do the heavy lifting.
Optimizing in-progress campaigns The big platforms and channels will optimize the campaigns you’re running on them for you, in most cases. But thanks to your MMP, you can see and compare global performance, including incrementality. That helps you optimize the big picture as well as the details.
Organizing campaign data No-one knows how disorganized campaigns can get when you really start marketing. Even 10 or 15 — a tiny number for most — can get out of hand. Organize all your campaigns and the data you need from them in your MMP dashboard. Built-in data governance helps.
Enriching marketing and conversion data for value-added insights So you’re doing SKAdNetwork. How do you tell your ad partners what conversion events matter to you, and what to optimize on? When you get SKAN postbacks from Apple, how do you decode what they mean? You guessed it: your MMP does it for you.
Collecting data from major platforms like Facebook/Meta, Google, Snap, Twitter, Tiktok, and others that only offer full data access to a small number of trusted partners Some of the biggest platforms on the planet only offer full data to trusted mobile measurement partners. There’s a small number of these companies globally, and they follow stringent guidelines and requirements to earn platform trust. Get all the data you need with an MMP.
Streaming data into BI systems easily, efficiently, immediately When you start, your MMP’s dashboard is probably sufficient. But as you scale, you likely need to integrate fresh data into your internal BI systems to drive costing, LTV, payback periods, ROAS, and other critical competitive information. Thanks to Marketing ETL from MMPs like Singular, you can get it easily, quickly, and reliably.
Combining spend and conversion data to calculate overall and campaign-level return on ad spend Should you spend more on channel A? Less on channel B? Cut off channel C entirely? You have a good overview of ROAS thanks to your MMP, providing the data you need to make that kind of decision.
Providing a single view of global performance Knowing what’s going on is great. Getting it all in one place with guaranteed normalized and standardized data is better.
Verifying ad partner performance Trust but verify, right? Everyone tells you all their traffic is great, high quality, fraud-free, viewable, and high converting. All of that is hard to verify, except when you have an MMP that verifies what is ultimately the only thing you need to know: did … it … drive … conversions?
Protecting advertisers from ad fraud Ad networks don’t have to be high fraud to be bad, but high fraud results in the worst form of bad ad spend. The right MMP will protect you from fraud in real time, meaning no post-campaign reconciliation hell. The right MMP, like Singular, will also do that as part of its service, not as an add-on charge.
Creating audiences for episode and live/dynamic marketing campaigns Being able to create audiences from your best users, your worst users, your former users, and any detailed combination of in-app activity is huge for being able to grow with new partners.
Navigating complexities in partner management by standardizing data definitions and terminologies, and normalizing both spend and conversion data Adding up conversion events, costs, or actions is not as simple as adding when different platforms have different metrics. Or, worse, the same metric names with different meanings. MMPs like Singular simplify all of that for you.
Providing multi-platform measurement via deep linking, deferred deep linking, and tracking capabilities User acquisition isn’t as simple as it once was. Now you’re in the era of alt-UA, with CTV, influencers, desktop, SEO, console, out-of-home, and other channels joining in-app ad campaigns. Being able to capture your results from all of them is critical, and your MMP can do that.
Ensuring legal compliance with all applicable privacy legislation and platform requirements Ensuring you’re compliant with COPPA and GDPR and CCPA and all the other privacy acts and governmental regulations, not to mention platform guidelines around tracking and transparency and privacy, could be a full-time job. Unless you outsource it to your MMP.
The 2023 MMP buyer’s guide
No one needs to tell you that growing mobile apps has never been harder. No one needs to tell you that you need a trusted partner for accurate, unbiased data from all your ad networks. And no one needs to tell you that you need world-class modeling for all the data you’ll never get, thanks to privacy changes.
Singular is that partner.
And Singular provides the insight you need.
But don’t take our word for it. This guide will help you navigate the process of finding a next-generation mobile measurement partner to accelerate your growth. But we’ll also show you what Singular customers say about us. And we’ll show you why unbiased marketers at the social software review platform G2 say Singular is best.
The guide will also give you the 12 core groups of features you need to look for in an MMP, and the 10 steps to picking the right MMP for you. The guide will also provide the 10 top questions to ask your potential MMP partners before making your final selection, and finally, the 6 key things you cannot compromise when deciding to work with an MMP.
If you’re brand-new, Singular does have a free tier.
If you’re well-established and already successful, Singular has a switcher’s guide to make your transition as smooth as it can possibly be.
As promised back in June, Apple released its initial list of required reason APIs this morning in 5 categories: file timestamp APIs, system boot time APIs, disk space APIs, active keyboard APIs, and user defaults APIs. Most of them are obviously related to Apple’s goal of making device fingerprinting impossible or at least ineffective, but at least one of them might cause some challenges for most app developers.
Required reason APIs will need to be declared starting in fall of 2023 when you upload a new app or app update. As of fall, however, you’ll just receive an emailed notice if you haven’t declared a reason why you’re using the API. In spring of 2024, however, you’ll be required to select from a list of approved reasons for each required reason API before you can upload your app or update at all.
Here are the 30 APIs and functions that Apple has (so far) included in the list:
File timestamp APIs
creationDate
modificationDate
fileModificationDate
contentModificationDateKey
creationDateKey
getattrlist
getattrlistbulk
fgetattrlist
stat
fstat
fstatat
lstat
getattrlistat
System boot time APIs
systemUptime
mach_absolute_time()
Disk space APIs
volumeAvailableCapacityKey
volumeAvailableCapacityForImportantUsageKey
volumeAvailableCapacityForOpportunisticUsageKey
volumeTotalCapacityKey
systemFreeSize
systemSize
states
statvfs
fstatfs
fstatvfs
getattrlist
fgetattrlist
getattrlistat
Active keyboard APIs
activeInputModes
User defaults APIs
UserDefaults
Potential challenges for at least 1 category
It’s obvious that Apple is targeting parameters that adtech companies use for precise fingerprinting: levels of disk space, timestamps, and so on.
One required reason API might, however, be a bit more challenging for developers: user defaults. A significant percentage of developers use the UserDefaults API to store app preferences rather than saving them to a file. One estimate is perhaps 90% of apps do this. If so, quite a few developers will need to provide a reason or switch to a different method of enabling in-app preferences.
Measurement impact of required reason APIs
For developers and marketers who are already fully engaged with Apple’s SKAdNetwork attribution framework, submitting an answer for each required reason API should be simple and quick. In addition, there is zero measurement impact if you’re already running SKAN campaigns and using Singular’s modeling and your own first-party in-app events to enrich the resulting measurement data.
For others who might be accessing the 30% of the adtech inventory that still offers fingerprinting, this continues to close the door on tracking.
I would not be shocked if this list is semi-dynamic and changes somewhat over time as fingerprinting adtech vendors play some cat-and-mouse games with Apple over different data sources.
Does your app need a kick in the butt? A marketing boost? A little bottle of app growth nitrous to pour into your mobile marketing engine and kickstart growth? Yeah. I thought so. Who doesn’t need an app marketing boost?
It’s a challenging time.
SKAN 4 is just hitting its inflection point, Twitter is becoming X, Threads is becoming Twitter, Meta and Google and all the other major growth partners are updating their algorithms to model iOS campaigns, and Privacy Sandbox on Android is just around the corner. So it’s a good time to reevaluate your app marketing strategy and find an app marketing boost for the second half of 2023.
Here are 20 app marketing strategy tips for kickstarting growth without breaking the bank. Even in a down economy.
Let’s dump some creative gasoline into your growth stack and fire up your installs.
1. Host an in-app event
Make Apple and Google your user acquisition partner by hosting an in-app event, competition, or challenge. Maybe it’s a tournament. Maybe it’s a virtual meet-up. Maybe it’s a debate. Maybe it’s a meet-the-allstars. Whatever: invent something cool.
Then, thanks to the magic of in-app events on iOS, Apple will surface your event in 3 places:
Your app listing page
Search results for relevant queries in the App Store
Editorially-curated selections on Today, Games, and Apps tabs in the App Store
The hope: new user acquisition due to higher visibility.
Side benefits: better user engagement. More excitement for you, with something cool happening in your app. Social noise with possible virality.
In our recent webinar on aligning organic and paid user acquisition, GameHive’s head of growth Mary Kim told us that this strategy is particularly strong on Android, where they’ve used it to get featured on Google Play with impressive results. Google calls this Promotional Content, formerly LiveOps.
2. Curate country-specific app ratings and reviews
As you know, Android now has country-specific ratings and reviews. It’s not just one big bucket now. So decide which countries you want to focus on, and invest some energy responding to existing reviews and asking for additional ones where you need better ratings or fresher reviews.
A little effort can mean a nice boost in ratings, and that’s going to assist both in search ranking and in social proof for conversions from views to installs.
Engage local teams if you have them, or work with an agency.
3. Drop a segmented campaign straight to a custom product page
You know Apple enables custom product pages. You know that Google has up to 50 custom store listings. But if you haven’t yet quite got around to actually using them, you’re missing out on higher CTR and CVR.
So cancel the plans (sorry, dreams) for the Super Bowl Ad and build 5 segments of people that use your app or play your game. Customize a special ad/social/content campaign just for each one, and route the ads to the appropriate app listing page tailored just for the right segment. Boost the campaigns that convert, starve the ones that don’t, evolve those that look promising.
(Bonus points and a gold star if you can get a custom in-app onboarding flow to sync up to the ads and the app listing page.)
And voila: you’re finetuning your segmentation strategy, which the product team might like, and you’re growing your app with people who need or want what you’ve got, and you’ve boosted retention with higher engagement too.
Let me count on my fingers: 1, 2, 3 wins.
4. Get better data from Singular to boost your app marketing
I need worse data, said no marketing drone ever.
You need the best data, the cleanest data, the most actionable data. I kinda think we can help you with that. You need a mobile measurement partner, but not just any MMP: you need the next-generation mobile measurement partner for the privacy era.
So ask these people … they’ll know more about getting you exactly the intelligence that you need, for each team member you have, in world-class time, wherever you need data.
5. Model data to make up for privacy gaps
Getting better data sounds great, and it is. But anyone who’s tried to grow iOS apps at scale in the past year knows, missing/omitted/censored data is just a fact of life right now.
You can’t fix what you don’t have, right?
Actually, you can.
You can model for missing data using some smart AI and data science and privacy-safe first-party data that give you much better insight into what’s actually happening in your app. It’s called SKAN Advanced Analytics, and it’s available now. The key is: it makes SKAN performant. And to a higher level than any other MMP’s SKAN solution.
Why do 99% of car ads suck? Because they all look the same: roads, landscapes, vistas, red cars, and happy people doing things most worker bees like us rarely out and do.
Study the ads your top competitors put out. Find patterns. Realize that humans are pattern-recognition machines, and once we identify them and realize they’re safe, we start to tune them out. Yes: it’s possible to advertise in a way that accelerates ad blindness.
Make new patterns, and differentiate your marketing.
That way you break the mould and defeat ad blindness.
7. Farm, don’t hunt
We’re all very aware of the mobile’s massively leaky bucket problem. We’re pouring in users by the thousands on the top, and they’re flowing like sand through our fingers out the bottom.
Don’t just keep spending more money on acquisition.
Set a goal to improve retention by .5 % or 1% a month. (Maybe that’s low for you. Maybe that’s high. The point is: set a goal and track your progress.)
Then connect all the dots: why do people churn? What is common about people who don’t? Keep an eye out for different demographics, segments, or behavioral patterns, and build better onboarding. Build better initial app experiences. Build sequences for people to level up in your app.
The goal is to keep more of what you hunt. (Or, PG version: farm, don’t hunt.)
The benefit: much less wasted UA money. And over time, increasingly better LTV.
8. People don’t buy what they don’t know
Look, performance marketing is great, but sometimes you just gotta do some brand.
The typical marketing funnel, as you are painfully aware, is:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Customer Relationship
Retention
Most mobile games blast straight to step 3, CONVERSION BABY. It’s the marketing equivalent of trying to hit a homer on your first at-bat, or sell the house with one sign, or win the lottery by buying one ticket.
Give people a minute! Let them get to know you!
If they don’t know your app at all, try a little brand marketing in the cheapest way possible. You want real ads that really show up for real people — check out Singular’s fraud protections — but you’re not looking to close the deal. You just want people to see your name, colors, logo in some relevant context … even if they see it subliminally.
Make it funky/fun/awesome, and make it memorable. Add some organic. Add some social. Offer tools for your users to share experiences or gameplay.
Then pair it with performance ads, and measure the organic lift your performance ads get when they’re delivered to a warmed-up audience versus served cold.
9. Surface your best content as native ads
Do people do amazing things in your app? Create cool art? Slay evil dragons? Say funny stuff? Make funky memes?
Make them the stars of your social, content, and paid ad campaigns. Capture some video, get permission, and share it as a native ad on a contextually-relevant platform … “So this just happened on [insert app name here] …”
10. Try podcast ads, but don’t make this 1 big mistake
Podcast ads are an undersaturated opportunity that you can exploit IF, repeat IF, you do it right.
You can tightly segment podcast audiences by the podcasts you promote, so that’s good. And when people are listening to podcasts, they’re often commuting or biking or working, so they’re a captive (audio) audience, which is also good.
Just one thing: don’t let the podcast host read your ad before the content with all the other ads. People know by now to skip 15 or 30 or 250 seconds forward until they get the actual podcast they want to listen to. For some of my favorite podcasts, it’s literally 3 to 5 minutes of solid ads, so I just fast forward.
If you’re contracting with podcasters either individually or via a platform, get them to drop it in 5 minutes in, 15 minutes in, or 30 minutes into the podcast.
Spotify, iHeart, and others offer programmatic placement and drop-in as well, and that can be much better for engagement than a beginning-of-show mention.
(Better yet, get multiple mentions in the same show, with different messages, each personalized by the podcast host.)
11. Pump your users up
Your app users are pretty cool people with pretty cool lives and pretty cool social lives. When they do something pretty cool in your pretty cool app … let them share it.
And not just with a generic text share to Twitter, but a full personalized not-too-cheesy award image that they can share to their IG story and celebrate knocking off 1,000,000 zombies. Or whatever pretty cool people do you in your app.
Happy users reproduce themselves by welcoming in others, and last I checked, that’s good for you.
12. 1000X your creatives to kickstart your app marketing success
Mobile marketing influencers agree: creative is one of your last levers for boosting app growth. You’ve heard it 100 times. So what are you going to do about it … work your designers and writers to the bone?
Nope.
Offload creative to the machine. Use the generative AI tools that are available. I mean, you need that spark from a human, but talk to any of 10 different vendors who will take your app marketing ingredients and bake about 25 million different cakes (errr, mobile ads) with them. AI is a beast: make it work for you.
Or, if you’re a giant publisher and you have worker bees and cycles to burn, roll your own.
13. Back to the future, baby (WWW for the win)
Remember the World Wide Web when we called it that? And capitalized it. And told people we were surfing after spending an hour listening to the beeping and whistling of our crappy 33.6 baud modems?
Yep, the web.
Place app ads on websites that are likely to be accessed by people on mobile (quick hint: that’s most of them) and are contextually relevant to your app or game. It’s cheaper, so you can go broader (see #8 about brand marketing) and since they’re on mobile, you’re one deep link click away from another happy person installing your app.
Bonus: put a landing page in for extra insights, which might make up the extra step funnel loss.
14. Buy the dip
Economic dips suck.
But buying the dip is good advice for people who have dry powder (a bit of extra capital laid away for a rainy day) and the foresight to see that ads are now cheaper, and that makes acquisition more economical, meaning your LTV doesn’t have to be quite as high to justify your ad spend.
It’s essentially buy low, sell high for mobile marketing (except there’s no selling).
15. Boost engagement with rewarded ads in your app for your app
You can’t buy love, but you earn better engagement and therefore retention in your app basically for free. Didn’t know that, huh? Here’s how:
People don’t know how to do everything in your app
In fact, it’s almost certain there’s something cool they would do, if only they knew
Share a tutorial with them, but do it differently
Make it like a rewarded ad, so they earn a benefit for checking it out
Like this: Check out this tip and get gems/power up/discounts/etc
Essentially it is a rewarded ad, in your app, for your app. Watching it makes your users/players/customers smarter about using your app, and shares cool stuff they can do with the app they already have. That might just head off app abandonment at the pass, it’s likely to boost engagement with more features and areas of your app, and it’s likely to increase retention.
Don’t believe me?
There’s a mobile game I play that I’ve spent about $250 with features I don’t yet fully understand. Things I have to collect to advance that I don’t know how to acquire. While it’s possible that I’m just a complete idiot … it’s also possible you have app users just like me. Boost their experience!
16. Let your app do the work
You’re not JUST a marketer, right? You’re also a strategist. A thinker. An executive. A keen observer of the mobile ecosystem, the human condition, and the deep mysteries of the universe. So you know that not all marketing problems need to be solved only by marketing solutions.
In many cases, the product can do the work.
I’m talking about PLG, AKA product led growth, and it’s about making your app so freakishly amazing, awesome, and wonderful that people can’t help but hear about it, search for it, install it, use it, and tell their moms and perfect strangers on the bus about it.
(Yeah, I know. This is one of those simple-but-not-easy tips. Sorry about that.)
17. Content marketing FTW via SEO
Why would anyone doing mobile app marketing concern themselves with content marketing and SEO? Because it’s worthwhile, for some apps in some verticals, to give people considering your app some additional evidence that it’s real, it’s big, it’s good, and it’s trustworthy.
Think subscription apps.
Think health apps, or fitness apps.
Think what it might take to convince someone that paying $5 or $10 a month is a good idea. They might need a little more information and little more persuading than you can easily fit in an app listing, or a mobile ad.
Boost your app footprint, your internet visibility, and your search engine profile with some content marketing that doesn’t suck. (In other words: actually useful, not formulaic, not essentially the same as 200 other brands, and not boring.) Better SEO ranking is going to contribute to better paid marketing performance.
18. Pause your ads, then burst them with a new campaign
If I see another Gardenscapes ad, I’ll probably die. The ad will reach through the fabric of space-time and literally tear my soul from my body, leaving me to float in existential angst for all eternity.
OK, that’s a bit dramatic.
But the point is, just like good speakers know how to vary volume, pitch, and intensity to keep people’s attention, good marketers know that a steady drone of advertising gets tuned out because it starts to fade into the scenery.
Don’t be that brand. Don’t be that app.
Sometimes, to boost your marketing impact, you have to pause your marketing efforts. Take a deep breath. Restart after a week or two. Then you can stand out from the walls and the screens and the other ads better, improving both clickthrough and conversion. (Oh, and it’s a nice incrementality check too.)
19. Calculate your organic multiplier
What you don’t know can’t make you smarter.
OK, that sounds obvious, but what would you do if you know that you generated 3 organic installs for every 1 paid install? Would it change how you did paid? Or, how you look at organic?
A user acquisition lead at a major studio just told me that they’ve seen this kind of organic multiplier, and it changed how they thought about ad pricing. Be wary, though: TikTok tends to have a larger organic multiplier thanks to a younger audience that shares more. Facebook tends to have a lower organic multiplier, but the users you get there tend to spend more.
So apply the organic multiplier with caution.
20. Oh dear, I only had 19 but already wrote the title
For some reason, 18 just doesn’t sound as good, so the 19th tip is one that you’ve already done: read this article.
(Insufferably lame, I know, but don’t you feel good for having already accomplished something today? Yay you. You totally rock.)
Here’s the challenge: implement just one of these tips. See how it goes. And let me know (Twitter is good) what changed, improved, or got worse.
Just one more thing …
If you need accurate marketing measurement that doesn’t suck, chat with Singular. Book a meeting here, and find out how Singular’s platform can gather all the data that’s possible, model the data that’s missing, and provide the insights you need to drive more profitable growth.
Thanks to Meta’s recent move to SKAN 4 postbacks we are seeing a significant jump in SKAN 4 industry-wide adoption. At the risk of being just a tad early, I’m calling it the SKAN 4 inflection point we’ve been waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for.
Since May 9, SKAN 4 adoption has been hovering around the 10% mark. It’s been a phase of testing, analyzing, refactoring, and optimizing for pretty much all the major ad networks and platforms.
But on July 18th, we saw significant movement that has turned into an emerging trend line: the SKAN 4 inflection point. The most recent data indicates we hit 23% SKAN 4 postbacks industry-wide, with no signs of slowing down.
The reason for the new trend?
Meta.
While Unity, AppLovin, and a raft of smaller ad networks have been leading the charge with SKAN 4 postback rates approaching the 70% level, the big players have been slower to enter the fray.
Not anymore.
Meta started its rollout of SKAN 4 support on July 17, and the result are pretty obvious. In a matter of just 5 days, Meta has gone from 5% SKAN 4 postbacks to 52%:
That is literally huge.
This quick transition is a confident move by one of the largest advertising platforms in the world. Such a massive and rapid adoption shows that Meta is pretty certain that they know how to optimize iOS campaigns and are comfortable releasing a flood of SKAN 4 postbacks. (Of course, it helps that the company’s Aggregated Event Measurement technology has evolved through at least 2 major milestones this year, giving Meta multiple ways to measure, optimize, and improve iOS campaigns.)
This is also a huge step for the industry.
It’s no secret that SKAN 4 has been in the birth process for a very long time. Apple announced it literally last June in WWDC 2022, after all. Now it is starting to feel like SKAN 4 is finally out of dev and into production.
“We’re excited to see SKAN 4 adoption start to take off,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv. “It’s been a long time since Apple introduced SKAN 4 last year, and the industry has had a lot of work to do to support this. Now that hard work is starting to come to fruition. The beneficiaries, of course, will be marketers: more signal, more data, more insight to make their campaigns smarter and better.”
More room to grow, of course
Being at 23% SKAN 4 means we’re still at 77% SKAN 3 and older. (Yeah, there’s still a few SKAN 2 postbacks floating around.)
And that means that there’s plenty of room to grow.
However, I expect TikTok, Google, and other ad networks to jump on the bandwagon fairly soon, which should boost the SKAN 4 percentage of postbacks well north of 50%. What we’ll also see is networks like Smadex, who are doing some fairly hard-core yo-yoing between SKAN 3 and SKAN 4, start to lock in their SKAN 4 systems, gain confidence in their SKAN 4 solution, and smooth out to a more consistent 70-100% SKAN 4 postback mix.
Check the SKAN 4 inflection point data yourself
All of this data, by the way, is from the public SKAN 4 Adoption Dashboard that Singular publishes. It is updated daily.
Check it anytime to see which ad networks are driving the SKAN 4 adoption, and where your favorite ad partners currently sit.
And, get the SKAN 4 transition guide
Hopefully you’re already set up your SKAN 4 postbacks in the Singular dashboard. They’re completely backwards compatible with SKAN 3, so you won’t lose any data from ad partners who aren’t on SKAN 4 yet.
Overwhelmed by the vast array of new generative AI marketing tools? Wondering which ones are the best for mobile marketers? What you need is a list of marketing-specific generative AI tools that you can use in your everyday working life.
Let’s be honest, though.
No one’s using 81 generative AI tools a day, just like none of your users, customers, or clients use 81 apps a day. But there’s likely 2 or 3 tools in here that will be just perfect for your tasks and workflow and will save you significant time and money.
Of course, I didn’t come up with this massive list of generative AI marketing tools by old-fashioned Googling. (That’s so 2010s.) I used GPT-4 and the There’s An AI For That plugin to generate most of this list. Plus, of course, a few that I know and use, and also a few that people have recommended to me.
Enjoy!
Generative AI marketing tools
Need to generate creative ideas? Here are some of the best generative AI tools for generating creative ideas. Just a quick note: I find them more useful as mind-expanders than actual perfect idea generators. Often we just need that idea out of far left field that will strike one particular synapse with a bolt of lighting and stimulate that perfect idea you needed.
One that isn’t here: GPT-4 from OpenAI. I often get great ideas from GPT-4.
Idea Generator: Generated business and creative ideas for the web.
Quilt & Create: Generates creative ideas through ideation.
Need to analyze data?
Here are some of the best generative AI tools for data analysis. Nothing beats a data scientist, of course, but getting time with one can be challenging. And even if you are a data scientist, do you really have all the time in the world to clean and normalize all your data and then also do all the analysis? Probably not.
Use AI to do some of the heavy lifting.
Sheet AI: Automate data analysis in Google Sheets.
Of course, if you have GPT-4, turn on the Code Interpreter. You’ll be able to upload data and get some pretty far-out insights from it.
Need help making ads?
Everyone needs help making ads, especially if you’ve already made about 10,000 of them and your mind is semi-fried from the long hard process. Here are some of the best generative AI tools for making ads.
Again, like other generative AI marketing tools, use these to create concepts and ideas that you can take and perfect. Of course, if you get super lucky, you might get usable creative right out of the box. Or from the prompt …
Clickable: Ad creation platform for multiple marketing channels.
AdCreative: Ad creative generation for social media marketing.
Ai-Ads: Optimized Google Ads for business advertising.
Designs AI: Unified content creation for diverse users.
AdswithAI: Personalized ad platform boosts e-commerce sales.
Need help making videos?
I make a lot of videos, and it takes a lot of time. If you don’t have that time, or don’t have an editor for the videos you do make, generative AI marketing tools are here to rescue you.
Here are some of the best AI tools for making marketing videos:
Boolvideo: Marketing video creation for e-commerce.
Waymark: Custom commercials from imported business details.
Oxolo: Product video creation for e-commerce businesses.
Who doesn’t? And working with your creative team can be tough … you need to submit a request via Monday or Asana, they probably want a creative brief and lots of details, and then everything still has to fit into a sprint at some point in the future … unless you’re the CEO and your requests go straight to the front of the queue.
Here are some of the best generative AI tools for creating art for mobile games or websites:
Ai Art Generator: Mobile app that generates unique art from text inputs.
TextureLab: An app for generating unique mobile wallpapers.
4AiPaw: Art creation through prompts and style selection.
I also get good results from Stable Diffusion, and I’ve used OpenAI’s Dall-E a few times with good results as well.
Need help managing user feedback or requests for help?
Customers! Can’t live without ‘em, can’t live with ‘em.
What you do want to do, of course, if you have some customers and would like to keep them (money is good) is serve them well. Answer them. Respond to them, and give them the information they need when they need it, which is usually right away.
Generative AI marketing tools can help, but caveat emptor.
No one likes automated phone systems, no one likes chatbots that can’t actually answer anything, and no one will like your generative AI customer service tool if it sucks. Maybe the best bet is to use these tools alongside your people.
Here are some of the best generative AI tools for automated customer service:
But AI to the rescue: here are some of the best AI tools for building apps. Just be aware that while there are a lot of tools and a lot of promises, none of them (or shall we be more polite and say few) deliver on their promises for mobile apps at least. There are more options for web apps, but generative AI solutions for mobile app development are still fairly rudimentary.
Need to make better prompts for generative AI tools?
Why do we need humans at all? I mean, we can prompt our generative AI marketing tools, but why not ask AI for better prompts to feed into generative AI platforms?
It’s very meta but also very useful since better prompts often result in the ridiculously incredible AI-generated art and other outputs that we’ll see from time to time on social media.
Here are some AI tools that can help you generate better prompts for generative AI tools:
PromptPerfect: Optimizes language prompts with intuitive interface.
Marketing and generative AI
The good news for marketers: we still need you. The other good news for marketers: generative AI for marketing tools is getting better and better, and can provide solid support for doing more than you ever thought possible, and quicker too.
But as with everything in a new, exploding, and super-hyped space, mentally prepare yourself to be bitterly disappointed at least 3 times for every WOW that escapes your mouth when you see the output of a generative AI tool.
It’s early. There are incredible generative AI marketing tools.