Fueling your App Growth Mindset for 2022: Advice from 8 Mobile Industry Leaders
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There’s something about a new year. A fresh start. New opportunities. Growth.
Just like with every year, 2022 promises to have its ups and downs, its challenges and rewards, its achievements and setbacks. It’s not what the new year brings to us, but what we bring to the new year.
What we’d most like to encourage everyone to bring into the new year is a growth mindset. Because change is inevitable and the best we can do is not only grow with the change—but lead the change.
One of AGN’s highlights for 2021 was the launch of our podcast, “The App Growth Show.” Although still in its infancy, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting an amazing array of mobile app experts that have shared memorable advice with our audience—with an amazing lineup already planned for 2022 (so stay tuned!).
Here we’d like to share priceless advice from 8 mobile industry leaders we’ve had the pleasure of working with to help you fuel your App Growth Mindset for 2022.
Enjoy!
There is a lot to be excited about! Especially the proliferation of different emerging trends and technologies coming together: artificial intelligence, 5G, quantum computing, blockchains, cryptocurrencies, connected homes, generic predictions, and meatless meat. However, the most intriguing is the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, automation, and remote work being adopted across many business processes and customer experiences. This has led to new human behaviors and habits where technology plays a crucial role in enabling the world to survive and thrive post the pandemic.
There’s the allure of acquiring lots of users and scaling really quickly but if you have a leaky funnel and you haven’t proven value, that money is wasted. In the early stages, your budget should be focused on creating a really great product that retains users, that people pay for, that people pay for and, ultimately—if you can get your users to be amplifiers—you’re going to get ahead of the game. After you accomplish all of these steps, you do need to invest in marketing to get to the next level.”
It’s really important to understand the customer journey of your app—each step that your users take, the emotions they have, ways you can help them move to another stage of the journey—you need to understand the full flow to see the concrete items that you need to fine tune to improve the quality of your app and improve the quality of communication with the user. Once you’ve identified the flow, you can use this information to build your marketing strategy.”
One of my mantras is: You want to turn every user into an evangelist of the product. That’s the ultimate goal. You’re not going to complete 100% of that but capturing them—whether that’s push notification, email, SMS—is a critical way you can build the relationship with a higher percentage of people that downloaded your app. And the more you can bend that curve positively, the more it has a monumental, positive impact on your business results.”
Gamification can really help with those major KPIs, like how many times users log into your app and the session time. But you should really think about your business goals in terms of: ‘What do I want my user to do?’ and ‘What is the intrinsic value that we offer the end user and how will we get them to understand this value as quickly as possible?’ And then the general engagement of coming back and spending time in the app will almost come automatically.”
Be clear on your vision. Then go validate it without a product—go test it on social media, on Reddit—figure out if there’s a community of people that actually want what you’re going to build. Once you’ve validated that, go find partners that can help you build it. Partners can help you keep your team lean and focused on execution. Stay super focused and test what you’ve built. Then test again and learn, and again and again—rely on the data and keep listening to your users along the way.”
There’s a willingness on the part of the consumer to share information in order to get a more customized, personalized experience. If they’re receiving this efficiently and are rewarded for some form of loyalty, then they’re going to be more likely to work with that brand. On the other hand, if they’ve downloaded an app, and that app is ignoring them—say, they’ve visited and haven’t been back and the brand hasn’t said ‘how can we help you?’ —there’s this extraordinary drop off of people who try an app and never go back. And a lot of it has simply to do with whether or not a brand has said ‘hello’ or ‘thanks for stopping by.’ It’s just fundamental human behavior.
Having helped so many different apps, I’d have to say a key part of the marketing strategy is to understand the current trends and leverage that with the powerful tools available, whether it’s revenue tracking, user engagement or campaign management & attribution. As an agency, our goal is to get the right resources into the hands of our clients so they can boost their app to new heights. You’d be surprised how many apps don’t have the right infrastructure to really engage their users and track the performance of such experiments. So my advice to growing apps would be to first think about how they’re going to interact with users once their app is live and how they will efficiently introduce changes to an already existing build.”
