building a community around a mobile application

BUILDING A COMMUNITY AROUND A MOBILE APPLICATION

Vlada Pechenaya- Growth Marketing at Twentify

MY STORY

ISTANBUL, NOT CONSTANTINOPLE

LONDON CALLING

HOW I BECAME A SQUIRREL

145.000 USERS IN 5 COUNTRIES

COMMUNITY BUILDING &SQUIRREL LOVE

““Getting a mobile app noticed in the increasingly crowded mobile app market is more difficult than ever.”

DEVELOPMENT STAGE

Building Community From the Beginning of Development Is a Must!

DEVELOPMENT➤ Landing page with a sign up form to gather early leads and to

build an email database. ➤ Lots and lots of market research and customer development- go

and speak to people. ➤ Getting early feedback. ➤ Identifying influencers and people who might be interested in

your product. ➤ Gathering early brand ambassadors and beta-testers. ➤ Building a reputation inside relevant networks and mobile

review websites and blogs by commenting and building relationships.

➤ Building marketing assets such as: responsive, clear website, social media channels, branding, icons, video, etc.

➤ Writing a blog, activating content marketing early on.

Tell Your Story and Make It Interesting!

LAUNCH

Instead of a boring press release, tell a personal story of developing the app. People want to hear stories about people.

Make sure you spell out the benefits of your product well, think in terms of how your app makes the lives of users better or easier.

Prepare a press kit, including app icons, app description, screenshots, press releases, company profile, company logo. You can also go one step further and include video, quotes, FAQ sheets.

-Ankit Srivastava “How my first app got , 2 million downloads within first year without spending any money” via Medium

App Presentation A- Amateur Version that got me around 100 downloads a day from Facebook groups.

App Presentation B- Professional Version that got me around 1200 downloads a day from Facebook groups

PRESENTATION MATTERS

PROFESSIONALLY DESIGNED SCREENSHOTS

WEBSITE

SOCIAL PROOF

BUILDING A CROWD? START WITH CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT

Customer development has been proposed as a part of Lean Startup methodology as a groundbreaking approach to discovering the customer needs. 

TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE REALLY WELL➤ Establish User Segments

➤ Define Personas, as detailed as possible

➤ Use Socioeconomic Status (SES) categories as guidance

➤ One-on-one interviews

➤ Focus Groups

➤ Surveys

➤ Live Support Feedback

➤ Always Asking for Feedback

Through Activities Such As

USER COMMUNICATION ➤ Live Chat

➤ Push Notifications

➤ Email

➤ Helpdesk/ Live Support

➤ CRM (Segmentation)

➤ Analytics

➤ Getting direct responses to every communication

INTERCOM

➤ Setting up attributes and custom events for segmentation and analytics

➤ Tracking communication metrics such as open rate, click rate, response rate

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS ➤ Be newsworthy/ specific

➤ Be engaging

➤ Speak their language

➤ Include interesting content

➤ Establish the right number of push notifications for your users

➤ Be timely and appropriate, don’t bother them in their rest time and during dinner

➤ Take advantage of time and location flexibility

➤ Encourage direct responses & feedback

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

SOCIAL MEDIA

USER-GENERATED CONTESTS

ENGAGEMENT-ASK THEIR OPINION

CONSISTENT VISUAL LANGUAGE

#PARABIZEHEPLAZIM

UGC CONTESTS

UGC CONTESTS

OUR USERS ROCK!

EMAIL MARKETING

Squirrel Weekly- OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

ACQUISITION

VIRAL LOOPS

ENGAGEMENT METRICSCommunity Metrics: ➤ New Signups ➤ Active Users ➤ Active/Signups Rate=Conversion

Rate ➤ Organic Acquisition ➤ Paid Acquisition ➤ Organic vs Paid acquisition

Metrics for Facebook Acquisition: ➤ Results- Number of Installs ➤ Reach ➤ Cost per Result, or CPI (Cost per Install) ➤ Amount Spent ➤ CTR

Twitter Metrics: ➤ Twitter Followers (end of the

month) ➤ New Followers ➤ Follower Growth Rate

➤ Tweet Impressions  ➤ Impressions Growth Rate 

➤ Profile Visits ➤ Profile Visits Growth Rate

➤ Number of Engagements ➤ Engagement Rate 

Facebook Metrics: Reach ➤ 28 Days Total Reach ➤ 28 Days Organic Reach ➤ 28 Days Paid Reach

Page Metrics ➤ New Page Likes  ➤ Lifetime Total Likes

Engagement ➤ 28 Days Page Engaged Users ➤ Engagement Rate=(Engaged

Users/Reached Users)×100

➤ 28 Days Organic impressions of your posts

➤ 28 Days Paid impressions of your posts

GAMIFICATIONGamification helps with engagement, behaviour modification, retention, loyalty and monetisation.

GAMIFICATION

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products -Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover

GAMIFICATION

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps -Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products -Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover

Herkes için Oyunlaştırma -Ercan Altuğ Yılmaz and Niels Van Der Linden

““A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%”

-Bain & Co

IMPROVING RETENTION

IMPROVING RETENTION

Last Seen 15 Days Ago Email Last Seen 30 Days Ago Email

GROWTH HACKING ➤ Targeting communities on Quora, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Qualaroo (Quora+Mechanical Turk growth

hack) ➤ Target Youtubers in your niche with highest view count and ask to review your app ➤ Identifying influencers with tools such as Little Bird, FollowerWonk, BuzzSumo, Kred and Klout and

striking partnerships ➤ Reaching entrepreneurs and startup communities on Facebook, angel.co, f6s.com, AngelList, Slack

channels ➤ If you have some marketing traction, promote your stories on Growth Hackers, Qualaroo, Inbound.org,

Hacker News. ➤ When you have a following and community, launching on Product Hunt, asking for support and up votes ➤ IFTT recipes for targeting competitors, automation, user activity tracking (for example, Set IFTT recipe

finding bad Tweets about competitors, and reply to those tweets directly) ➤ Ask for app reviews from our favourite users ➤ Blog about your startup life ➤ Ask users to submit their stories using your product and feature best stories ➤ Invite users to suggest new features and collaborate on some public projects ➤ Inbuilt referral program into the program (Dropbox)

TRY BOUNTY FOR YOURSELF-WWW.GETBOUNTY.CO

Linkedin: https://tr.linkedin.com/in/vladapechenaya

Twitter: @vlada_pechenaya Website: itsvlada.comLet’s Connect!