Last year, more than two million apps were downloaded from Google Store and the Apple App Store had similar numbers. However, developers often lack marketing experience – which is also different from digital marketing. What are the main differences, how the mobile phone industry has changed in the last 5 years and what are the newest trends – you can find out in this interview with the owner of the mobile marketing agency of the year, Peter Fodor.
(taken over from Tyinternety.cz, translated and shortened)
How did you get started with marketing?
I worked in advertising for five years and before that I had studied marketing. I worked for clients like Vodafone and Nestlé, so basically for multinational companies but somewhere around the year 2011 I became really fed up with it. One of the reasons for this were the people, their “quality” and I could also see that the world was changing, so I wanted to work in a different kind of business.
Was it a big change?
It was quite dramatic as at the time I was expecting my first child and I told my wife that I want to start working in a completely new field. I was never a developer, I had never programmed, I never worked in design but me and my colleague from the agency decided that it is now or never. We were both around 30 and I thought it was about time I finally get started. So, we started making games for phones, first for iPhones, later for Android and in the end also desktop games. We released 8 games and apps, while we were able to reach 12 million downloads without spending any money on media.
So, why did you change it to work in mobile marketing?
Between the years 2011 and 2015 when we had our studio, there was a big shift in the gaming industry and in paid games – from premium to freemium. It was the time when games like Clash of Clans or Candy Crush appeared. Also, we were not able to do make the same switch because it required a completely different approach to designing games, we would need a team and to create different types of games.
At the same time, people started asking us if we could help them with the marketing of their mobile titles, we were always better at distribution than at monetization. That is why I started helping our first clients in 2015 from the Czech Republic, America and Poland. The results were good, it really was a well-functioning symbiosis. However, I knew that I needed data specialists, designers and acquisition managers, which led to the creation of a separate company – AppAgent.
What services do you offer?
We work for companies, that specialize in their own product, in what they are good at. Also, we help them fill any gaps they may have in marketing, either because they are not interested in it or because they simply don’t know how to do it. For example, if it’s a small Startup, we might provide them with complete marketing services. With larger companies we usually just fill some gaps they may have – for example, it can be difficult for them to find a person, who can do the acquisition of users or for making advertisements. 90% of our clients are from abroad such as the US or across Scandinavia, all the way to Hong Kong.
What is the biggest difference between normal marketing and marketing for mobile phone apps?
One considerable difference is that everything we do can be tracked as the return of the investment. Mobile marketing is all about numbers, data, automatization and in my opinion, it can be a bit “hardcore” for usual marketers. This is what I like about it. I work in a field where if I decide to invest a dollar, I want two back and I can precisely evaluate this investment.
Of course, this can be due to the fact that technologies have changed a lot since 2010.
Absolutely, but the most important thing is the mindset of the people who do it. A number of top mobile marketers are former financiers, investors or overall people from financial markets. Surprisingly, these people are more useful than creative marketers from the previous era because we need them to be able to work with numbers – the same way they would on financial markets.
How would you compare mobile and digital marketing over time? Are these two areas becoming more and more similar or rather distant?
Over time, the differences between these two are growing because digital and mobile offer different tools, smart gadgets offer a lot more interactions for users. We know who you are, where you are flying, when you use your phone for shopping, for boarding a plane, for booking plane tickets, etc. In the end, we can even send you a push notification because we know that you have recently been to Barcelona, before that you went to Rome and now you might like to visit Amsterdam. This is not possible on a website as you are either dependent on an email or on the notifications of the browser. A mobile phone provides a much closer connection and much richer data.
What will be the biggest challenge in mobile marketing in the upcoming years?
I think that the transformation of manual work into automatization on a large scale and more technology throughout the whole field.
How are you managing to stand up to this challenge?
We make more products and we learn about more business cases than anyone else, so we also have a great number of learning cycles. We are able to quickly gain information and we develop our own marketing analytics and tools. That is why we can help our clients fill this gap and transfer their business. All before it is too late for them.
The original article: https://tyinternety.cz/technologie/petr-fodor-appagent-mobil-na-rozdil-od-digitalu-poskytuje-tesnejsi-propojeni-a-mnohem-bohatsi-data/
