The secret to mobile app growth

Imagine for a second you are a firefighter. You get the call to action, you load up the truck and you’re ready to go to battle. Emotions are high, and as you pull out of the station you realize the fire truck won’t move faster than 5 mph. All of your training and preparation doesn’t matter because you don’t make it there in time.

This is a lot like app marketing.

You are constantly tasked with keeping up with the pace of your consumers. This requires both extensive domain expertise as well as a set of marketing & analytics tools that allow you to do your job effectively. Part of the challenge, however, is that the ecosystem of app tools and services is constantly evolving. If you are successful, though, new challenges, as well as new opportunities, will emerge as the needs of the business evolve. But what if you become stuck because the tools that got you from Point A to Point B don’t get you to Point C and beyond? The pace of innovation within the app tech space is moving so fast that the vendor you chose to go with 6 months ago may not be providing the most innovative offering anymore. Even the way you did segmentation before may not make sense after some time.

So what do you do? You scramble to find a vendor and beg someone in product to negotiate with engineering to slot in a new SDK for the next release, which isn’t for a week or two, and then you have to wait until the newest version of the app is approved by the app store a few days after that.

Just like in the firefighter analogy, it’s too late. And what happens the next time there is an issue and there is no political capital left to expand? Being agile and moving fast is critical in-app marketing because without speed & control nothing else matters. The fire consumes the house and it’s over.

So how can you begin to address this? It starts with getting control of your data. Implementing a data layer not only provides numerous technical benefits but also gives the app marketer on-demand access to their data with total control over how much and what type of data gets sent to each partner. This is critical for segmentation and activation, preventing vendor lock-in, and solving for privacy and security.

In addition to the immediate use cases, here are the three reasons why app marketers need to be thinking about improving speed through better data control.

Moving faster allows you to make more money. The demands of your consumers change at an amazing rate, and the pace of innovation throughout the industry moves just as fast – and in the middle of it all is you. Start by mapping behaviors to goals and goals to tech solutions. This will allow you to optimize your stack to be able to capitalize on any opportunity at any time. If you don’t have on-demand access to the latest tools, you are missing opportunities to create that alignment and are easily leaving money on the table.

There is no such thing as “set it and forget it.” In being consumer-obsessed, you know that the demands of the customer are always evolving. As a result, what worked for you yesterday surely won’t work forever, especially as your audience grows. You will fatigue existing tactics and certain tactics will become outdated. By taking control of your data, you create predictability and take control of your ability to execute.

Moving fast creates opportunities to solve challenges that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Ultimately, your job as an app marketer is to always remain ready and agile. You need to adopt an “always on” mindset where you readily have access to your data in order to address the constantly evolving needs of the business. There are lots of tools out there, and this list is growing at an exponential rate. All of the various app services are good at different things and can create value at different stages of the business, but embedding services manually and creating vendor lock can slow down your business and cause you to miss out on key opportunities. The key to app marketing success is speed and to move fast you need to get control of your data.

If you are an app marketer and want to find out more about how mParticle allows you to keep pace with your consumers, please drop us a line at info@mparticle.com.