Subtitles section Play video
>>> Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Patrick Mork.
[ Applause ] >>Patrick Mork: Thank you. It's great to see
everybody today. Welcome to the marketing session of apps marketing 101 for developers
for Google Play. Delighted to see everybody here. It's been
a pretty amazing day, at least to say it's been a surprise, it's been full of surprises
even for some of us on the marketing team. It's been really exciting.
20 billion app downloads, of course, on Google Play. One and a half billion downloads every
single month. And, of course, the source of a lot of those revenues, as you've seen from
some of the previous sessions, in application billing, of course, being on a tear.
We're going to talk to you about marketing today, spend a couple of minutes on how we
market the store and your apps to consumers, which I think could be of interest to a number
of you, and then talk about app marketing in itself, what is app marketing all about,
how should we do it? What kind of frameworks can we share with you and what kind of tools
can we share with you? Let's think about marketing for a second.
And probably some of you out there in the audience have heard of the famous four Ps.
Who's heard of the four Ps? Okay. A couple people.
Well, let's talk first of all what the four Ps are not.
Please, please, please, please download my application. Please, please, please buy my
app. Yes, you can do marketing that way, of course,
it's not the most effective. But we're going to talk about all the tricks in the books
that have to do with marketing, including the real four Ps which we'll get to in a minute.
One of the things I want to share is a little bit our friendly neighborhood checklist for
what it is to do marketing when we're talking about apps.
So if your eyes do kind of start glazing over at this point, it is 4:00 in the afternoon.
It's been a very exciting day. Don't worry. The presentation is going to be available
offline. And we'll have versions for you to download, especially of this particular slide.
What we're going to talk about is basically our apps, our business models, how to promote
applications, and how to distribute applications. And what we've done, actually, for all you
developers in the house to make this even easier is we've kind of color-coded everything.
So, basically, if you're a new developer or you're a developer who don't potentially have
a lot of experience developing or marketing applications, then there's a lot of this is
going to be new to you, especially the stuff in blue, which is the basic stuff on marketing
that you should be looking at. If you're already a little bit more advanced or an intermediate
developer with some basic marketing experience, you're going to want to look at all the things
that are highlighted in green. And, of course, for those of you who have
been really successful, or some of the larger developers who are making some money on Android,
which is always great news to hear, then a lot of the color coded stuff in red is advanced.
But before we go into the actual nuts and bolts, let's play a little video which gives
you a good idea of how we actually market apps to consumers.
This is gears and premiers exclusively at Google Play.
[ Video. ] >>> Suppose you buy an app on your computer
to send to your smartphone. You might need a cable to transfer it from one to the other.
And if you want it on your tablet, you need to transfer it again.
Suppose you used Google Play. You can buy an app on your computer and send
it to any of your Android devices instantly, with no cables.
Because Google Play makes your apps available anywhere, so you can enjoy them everywhere.
Google Play, your entertainment all simply here.
[ Video concludes. ] >>Patrick Mork: So this is kind of a little
bit just an example of how we're actually getting out there and really starting to market
applications on your behalf and going out and talking to consumers.
I think it's also worth sharing a little bit what are the other kinds of things that we're
doing to market Google Play. In particular, one of the things that's worth sharing with
all of you in the room and all of the people in our international audience who are live
streaming this today, is just how much effort is going into marketing the store.
In the first six weeks of launch alone, we did over 5 billion impressions to consumers
all over the world. Not to mention a lot of the other advertising that you may have seen,
for example, seeing Google Play available on the nav bar across all our Google properties.
Or a lot of the emails in CRM that we've been doing or a lot of the work that we've been
doing with partners. The advertising effort on behalf of the team
at Google Play and the marketing team has been nothing less than spectacular over the
past couple of months and is only going to grow and accelerate over time.
More importantly, though -- and this is really kind of, like, a big callout to all of you
in the room and to awesome of the developers who have supported us, as Hugo said in his
keynote -- is there's been a lot of love from the developer community, there's been a lot
of support from all our content partners, whether that's game developers, app developers,
books publishers, music labels, and movie studios. Really, kind of the feedback that
we've gotten from the community, from all our partners, has been tremendous. And has
really also helped accelerate the awareness of consumers of what Google Play is and as
a destination to get all the things content for their devices. So this has been amazing,
and we really thank you for that. But let's get to the nitty-gritty. Let's get
to the stuff that we're really interested in and excited about. And that is, how do
we actually market apps? Well, one of the ways that we look at things
at Google, and we encourage our partners to do the same, is really this very simple matrix
that our CMO, Lorraine Twohill, has come up with, which really guides the essence and
philosophy of marketing at Google. And that is really understanding users, building magical
experiences -- which in this case is you guys building magical applications -- and then
really connecting the two. So let's take a really kind of bizarre but
fun and specific example of how that works in reality when we talk about apps.
Let's say that you're a carpenter. Or you're doing DIY in your house. And you're fixing
chairs and you're hanging frames up on your wall and you're maybe adjusting beams, you
know, in your house and you're doing all sorts of work in your house. Well, how cool would
it be if when you're putting that frame up on the wall, the one that you kind of like
have to ask your wife to sit 50 meters behind you to tell if you it's crooked or straight,
how cool would it be if you had a little application that could do that for you? Like Ben Zibble's
bubble app. I could fire up my bubble app and place my phone on top of that frame and
see if the frame is perfectly aligned or not. Saves me a lot of time. Makes my life easier,
and to some extent as well, it's kind of a magical experience.
The point is that applications are either enhancing our lives or making our lives more
productive, or they're entertaining us. And they do it in such a way that really has a
magical quality and component to it. And our role as marketers and your role as
marketers is, how do we connect those two. How do we connect the magic of the apps that
we build with, essentially, an entertaining experience for a consumer or a productive
experience for consumers? But, really, before we actually get into the
nuts and bolts of the four Ps themselves, let's talk about research for a minute. Because
when you talk about users, it really starts with research. Before you even write that
first line of code, you really have to understand who your consumers are, what they're doing,
how they download apps, where they download apps, and how they consume and use those applications.
And, really, it's a lot simpler than would you think. People always think, oh, research.
They think about IDC or they think about Nielsen or they think about tens of thousand of dollars
spent on research. It's really not that complex or that expensive.
The way we break it down, for example, is we look at quantitative versus qualitative
research. At its very basic level, your quantitative research is basically when you go out and
you do extensive questionnaires and you survey thousands of different consumers or hundreds
of different consumers. And you're asking the basic questions that you're trying to
get answered. How often does this consumer download applications? What kind of handsets
are they using? How much per month are they spending downloading applications? How long
are they spending in an application session? You're really trying to understand kind of
the macro, broad picture of consumer demographics and habits and consumption to guide the development
philosophy for your application. Then, of course, as you start building your
application, you get near that famous milestone, that first milestone of having a beta or an
alpha, then, really, it's about qualitative research. And qualitative research can take
a lot of different forms, like focus groups, for example. Or screen focus groups, or just
sitting down with a bunch of people that you may or may not know that well around pizza
and beers and trying to understand what they think of your app. And this is really the
in-depth part of the market research, which is where you're really trying to understand
how's the consumer using my app? How quickly does my app load? What kind of features do
they like? How easy is the UI to navigate? And what kind of features could enhance the
application? Or better yet, what features should I remove because the consumers simply
don't either get the features or they don't really use the features?
The best news about research and its ability to guide our development philosophy, as I
said earlier, is that it's neither that expensive or that time-consuming. You can start right
now and you can do research online. You can go, for example, to google.com/insights, put
together three simple questions, survey 1500 consumers and get answers in three to four
days at less than $1,000. On the quantitative side.
And your focus groups -- again, this is something you just need to know enough people that you
can get together groups of people and spend an afternoon brainstorming and getting feedback.
It's really not that hard and there's a lot of tools available to do that.
And now introducing the real four Ps. So how did the real four Ps influence our marketing
and our thinking around app marketing? Well, of course, when we talk about the real
four Ps, we're talking about product, which is our app. We're talking about price, which
is our business model. We're talking about distribution, which ends up being how many
devices are we covering? What operating systems are we developing on? And what channels within
those operating systems are we distributing on?
And lastly, we're talking about promotions, which can be anything from the type of assets
that we build, the thumbnails, the screen shots, the assets, the videos, our banners,
search ads, all the kind of tools that we would use to promote our applications.
So talking about product, and I love this analogy, and it's actually even better to
use this analogy at 4:00 in the afternoon, because by that point, I know most of you
people have eaten, so you're not starving, and you won't just run out of the room when
you see all this stuff that's on the slide. But truth be told, the way I look at it is
it's about snacking versus feasting. Right? So around 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, like
right now, you might have a little hunger. You might want a little something to snack
on. So you grab, you know, a Snickers bar or you'll grab a bag of chips. And you open
that bag of chips, and you will push your hand into the bag, and you will take out one
or two chips. But you're not going to put your hand in and take all the chips out of
the bag and stuff them in your face. Well, some people might, but you probably won't.
It's really something that you do just to kill the hunger at that particular point in
time, versus, of course, feasting, which is what's going to happen around 11:00 or midnight
tonight after you've been hearing Paul Oakenfold and you're starving and you need about five
courses. Totally different experience. Why am I using this example? Mobile app usage
and mobile app consumption is all about snacking. It's not about feasting. If you look at the
research, the research that we see and the research that's publicly available will tell
you that on average, consumers are spending probably around an hour and a half per day
using apps. So what does that tell us? Well, that tells us that if they're spending about
an hour and a half per day using apps, and they've got maybe 30 apps on their phone,
of which they use ten frequently, well, they're probably going to use your app no more than
nine or ten minutes a day. Sounds obvious. But what's the implication for product development?
There's a couple of implications. The first implication is that if I'm -- as
a consumer, I'm using my favorite app, and I'm using it for five minutes a day, if I
get a notification from you that says that I need to update my application, activate
my Wi-Fi, and download two gigabytes of files -- well, maybe with smart apps, now that's
going to be easier. But that still kind of goes against the philosophy of snacking. Why
am I going to spend five minutes downloading a file when I'm using the app maybe nine minutes
every single day? It has implications in terms of the load speed;
right? If I'm getting on a bus and I've got two stops and I want to check my sports scores
or I want to see what the weather's like in London -- we know what the weather's like
in London -- but if I want to see what the weather is like in London, I don't want the
application to take 20 to 30 seconds to load. I want to dip my hand into the experience,
dip it out, get my information, thank you very much, and I'm done.
And it has lots of other implications as well. Right? It has implications in terms of how
easy is the application to use. Let's say that I am on that bus in London and I've got
about 15 minutes' commute. Well, am I going to spend five minutes of
those 15 minutes actually reading through all, like, you know, the options that are
available in the app and trying to read and understand how the app works? Probably not.
I really want to get into the experience quickly, which means I need an intuitive UI, I need
very easy-to-use features, I need to be able to dip in and dip out very quickly.
So understanding your users and understanding that people snack has direct implications
for how you develop content. So let's talk for a minute about great applications.
And there are thousands of great applications. And, of course, we can't possibly cite them
all. But this is an old-school example that I like to use.
eBuddy is a Dutch developer that's been around since 2005, 2006, started originally developing
J2ME apps. I remember that fondly, because I started my career in games trying to sell
J2ME games to carriers five years ago. And hence the first slide about please, please,
please. You probably get the rest of the picture. Needless to say, obviously, you know, these
guys have been around a very long time. And they do a lot of things really, really
well. So what we did was we put together a handy
little checklist together for these guys for what we think they do well. A couple of things.
First of all, the product really solves a clear and present need. As I mentioned earlier,
at the beginning of my speech, you're either entertaining or you're addressing a specific
issue or making the person's life easier. eBuddy does that basically by aggregating
five or six different IMs into one easy to use client where you can be logged into all
your instant messengers and be chatting with your friends anywhere in the world no matter
what instant messenger they're using. They saw the need.
They had excellent device coverage. One of the things that amazes me about developers
is that sometimes we'll see these great apps, and they'll be, like, 500 megabytes in size
and have a black list of 1200 devices. Well, one of the ways that you basically get noticed
in the apps market is through virality. And virality means reach. And reach means device
coverage. These guys have a very simple app that works
very quickly, it's easy to use, it loads quickly, the UI is super intuitive and they're available
across lots of different devices. As a matter of fact, they're available on nearly every
device from Android 1.5 and up. Now, I'm not telling you guys need to go back
and develop on 1.5. But what I'm saying is, you need to be available on as many devices
as are relevant to maximize your virality. Of course, the other thing that's important
with this application which goes without saying and also helps virality is parity of features
across operating systems. If I have a great application that I get on Android and it's
got these cool features and I tell my friend about it and he's got an iPhone, he goes out
and downloads it and it doesn't have the same features, that's kind of a crummy experience
for him. Right? Likewise, if the opposite happens that somebody gets a great application
on iOS and then tells their friend and their friend downloads the Android version and it's
a port, that's not a really cool thing to do, either.
And, as a matter of fact, when you talk about placement and getting featured in the Google
Play Store, that is a sure way not to get featured in the Play Store. Right? We want
to make sure that Android consumers have the best possible experience, and, if possible,
a better experience than on other platforms. And lastly, continuously upgrading the application,
making sure that you're constantly fixing bugs, constantly removing features that are
out of date, constantly improving on new features, and making sure that the quality of your application
isn't just good when you launch, but it's continuously and consistently good across
all your revisions. And if you look at eBuddy, they have a 4.3 rating across 155,000 reviews.
And they have done 10 to 50 million downloads on Google Play, which is actually a lot more
than some of the better-known apps than we know here in the Valley.
So a lot of different things to (indiscernible) over on our checklist.
So you've heard a lot with productive from me, but I'd like to turn it over to a video
from one of our top developers to talk about their experience on product.
[ Video. ] >>> My name is Perry Tam, I'm CEO and cofounder
of Storm8. >>> And I'm Vatsal Bhardwaj, product manager
for growth initiatives here at Storm8. >>> At Storm8, we make social games for mobile. In
the past three years, we have created 30 titles, and they have been downloaded more than 300
million times on more than 100 million devices. >>> When we look at marketing and marketing
strategy at Storm8, it actually starts with the product concept. So when we are thinking
about what game we are going to build next, that's when marketing starts. So we do a lot
of rigorous market research, surveying of our users to understand what kind of games,
what kind of features, game mechanics will deliver the most fun.
>>> So to deliver high-quality product for our users, there are really three things which
go with that. The first is a very strong focus on the target consumers. The second piece
is a solid product and product management process. And then the third piece is add Analytics
and data capabilities. We pay a lot of attention to who are our target users, where are they
located, what kind of Android devices they are using.
>>> There was a time that we did, like, 40% of pricing to test out what would that drive
the effect of, you know, our users' behavior. We also did maybe drop the price to 99 cents
for a limited time period. And from those tests, we collect a lot of data as to whether
they convert more free users to paying users or actually could be detrimental to us down
the road. >>> We pay a lot of attention to packaging
of our games. So it includes things like the screen shots, the app icon, the description.
And we want to make sure that it's well optimized so that users who love that game can easily
discover it. We have a very strong data and analytics team. And throughout the process,
we make sure we do regress analysis and measurement to, again, create the game that's going to
be most fun for our users. [ Video concludes. ]
>>Patrick Mork: Great. So there you have a little bit from Storm8. But as I hope you
noticed, research, rigorous development process, really iterating and really understanding
the data, right, critical to getting the product right.
But, of course, although we like to make great apps and games, you know, if we can't pay
the water bill at the end of the month, it all becomes a little bit hairy; right? So
no conversation would be complete, you know, without talking about business models.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, because, of course, many of you just sat through
a session on monetization with Kenneth Lui and his colleagues. I think they did an excellent
job of describing the various models out there. What I will try and do is add a little bit
my two cents and experience based on how to look at each one of these individual models
and some of the unique variables that affect each.
So, you know, you've heard about freemium, you've heard about the march of freemium and
how well that's doing. As Chris mentioned, it's over 50% of our revenue now which is
exciting. And we've seen a huge takeoff in freemium over the last months. That's not
to say that it's the right model for you. That's not to say that it's going to make
you super competitive against the other apps on your system. As we see, freemium works
better in some categories versus others. We really have to understand what the right price
points are when it comes to freemium. What's going to be the way to engage with consumers?
How often do we provide notifications to consumers? What kind of notifications do we provide and
at what price points? So it's really about testing, testing, re-understanding, changing
the pricing, looking at price elasticity, and really measuring and analyzing what works.
More importantly, I think one of the questions I want to address directly is talked about
paid applications. Because many of your applications out there will still be paid apps. And as
mentioned earlier, freemium might not work for you. So let's spend a minute talking about
paid applications. And I really wanted to talk about two things
when it has to do with paid apps. Because even though we're in the world of smartphones
and Java is long gone from now, well, there's still a lot of things that don't change. There's
still a lot of constants that remain the same. One of those is the challenge around pricing.
So the myth around the 99-cent price point or the 99-cent dilemma as I call it, here's
the dilemma: The dilemma is that if you look at a curve and you look at the number of applications
available on the Android platform or on iOS for that matter, you'll see the left side
of the curve where the majority of the apps lie are where most of those apps are at 99
cents. And here's the problem with that. Well, the problem is that if you price your
app at 99 cents from the get-go, how do you discount? If you want to put your app on sale,
where do you go from 99 cents? You can't. It's a lot harder. And one of the rules of
marketing, you'll hear several of those today, is very simple, and it's this: It's always
a lot easier to take your price down than to raise your price. In any product, in any
category, in any supermarket, in any industry, it's always the same case.
So our recommendation there is, if you are going to have paid apps, always start at a
slightly higher price point, because it gives you flexibility to discount and make offers
on your application. The other reason why we believe pricing at
99 cents is a risk is because, ultimately, most of us, when we go to make a purchase,
let's say we're buying a pair of sneakers or buying a pair of jeans or we're buying,
I don't know, a plane ticket, having a lower price tells us a certain thing about the product
that we're buying. And in many cases, low price equals cheap. So the question to you,
then, is, is that the kind of message that you want to pass to your consumer? The person
that's seeing your app for the first time? That maybe sees your app side by side with
five other competitors, and you're the cheapest app?
That sometimes works for consumers who are really price-sensitive. But for other consumers,
they'll look at that and say, "This app basically does the same, so it's probably not as good."
And that does happen. More likely what we like to did is we like
to encourage you guys to really think about the price life cycle of your application.
What we've done is build kind of a theoretical model on what that looks like. In this particular
case, an app developer launches an app or game at 2.99 and they get a certain number
of installs. The first month, it's 50,000. The second month, it's another 40,000. The
third month, it starts to drop. And at that point, because they priced at 2.99, they're
able to able to drop the price. So they drop the price to 1.99, and they get a whole bunch
of new users who go, "Oh, yes, great. An offer. I'm going to get this app now." And they share
with their friends, and they say, "You know, I was a cheap bastard before. I didn't want
to buy it at $3. But now it's at 2. I'm in." So they buy the app. And the friends start
piling in and you get a little bit of virality because they're getting a great deal. What
do you do? You raise the price. Once you start getting that volume build and that momentum,
you raise the price. A lot of consumers who may have heard about how great your app was,
they don't necessarily realize the price is no longer discounted, so they still buy it.
And you can basically get the difference of what you were charging before versus after.
And you can do that in cycles over time, until you get to the end of the life cycle, or maybe
12 months or eight months out or whatever your product plan is, you decide you're going
to phase out that app and launch a completely new one. What do you do, since you priced
at 2.99, you're going to drop the price to 99 cents, that's a great bargain. You can
do that because you're at the end of your price cycle and you're going to introduce
another app anyway. There what I'm saying is theoretical model
but encourage you to think of what is the price life cycle of my app, how do I manage
it over a time and how do I give myself enough flexibility with my price point that I can
move and pivot and change my price if I have to?
Let's talk about ads. So this chart was taken from a Kleiner Perkins
presentation by Mary Meeker. Some of you guys may read Mary Meeker on occasion when she
publishes material on the Internet specifically and about mobile Internet. And the thing about
ads is this: There's some good news and there's some opportunistic news; right?
The reality about ads is that ads today in terms of ECPMs, which is the effective cost
per thousand or what you're getting paid for your ads, is the ECPMs on mobile are significantly
lower than on desktop. No surprise; right? Desktop's been around ten years, has a different
user base. They spend perhaps more time on desktop, so the value of ECPM is higher. Mobile
is still a lot lower. But the good news is, when you look at this graph, you'll see that
the yellow bar, the bar on the left across all of these different types of media, that's
the amount of time spent by consumers. So what do we see here? Well, we see that on
average, consumers are spending about 10% of their time on mobile, which is huge. That's
massively encouraging for every single one of us in this room and every single one of
us around the world who is developing great content.
The challenge is, only 1% of the ad dollars are flowing into mobile today. But that means
a massive opportunity. Why? Simple. Dollars always follow eyeballs. That's just the way
advertising works. There's always a lag. Which means, essentially, if you have a great product
and you really understand how to monetize through ads, it's a question of time before
that gap closes and before the ECPMs either get close to or match what we see on desktops
and enable you guys to really maximize the monetization of your apps through ads.
I think the last point I want to make -- well, two more points on monetization before moving
on -- is, use hybrids. We saw that earlier. We talked -- we saw paymium. We saw a combination
of different business models. And this is really exciting stuff because what we're seeing
is more and more developers are starting to do that and it's starting to pay dividends.
And it also reduces your risk as a developer. So if you have in-app payments, that's great.
Why not throw in app ads if it makes sense, and you can potentially monetize from both
or you can see which works better than the other. Having a hybrid and a combination of
different business models gives you more flexibility and maximizes your ability to monetize your
apps. Last point on monetization. We live in a global
world. Apps are being downloaded every single second, all over the world, on all sorts of
different devices. So what are the implications for you as app developers? Simple. Different
business models will work differently in different countries. So if you've got a great game in
the United States where you know that a lot of consumers, may be 60% plus of consumers
are on contract and have higher-end smartphones, chances are those consumers are more willing
to pay for your app, therefore, a paid app or in-app payments might make more sense for
you. But if you're trying to distribute and monetize
your apps in India, where, potentially, 90 to 95% of consumers are on prepaid cards and
they're still in the process of rolling out 3G networks where data is expensive, then
perhaps that business model doesn't work as well and you need to think of maybe I should
monetize through ads. The reality there is, try and look at your
market globally and see how you can monetize your app using different business models in
different regions. Be creative. So once we've built this great product and
we know how we're going to monetize it and keep all the lights on at the end of the day,
well, then we start thinking about, aha, how do I promote my app? Where should I spend
my money? Where should I spend those hard-earned VC dollars that are going to enable me to
get more users, yay, another rule of marketing, rule number two numero uno, don't invest behind
a weak product. It goes behind saying. But you see people do this all the time, and not
just in our business, but in tons of businesses. If you invest behind a weak product, you're
basically creating a negative consumer perception of your product and of your brand, if that's
what you're trying to build. You should go back to the drawing board and
rework your application until you're sure that you have the best possible experience.
If you're not excited about your application or you're not convinced you would pay, do
you think a consumer is because they're going to see an ad that you're seeing on AdMob or
somewhere else? Probably not. Once you're really sure that you have a great
product, then there's a number of great frameworks we can suggest to you that are going to help
you put together your marketing plan. The first of these is STP. Knowing your users.
It's all about segmenting, targeting, and then positioning your app properly. The second
one is once I position my app properly, I know who I'm going after, what's the message
I'm giving the consumer? What is my one liner? What are my points of difference? Why should
a consumer care? Third, once I have all my messaging down and
I've properly positioned my app and I know where I'm going, it's, well, how do I build
a structured marketing plan? What needs to go into my marking plan? What kind of activity
should I do? Lastly, what is my media strategy look like.
The good news is I'm going to go through each one of these in detail and explain in detail
a little more clearly. Let's look at our audience. So let's say,
for example, I'm a game developer and I've seen this great case study from Kenneth Lui
at Google I/O, I've decided, you know what, that's it, dude, I'm going for in-app payments.
I'm going to do in-app payments with, like, funky furry animals at different price points.
I'm going to get a ton of downloads to get consumers to basically pay me a the lot of
money. If you are going to do in-app payments on
games, then probably what you need to do is really segment your target audience properly
and look at how you target those people. Excuse me.
So if I'm using in-app payments for game, there's two axis probably that I'm going to
look at. I'm going to look at available time. I need people to have available time to play
my games. And then I'm probably going to look at disposable income. Because if a person
is 13 years old and has tons of available time but no income, I'm not going to make
much money from them. I segment my audience this way. I come up with all these different
segments that I have. Upscale adults, techies, middle income families, soccer moms, whatever
it happens to be. And when I look at my matrix, I think, okay, the right target audience is
probably these guys. Young adults 24-35 years old, no kids, right? So they have disposable
time and they have income. That's my target audience. Then it's a question of, okay, how
do I position my app? What's my one-liner to those people? What am I going to tell those
people to click and install my application? Which takes us to the next step. How do I
develop convincing messaging? What's the one line that I'm going to tell people about my
sports application that is going to get them so excited that they are going to want to
download it? Is it that I have realtime instantaneous scores? Is it the fact that I'm the only application
that has social engagement and built-in hangouts into it? Is it the fact that I have this application
that runs on all sorts of different platforms and backs up my data on the web? What's your
one liner? What's your positioning statement? After that, what are the two or three key
points of difference that are going to go into my product description? So that when
people land on my page, because they have searched or clicked an ad, they read these
three or four great things about the application. Not the bug fixes, but the stuff that really
matters. They think, this app is really cool because it has Android beam and I can do all
this crazy stuff like play multiplayer games without activating Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. That's
wicked cool. I'm going to get that instead of that other application. And lastly, what's
my call to action? When you start doing Get Creative, we see app developers do ad campaigns,
online stuff, banners, they advertise their little logo with a little dragon and it doesn't
tell me anything about what I should do next. Okay, so you've got me all excited about your
little furry animals and I can get these collectable items, what do I do? Where do I go? Where
can I find this app? Clear calls to action. On the right-hand side -- actually I thought
it would be fun to share this. Kushagra, who is working with us right here on the Google
Play team and actually is the one who really was responsible for a lot of this material
as well as the interviews, so I owe him a huge debt of gratitude on that. Kushagra put
together an amazing promotion at the end of last year around apps. Some of you guys may
have seen it. In December, we hit 10 billion downloads. We did a promotion called 10-10-10.
I really need a beer. [ Laughter ]
>>Patrick Mork: Water just doesn't do it. Anyway. We put together this promotion called
10-10-10. That was to celebrate 10 billion downloads and that now seems like a long time
ago, right? 20 billion now, great stuff. We put together this promotion called 10-10-10.
We had three key things we want today communicate to consumers. 10 days, 10-cent apps, 10 apps
a day. Really simple. Yet, even though it was so simple, as you can see going from top
to bottom, we went through several different versions of creative material to get to the
right creative. You are not even seeing all of it because it wouldn't fit on the slide.
We went through version after version after version after version after version of getting
the creative right. And the point here is whether it's your thumbnails or your video
or your text descriptions, you iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate until you get it right. And
you test and test and test and test until you get it right. Just like you do with your
product. Creative is an iterative process, but it can be so effective if you do it right.
That brings us to the marketing plan. How do we build a plan? The way we look the marketing
plans is quite simple. Awareness. Trial. Purchase. And repeat.
It has to be generally in that order. Why? Because if I basically start jumping into
purchase, it's kind of like I met this pretty girl at the Paul Oakenfold party tonight and
I say tomorrow morning, let's get married. Uh, no, you're weird. I am not going to call
you again. It's basically, you have to go through the steps of the process so that you
can convince the consumer to get to the point where they are going to consider a purchase.
You start with awareness. Talk to them about what your product does. Where they should
get it. Why it's unique. How it's different. There's a couple tools you can do here. This
is not exhaustive, of course. Good PR. One of the most underused things I see in this
industry. Talk to the press, become their friends, make sure that you send them their
APKs, get them to your studio to see what you are working on. It can be one of the most
effective marketing tools you can do and one of the cheapest is to get these people to
write about your apps. I'll give you another tip. Getting people to write about your apps
has a direct influence on your search rankings in the play store. It's called web anchoring.
It means that the more people kind of like click on a link externally outside the play
store and come to your page, because they've read about you, the better you will index
in the search rankings. Social. We talked about virality. Have a blog.
Invite people to comment on it. Post your APKs on it. Create discussion. Get people
to talk about it. Of course, other basic tools. Search ads, mobile ads. If you get to the
point where you have the available cash, well, TV or above-the-line media.
Then we talk about trial. What can we do for trial? We talked about some of the business
models earlier today. We can have a free trial version. A version where I can use the app
for 30 days. And then it's great because I don't have to pay pour it and I can really
figure out if I like it. Why is trial so important? Very simple, guys. It's very important because
essentially many consumers out there have never experienced content before. Many consumers
out there are getting a smartphone for the first time and they will think this content
stuff is marvelous. Are they going to shell four five bucks or euros if they have never
tried content before? Probably not in some cases. By providing a free version of your
application, you generate that comfort level. When I was in the soft drinks business -- I
worked at Pepsi for many years. When we would launch a new drink in the market, we would
go out and give hundreds of thousands of cans to people. We'd have these pretty girls in
mini skirts and walking down in the middle of traffic and they would knock on your door,
how about a can of Pepsi max? Why did we do that? Trial. We want to make sure that the
consumers love the product. Hopefully they like the girls, too. But they love the product.
So that when they go to the supermarket, they have had it, tried it. Yeah, yeah, this is
pretty good stuff. I think I'll buy a six-pack. Same thing goes for apps and games.
We move on to purchase. Purchase, of course, there are other things we can do. We can do
direct response campaigns where we are pushing people to download the app. They have heard
about it. They have read about it on Tech Crunch. They have read the blogs. Talked to
their friends about it. We can do notifications. We are saying, hey, guess what, you have now
been playing my game for 30 days, it's time to pay up. They may or may not do that. But,
of course, at least they have had the opportunity to try it because you have gone through step
two. Lastly, repeat. Third rule of marketing. Always easier to get money from an existing
consumer than a new consumer. Makes sense but a lot of people don't follow that rule?
How do we keep the consumer interested. We heard about it in monetization panel. Right?
You give them more don't. You upgrade your app frequently. You introduce new features.
You give them new reasons to pay for this stuff. You provide updates. You have CRM campaigns
because you've actually been talking to your consumers for the past three years and you
have an email database of 150,000 loyal fans who have downloaded your app. That's all about
repeat. But we do have a pretty good idea already
of what kind of stuff works. So when I was talking about research earlier in the session,
we did this over the last couple of weeks. We put out a couple of questions on google.com/insights,
paid about a thousand bucks, whatever, basically asked people, what influences your decision
to install an app? U.S. only consumers, granted. We got about 1500 responses which is statistically
significant. And here's what they told us. I'm influenced by user reviews. Top apps lists.
User ratings. And screen shots. Those are the top four. Now, obviously, it doesn't mean
that they are not influenced by the rest. But they are influenced by a lot of stuff
that you guys control. You control the user ratings because you can control how good your
product is and how frequently you update it. And how many cool features you build in and
how many crap features you take out. You control the text description. Because
you read the great marketing slides that talk about how important creative is and you built
killer text, great assets and super powerful video that have gone totally viral on YouTube.
So you control a lot of that stuff. And search, you don't control that directly but you do
control it indirectly. Why? Tip number two: The other thing that affects your search rankings
in the Google Play store, is the number of installs. The more installs you have, the
higher you are on the search rankings. However, caveat, the more uninstalls you have, the
lower your search rankings, which is why you have to be careful when you use marketing.
Because if your product is not good enough and you get a lot of installs and then more
uninstalls than installs because people figure out your app was not good, it is going to
penalize your search rankings. The last one on the list is paid advertising
or search. Paid search, AdMob ads. That stuff can be very effective at scale but isn't necessarily
the primary things that drives interest from consumers.
Wow. Lots of stuff. It's time to advertise. It's time to get out there and spend my hard-earned
dollars advertising to consumers. What do I do? Well, we typically break this down into
two different components, if you will. One component is, of course, brand awareness or
brand advertising. Many consumers are very familiar with this, typically bigger brands
do this. But also developers who aspire to really build a long-lasting presence on mobile
are starting to do this. And the thing that we're starting to see after three or four
years now on the smartphone app space, you are starting to see the emergence of the world's
first mobile brands, which is really cool. Right? These are apps that have basically
built their reputation and built their brand on mobile. Angry Birds, massive brand started
on mobile. Lookout Mobile Security, security app, started on mobile. Uber, some of you
guys, little more niche, started on mobile. We're seeing more and more mobile brands and
brands being built for the first time through mobile. When we tuck about brand advertising,
that's stuff like if I come up with a cool video for my app and I promote that through
YouTube. I might not necessarily get a ton of people to buy it but I create a lot of
awareness. Why? Because a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand
pictures. That's brand awareness. That's brand advertising. TV, outdoor, YouTube, videos,
that's brand awareness. How do you measure that stuff? You might ask, why on earth would
I do this? I need to be able to measure this. If I do an AdMob campaign, I can measure the
clicks. That's true, but you can measure brand. It's a different way of doing it. Essentially
what you need to do is you run what's called a brand tracker which can be very simple exercise
of asking three to four questions to your base of consumers every single month. And
you ask them questions like, for example, among the following kinds of sports apps,
which have you heard of? You list all the apps, yours and your competitors. That's aided
brand awareness. You can ask another question which is, which sports apps have you heard
of in general? That's unaided brand awareness. You can ask questions, for example, of in
the next four weeks, do you intend to purchase a sports app? That's purchase intent. So there
are a lot of ways to measure brand awareness. Most of your time, however, is probably going
to be focused on the second bullet which is all about direct response. And in that case
what you're looking at is stuff like search, mobile ads, incentivized.
So tip number four: Search at least for us when we are promoting the Google Play store
has been one of the most effective ways to actually advertise. Why? First of all, because
the click through rate, which our colleagues previously mentioned, is higher on search
generally than any other medium. Why is that? Because search is an active advertising form.
Search basically provides a request, provides information to a consumer who is already looking
for something specific. Therefore, the odds are that that person is more interested in
that result because it's specific to what they are looking for. If I do a search on
sports apps and I see your app and I'm interested in sports, the probability is higher that
I'm going to download that. That's going to be more cost effective for you and higher
probability that that person is actually going to install your application. Typically, what
would you expect from a good mobile search campaign? For us, we see good search result
-- a good click through rate on mobile search through 3, 4, 5% click through rate, or at
least 2%, somewhere around there. Ads you can use and are a great way to scale your
marketing efforts but are typically going to be a little bit less effective? Why? Because
ads essentially are a passive means of advertising. The consumers playing a game on a web site
somewhere and they see an ad and basically it's a passive experience. I'm either interested
in or I'm not. But I'm not specifically making a proactive search for it, so I'm probably
not looking for your application. Web site typically a good response rate for
Mobile ad campaign can be .5, .6, .7, .8% CTR, vastly different from what you would
get on search. Perhaps more targeted in certain cases and perhaps we can get more scale but,
again, different results. So here we're going to actually run another video where we interviewed
another one of our top developers, this case it was Pocket Gems telling us about their
experience marketing and what worked for them. [ Video ]
>>> Hi, I'm Arjun Dayal, Android product leader for Pocket Gems.
>>> And Michael Dawson, I lead business development in Pocket Gems.
>>> Pocket Gems is a Mobile gaming focused company that was founded in 2009 and is backed
by Sequoia Capital. Our titles have been downloaded 60,000 times and on Android specifically we've
had five titles released in the past nine months. Marketing in Pocket Gems allows us
to inform our community about our new unique experiences. What we found is that by focusing
on creating unique experiences applied to the broadest audience what we're able to do
is get the most engagement out of our user base.
>>> For us the goal is to get our games in front of as many people as possible. Google
Play has been the most important for that with by far the largest audience.
>>> For marketing messages a lot of the data is really centered around engagement. And
for that -- we're able to engage the effectiveness of messages and how connected our community
and population is based on the amount of time they spent in the app and the number of times
they looked at different aspects. >>> We take a multichannel approach. The most
important channel is cross-promotion for us but we layer on to that and PR, paid advertising
channels, as well as work to start word-of-mouth campaigns. We love talking to game writers
and tech writers as well as Android-specific bloggers.
>>> We have a lot of fun with the creative. We take our iconic characters, we put them
in simple backgrounds and then create a bunch of versions of those and then we AB test that
creative. So as an example with Top Dragon Park, we took our little baby dragon Nixon
and we tried him in different colors and found people loved blue the best so we made blue
the icon in a lot of our ad-creating. >>> So in Tap Zoo and Tap Dragon Park over
the last couple months, we've had a number of different special promotions and specialized
requests that have allowed our users to get creative.
>>> We look to get the word out about our games right before they launch, so this can
either be pure mouth of friends telling friends or it can be in the games telling people about
new games we've launched. >>> When we're about to launch an app, we
create a number of different assets, including app icons, feature graphics, future graphics,
promotional graphics, viral videos and descriptive screen shots that allow users who have not
download the game yet to understand what it's like to actually play the game.
[ Video concludes ] >>Patrick Mork: Cool, that's about advertising.
The last thing I really wanted to talk about, the last P of the four Ps, is, of course,
distribution. So you guys may remember I said at the beginning of the presentation that
I was a Pepsi guy, that I had blue blood that flows throughout my veins. And I was one of
these freaks that would not drink a vodka Coke because it had Coke in it so I'd just
drink the vodka. So it does pain me to say this but why is Coke still it? Why does Coke
still beat Pepsi? Distribution. It's not necessarily they have a stronger brand. It's certainly
not that they have better advertising. Coke today is available in more countries of the
world freely and accessibly than bottled drinkable water. That sounds like a joke. It is very
true. The thing that built Coke distribution muscle, and some of these pictures prove it.
You can find Coke anywhere. I have found Coke the most outrageous places possible and, of
course, it pissed me off because I wanted Pepsi. The same kind of thing needs to influence
your decision when you think about distribution. Your distribution does not end when you go
live on the play store. Maybe it does on iOS but not on the play store. Our goal is virality
and virality means reach. So how do we tackle distribution, is that developers, all the
first stuff, of course, is device coverage, we look at all those devices, we look at the
market, we anticipate the new devices coming out on the market, and we think to ourselves,
what devices do I need to be on, what are the legacy devices that still have a lot of
attraction, what are the new devices that are still hot that I need my game to be on?
The more devices that we're on, the more people are going to talk about our great products
and it's going to go viral and I'm not going to have to worry if the user has the phone
or not because I have the app for it. The second step is channel coverage. Of course
we're thrilled you guys use Google Play and we think Google Play is going to be your main
distribution channel for a long time to come. But that doesn't mean it's the only distribution
channel. And the fifth tip of the day is distribute your application on as many distribution channels
as makes commercial sense for you. Wherever that might be. If you go, for example, to
WIP connector.org which is a site run by the wireless industry partnership which is a nonprofit
geared toward helping developers there's a whole section on that site that talks about
app stores and app distribution channels cross all the OSs, not just Android. So in that
respect, do yourselves a favor and distribute on as many channels as makes sense for you.
Whether that's carrier portals or carrier freeloads or third-party app stores, if it
makes sense and you can reach more people and you can get more viral, go for it.
The third step, of course, is in line with our thinking about virality and that's OS
coverage. And consumers have a great experience on an Android app, but if they have a lot
of friends who, God forbid, have iPhones, well, why should those people not be able
to get your app as well. It all helps you go viral, right? So have your app available,
again, on as many OSs as is commercially viable, as makes business sense for you because it's
going to drive your virality. When we look back at the case of e-buddy, these guys were
available on every single platform known to man, including, for example, Mobile web.
And lastly, of course, analyze, optimize, prioritize constantly. Look at your distribution
channels, look at your downloads by installed devices, look at your downloads by channel
and then reprioritize every quarter, look at the data, analyze. Rinse, repeat, and start
over. Lastly, of course, you're always going to
need a little bit of luck. Cross your toes, cross your fingers, hope it all works.
So we've been through a lot of stuff today. People are probably tired. People are probably
thirsty. We have a really cool fireside chat coming up which I hope you guys will stay
for. The other thing I wanted to point out is there's going to be a great session on
day three, 11:30 a.m, about measurement, it's going to go into a lot of detail, helping
you guys analyze how your performance of your campaigns are going. Today we've covered a
lot of stuff. We've talked about our product. We've talked about our business models. We've
talked about our promotions and how we advertise and promote our apps, the kind of assets we've
built. We've talked about distribution. All the different ways that we can go viral. And,
of course, we have our great checklist. So we really have a lot of stuff for you guys
to sink your teeth into. But before we go, a little gift for you guys,
it's a detail on the grand scheme of things that you're getting. So we really want you
guys to build great stuff. We really want you to play and work hard and when you work
hard we want you to play even harder. So we have a couple of tee shirts. These tee shirts
are pretty special to us. Simple reason. These tee shirts were created, there were only a
couple hundred created, and they were only created for members of the Google Play team
when we launched Google Play as a brand. That's part of the big celebration we did three months
ago. These are pretty much the last five that are left that have not been given out to consumers.
So I'm going to ask you a couple of questions to see how much of this stuff you absorbed.
See how fired up we are about marketing. Are we going to do research and know our users?
>>> Yes. >>PATRICK MORK: What?
>>> Yes. >>PATRICK MORK: All right. Are we going to
develop some really magical kick-ass Android apps?
>>> Yes. >>PATRICK MORK: What?
>>> Yes. >>PATRICK MORK: All right, that's better.
And lastly, are we going to build som awesome bad-ass marketing plans to connect those users
with our magical properties? >>> Yes.
>>Patrick Mork: What? >>> Yes.
>>Patrick Mork: What? >>> Yes.
>>Patrick Mork: All right. Thank you very much. Have a great time at I/O.