As part of a developer marketing panel at Casual Connect Europe 2015, Saikala Sultanova discussed all facets of building long-lasting user relations, including opportunities, dilemmas and methods. “There is a marketing mix for a reason”, she commented. “You need to get some of the cross-promos, some of the organic traffic, package your product with lots of features…at the same time, it is very important to include paid traffic.” For more responses from the panel, see the video below.
Saikala Sultanova leads strategic user acquisition efforts for Miniclip, which is a global leader in gaming that develops, publishes and distributes games to an audience of more than 70 million monthly active users across multiple platforms. Her primary role is to create successful initiatives for mobile and web gaming apps with Facebook, Twitter and major mobile advertising networks. Saikala has always enjoyed the idea of working with a gaming company filled with fun people where she can be closely involved in the tech environment.
A Dynamic Atmosphere for Constant Learning
She particularly enjoys the dynamic, fast-paced setting with constant learning. She is never bored in the ever-changing mobile app UA environment. Her job is made up of three main components that she enjoys: data, tech and people.
Her inspiration for pursuing a career in the games industry was sparked by a good friend, Tom Sarris, director of global communications at Playfish. In 2009, he introduced her to Pet Society and she quickly became enthralled. She spent a great deal of time playing to discover who has the biggest brain and geo challenge. After visiting the London office of Playfish and seeing their office with game consoles, fish tanks, an interior painted with game characters and employees wearing casual dress, she decided to work for a gaming company as soon as possible.
After completing her Master’s Degree, Saikala began her career with Plumbee, a social casino startup based in London and founded by former employees of Playfish. Here, she began learning marketing and game promotion and gaining valuable experience with user acquisition, CRM and growth. Everything she did at Plumbee was an important part of her learning and progress with various challenges that taught her to look outside the box and find the best solution for the time and place. She asserts, “This kind of experience gave me strength and courage to aim higher and farther and practice a ‘helicopter view’ on where the business should be by a given time.” She remembers the joy of doing everything herself; it keeps her capable of doing whatever is necessary to deliver the desired results for the business.
These days, playing games at work is the most fun part of her job. She also loves A/B testing, pivot tables and poker nights at work.
Maintaining a Balance
Miniclip is fortunate to have a large number of cross-platform apps and an engaged user base in the millions. Everyone at the company cares deeply about putting the user experience at the forefront of the engine. Their challenge is finding the balance between keeping users engaged and meeting business goals. Because the macro-environment is ever-changing, they keep a close eye on users’ game experience and satisfaction with their products.
It is only possible to maintain this balance by working as a team toward a common goal. “Imagine you have a great free-to-play game which generates nice revenue in in-app purchases, but from a small fraction of the users,” Saikala says, “By far the largest percentage of users consists of free players. Monetization through ad serving to free players is now quite advanced, but you want to keep all players happy without spamming them with ads.” At Miniclip they respond by putting user experience and retention at the forefront and finding the balance between keeping users engaged and the business healthy.
The most satisfying time in Saikala’s career came with the opportunity to join Miniclip and start building the UA team and its operations from scratch, demonstrate positive results, and prove her capabilities with the Facebook canvas and on mobile cross devices and operating systems. She emphasizes her boss, Pieter Kooyman, as being a true mentor, giving great leadership support as well as space to maneuver.
Coming Changes in the Games Industry
Within the next year, Saikala foresees several developments in the games industry. Video advertisements are taking over mobile ad space. Already Unity Ads, Ad Colony and Vungle offer engaging video ad units across their networks. Facebook video ads are also making a strong start with a preview play in the News Feed for sponsored videos.
Mobile app installs will be trading deals directly between developers, for example, Tapdaq and Chartboost.
Mobile ad serving mediation platforms, such as Mobfox and Fyber, will help aggregate many mobile ad networks in one place and mediate the serving of mobile ads.
And health apps will increase in prominence. For example, when Saikala tested the MediSafe mobile app, it proved to be well-designed with an end-user experience in mind, as well as intuitive navigation and neat interface. Another app from a London startup, UltraFitness, is a good-looking utility app featuring workouts, meal plans, recipes and a store. Everything needed to stay healthy is available in one mobile app.
And over the next several years, she anticipates smart TVs becoming more integrated into our lives and VR devices becoming more commonly used. Miniclip will probably be working on both these trends, but she believes VR would benefit most from their expertise in making games genuinely multiplayer in real time.
Game Distribution
Saikala sees the game distribution situation evolving with more game apps than ever in all app stores. Android has never been more profitable, the result of increasing device penetration and better designed Android smartphones. And because businesses own much more data than ever before, marketers are confident in making faster decisions. The more they can measure, the more effectively they can spend marketing dollars.
Miniclip deals with the distribution situation by packaging mobile update submissions with new and fine-tuned game features as well as bug
fixes. This way they can try to qualify to be featured and gain organic users.
For her personal gaming, Saikala prefers cross-platform games and synchronized user XP so she can go anywhere and continue the game at the same level. She has noted that people in general enjoy the sort of casual games Miniclip offers, but there is also huge engagement and user loyalty to mid- and hardcore games. The wider audience will always go to Candy Crush, Trivia Crack, Crossy Road, Diamond Dash and similar games.
When Saikala is not working, she enjoys exploring countries, cultures and customs all around the world. She has a passion for mountains and takes hiking trips around the Dolomites, Atlas Mountains and Inylchek, among others. This year she plans to spend time relaxing near the Indian Ocean, and follow that next year with trekking around Tash Rabat, Chartyr Kul and take a horse trip to the Chinese part of the Silk Road.
She also likes to play Backgammon the old-fashioned, face-to-face way and often joins the West London local Backgammon tournament at Notting Hill.
Comments
