Glenn Kiladis, the vice president of new market and media solutions and the mobile games evangelist for Fiksu, spoke about strategies to build a loyal following, challenges in the mobile marketing ecosystem, and the solutions Fiksu offers in the mobile space with Clark Buckner from TechnologyAdvice.com (they provide coverage content on employee and worker training strategies, customer loyalty engagement implementations, business intelligence trends and much more).
Listen to the full interview here:

Building to Two Million Monthly Active Users

Fiksu, a sponsor at the Casual Connect USA 2014 conference, is a mobile app user acquisition platform that delivers loyal users through utilizing different traffic sources, tracking ad performance, optimizing real-time ad buying, and generating cost-effective and organic leads. Along with his roles at Fiksu, Glenn Kiladis also helped build Fiksu subsidiary FreeMyApps, a rewards-based network that now has the capability to generate 100,000 new games or app installations within 72 hours. Users earn rewards for downloading and engaging with specific apps that advertisers on FreeMyApps want to promote. With a very active and global user base, FreeMyApps now has about two million monthly active users. In a relatively short period, FreeMyApps built a loyal following around a strong community, with over 948,000 Facebook fans, over 496,000 Twitter followers, and over 38,000 YouTube subscribers.

To build such a strong community base, FreeMyApps used the following strategies:

- Contests: When marketing an app or game, they’ll tweet the contest to their community and post about it on Facebook. Sometimes they’ll run contests around a specific game or app just in Facebook.
- Responsive mobile app: They made sure that FreeMyApps was a responsive mobile web app on iOS and chose the native route for Android.
- Destination Service: On iOS, they made sure to make it a destination service and own that specific traffic.
- Social Sharing Referrals: They’re not a network of mobile app and game offers walled into other people’s apps, so they don’t rely on other organizations or developers to build their audience. Instead, they built their audience directly through allowing and rewarding end users who socially share the app via SMS, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Today, 40 percent of all new FreeMyApps’ users come through social sharing referrals.

What Was Learned

In seeing such strong audience growth, FreeMyApps saw the importance for a community to be built around the business. Subsequently, they hired a community manager to run their Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels, built a strong community on each platform, and worked to make the app as interactive as possible, even if an end user isn’t downloading games or apps.

Through this experience, Kiladis identified some challenges that companies need to be aware of in the mobile marketing ecosystem:

- The need for a user acquisition team: UA is constantly evolving challenge. New technologies and new players are continually popping up, and staying on top of the game requires dedicated staff - even if you use a UA partner like Fiksu.
- The need to know what tools, tech, or traffic sources, out of the thousands now available, are the best fit for your company: Every app has a personality - so there’s no one answer to “Which tracking software should we use?” or “Which traffic sources are the best?” Getting these answers requires research and testing for your specific app. In addition, they always find that a mix of traffic sources - 5 to 10 in active use, in most cases - yields the best overall user acquisition results, especially when you can continually optimize your bids and budgets across them as you monitor performance data. But choosing which 5 or 10 out of the hundreds of viable ad networks and other traffic sources is no easy task.
- The need for a solid attribution and analytics partner: Companies need to look for partners that utilize big data analysis, or at least have access to first- or third-party data, to help them acquire well-targeted users.
- The need to understand the value of incentivized vs. non-incentivized marketing: Incentivized marketing can potentially deliver less high-quality users.
- The need to keep up with a fast-moving industry: Game companies ought to have mobile acquisition teams, or seek partnerships with companies that can help them acquire and maintain users in the mobile gaming space.

Meanwhile, for companies that try to do it themselves, they need to:

- Choose the right attribution and analytics partner: Attribution allows a company or developer to tie media spending back to factual results so that they can know where users come from and through which channels they arrived. This helps to optimize future media spending so that a targeted audience yields high quality leads and customers.
- Assess whether they’re buying pure or arbitrage traffic: This is a big issue because a lot of companies represent ad inventory as their own, but their ad inventory has actually been bought from two or three other sources, and can consequently be two or three times removed from the source.
- Understand mobile ad technology that addresses media buying, attribution, optimization, etc.

To combat these issues, Fiksu created solutions such as multiple-source media buying, an auction-based approach, and an optimized platform. For more information on Fiksu’s solutions, products, platform, and resources, visit www.fiksu.com.