Smartphone manufacturers are clearly the earliest proponents of sophisticated digital product adoption techniques like mobile user onboarding flows and product walkthroughs but how are they faring in their global battle for hearts and minds?
A report by Electronics Hub in 2021 showed that out of 142 countries, 74 prefer Android over Apple 65 with Belarus, Fiji and Peru showing a draw. The survey methodology described in the report was based on sentiment analysis of over 347,000 tweets.
What was remarkable about the survey is that North America overwhelmingly prefers Android (yep you read that right) over Apple with Android averaging 32, over Apple 19 in terms of positive sentiment. Curiously Poland emerged as the world’s number 1 Android hater with 34% of tweets averaging negative. Latvia ranked as the world’s number one Apple hater with 35% tweets about Apple averaging negative.
Whatever religious standing consumers hold over either platform the sentiment doesn’t stack up when it comes to B2B and B2B2C mobile apps. A tally of Apple and Android SDKs for three of the most popular analytics firms Segment, Amplitude and Mixpanel tell a very different story. A sample of Business and Finance apps using SDKs for the aforementioned analytics firms reveal Apple as the clear front runner with almost double the number of SDKs over Android.
Love or hate when it comes to the question of how users feel the apps they use, analytics will provide some insight however they don’t provide any tools enabling quick response to change or influence user behaviour. App developers are largely limited to hard coding which extends to any user engagement strategies like mobile app user onboarding tours, product walkthroughs, contextual mobile tooltips, in-app FAQ’s and user surveys. Darryl Goede, CEO and founder of Sparkbox knows first hand how long and painful software development can be, however being able to use a low-code user engagement platform like Contextual allows his team to quickly respond to changes in user behaviour and maintain the love of Spark Pico users
React Native shares the love!. At Contextual we are noticing emerging B2B apps are trending towards Android particularly in Asia and South America however what we are also seeing is a preference for React Native for the development of both Android and IOS business apps. This is great news for Product Teams looking to accelerate their apps across both iOS and Android platforms. The good news is Contextual provides a simple easy to implement solution for creating and targeting mobile and web application user onboarding guides and walkthroughs and in-app contextual tooltips, FAQs and user surveys across each operating system.
Spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever
A strong lead indicator that consumers are depending ever more on mobile phones to conduct their day to day lives is borne out by the latest Sensor Tower Q2 2022 Data Digest: U.S. which reports that spending on Apps Overtakes Games on Apple’s Platform for the First Time Ever.
U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps “pipped” spending in mobile games for the first time ever in the second quarter of the year to $3.4 billion.
Both traditional bricks and mortar businesses and technology led firms are increasingly realizing the potential for greater customer engagement by achieving tenancy on their customers handheld devices.
However despite the massive amount of investment pouring into the development of apps achieving success it’s not as easy as just launching an app! Over 70% of new app installs are used just once and then abandoned and studies have shown that the drop off rate after a free trial period can be as high as 60%. [5 Tips on how to reduce Mobile user churn]
The apps that have survived that initial install and free trial period Gauntlet of Death and become part of the latest success numbers have achieved this by helping their users achieve Activation by shortening the time to “Initial Value” via effective mobile user onboarding strategies and maintained a path of “Realised Value” through effective in-app user engagement via ToolTips, new feature announcements, in-app FAQs and User Surveys.
Sensor Tower also reported that the preferred revenue strategy adopted by B2B and B2B2C mobile apps have also proven to have had a significant impact on these numbers.
The comparative difference between the two sectors (with $3.3 billion spent on mobile games) puts the delta in spending between the two at a mere $100M. However, the difference in comparative growth rates with gaming apps on 20% v non-game mobile apps at 40% compound annual growth rate has non-gaming apps on a trajectory to grow to almost $15B and increase the delta in spending between the two by almost $1B in 2023.
These numbers will place product teams and software developers of B2B and B2B2C mobile apps under even greater pressure as they seek to take advantage of this phenomenal growth. Apps that do not have an effective contextual mobile user onboarding walkthrough strategy will struggle to claim their share. Established mobile and web apps that do not have in-app messaging and tooltips to help guide users find new features and nudge users towards deeper engagement with existing features will lose ground to competitors.
In today’s competitive business landscape, achieving fast-paced growth is a top priority for all businesses and apps. However, sustainable and measurable growth requires more than just expansion. It demands a strategic approach that focuses on user satisfaction, seamless product adoption, and the integration of contextual marketing. This article explores the principles of Product-Led Growth (PLG) and highlights the benefits of incorporating contextual user onboarding, mobile tooltips, and a digital adoption platform into your marketing strategy.
Product-Led Growth, Explained:
Product-Led Growth is a strategy that emphasizes delivering value through the product itself to drive user acquisition and retention. Companies like Slack, Calendly, and Dropbox have successfully implemented PLG strategies, transforming their products into the heart of their marketing efforts. This approach not only reduces costs associated with traditional advertising but also fosters a self-serve user experience that encourages organic growth and user referrals.
The Power of Contextual Marketing and User Onboarding:
Contextual marketing plays a pivotal role in the success of product-led companies. By prioritizing user satisfaction and providing in-app guidance and support, companies can lower the adoption barrier and enhance product adoption. Leveraging tools like contextual user onboarding walkthroughs and mobile tooltips, businesses can empower users to discover the product’s value on their own, leading to a faster realization of the “aha moment.”
Why Integrate Context Marketing in Your Strategy?
While content marketing has gained popularity, it’s clear that a single marketing approach isn’t sufficient to deliver the best user experience. This is where the Context Marketing mindset comes into play. Contextual marketing meets users at the right time, filtering information and providing tailored content to enhance engagement, retention, and revenue.
Benefits of Contextual Marketing:
Increased Engagement: Enhanced user experience leads to increased engagement. By focusing on user satisfaction, product-led companies prioritize customer feedback and develop features driven by user needs. This customer-centric approach boosts engagement, happiness, and the likelihood of user recommendations.
Less Intrusive, More Organic: Contextual marketing tailors content to users’ preferences, delivering a personalized experience without compromising user satisfaction. Understanding user behavior allows companies to better target relevant material, increasing user conviction and driving action.
Better Conversion Rates: Targeted marketing meets users’ specific needs, increasing conversion rates and reducing churn. Personalized marketing keeps users engaged, minimizing app abandonment and increasing the probability of recommendations.
Enhanced Analytics: Contextual marketing provides valuable insights into user engagement, retention, and comprehension. Tracking key metrics such as revenue, user growth, and daily and monthly active users (DAU and MAU) helps quantify the impact of guidance initiatives and optimize marketing strategies.
How to Implement Context Marketing:
To harness the power of context marketing, consider integrating tools like Contextu.al into your strategy. In-app announcements, videos, guides, surveys, and tips can transform the user experience, providing contextual guidance and driving user retention. By prioritizing the user journey, you can leverage context marketing to its fullest potential.
Conclusion:
By embracing Product-Led Growth and integrating contextual marketing techniques, businesses can unlock sustainable and measurable growth. Leveraging user onboarding walkthroughs, contextual mobile tooltips, and a digital adoption platform, companies can enhance user experiences, increase engagement, improve conversion rates, and drive organic growth. Prioritize your users, optimize your marketing strategy, and take advantage of tools like Contextu.al to propel your app’s success. Book a demo with Contextual today and start driving product-led growth with a focus on user satisfaction and seamless product adoption.
I was on a zoom session yesterday with John Cutler from Amplitude. The session title was “Why Product & Marketing Need to Collaborate…**“ – it was timely given our “Context Marketing” series is suggesting Product Teams think like Marketers.
By now, Product Teams mostly accept customer centricity (via segmentation, audiences, cohorts and personas) is the new way of increasing adoption. In previous posts we’ve discussed context marketing: the elements are the small nuances that can personalize any user journey.
As users, we all want a personalized experience, don’t we?
more relevant help, guidance and nudges for the user’s stage of journey
better conversion rates that fuel product-led growth
Let’s check the key elements that make context marketing critical to your App’s user Activation and Retention approach!
Element 1: Building a Contextual App
“How can I manage my customer experiences?” you may ask.
A contextual platform has some defining attributes that eventually delivers product-led growth through its engagement tools. This shifts your focus from just “writing code” to “crafting experiences” (or more specifically – “crafting user journeys”).
Here are some recommendations you should focus on to make a business case for employing an Engagement and Guidance Platform:
Stop wasting your precious development team’s time!
Reduce the time it takes for you to learn new things!
Identify and measure users based on their consumer behavior throughout their journey instead of spamming them with pop-ups and announcements!
Of course you need to hardcode your App with required web and mobile releases for each change that you want to make to the FEATURES in your product.
But each Feature is discovered and mastered throughout the user’s unique JOURNEY. You can think of a Feature as a city and the journey as the road. Along a road the signposts are the contextual help.
To add these contextual signposts and contextual help to your App, there is no need to stop developing Features. The signposts can be crafted, released, changed instantly (or scheduled) from our dashboard – without writing code.
Each user journey will be unique, but you can optimise for common roads by targeting audiences in your App.
Your hardcoded platform does not have audience targeting embedded from the beginning and no default analytics to help you deliver relevant content.
Contextual one offers you point-and-click and real-time audience targeting with no-code tools and built-in guide interaction analytics.
Credit: superiorwallpapers.com
Element 2: User-centric Focus
Ditch Campaigns – Focus on Customer Journey
Marketing is initially impersonal and the more personal it gets, the better. Context is crucial for building confidence and contextualising the message increases your prospective customer’s perception of you.
Context marketing means distributing the content the right way, not just spamming it.
Moreover, some form of targeted marketing is now employed by 49% of marketers – but it’s outside the App.
So targeting is sophisticated when Acquiring users (type of ad placement, demographic targeting, geolocation, or behavioural targeting) – but once the user gets into the App there is little sophistication for personalized Customer Journey’s – this is where Contextual Marketing will grow over this decade.
Remembering Pirate Metrics in our previous post – targeted marketing occurs at the acquisition phase.
Context Marketing starts with the Activation stage and continues throughout the funnel (Retention, Referral and Revenue). It’s clear that great execution of Context Marketing is super valuable.
Element 3: Methodology
Ask yourself: What is the best way to create an awesome experience that is accessible for every client?
Let’s break down the key elements of context marketing:
Access the User’s Full Journey
Although the user onboarding process is important, getting some insights into people’s preferences – focusing on the overall user journey allows you to personalize their experience and activate certain engagement tools for the right audience.
It makes use of real-time data to enhance users’ profiles and analyze engagement or feature adoption behavior, allowing for more intelligent engagement between businesses and customers.
Customize for Contextual Engagement
Content and Help based on segmentation or App Usage
As the main purpose of context marketing is to deepen product adoption (and feature adoption), create and spread content along the journey for the purpose of engaging and retaining an audience.
Target an audience, segment, or cohort
It takes a suite of tools for a full user journey: emails, newsletters, inApp content, push notifications and customer support. All of these should converge to contextual by leveraging the specific timeframe and circumstances for the user in your product journey.
It’s near impossible for most Product Teams to customize to the exact user (like Amazon does with Product Recommendations) but the macro easier (achievable) solution is audiences/segments.
Let’s say you want to focus on a new segment of your target audience. Customer retention, product-led growth, and campaign depth are all aided by relevant help/guidance content provided to individuals: right time, in the right screen, and on whichever device they want.
Cut Through the Noise and Spam
Newsletters, promotional emails, pop-up notifications usually end up in the spam folder or being ignored by users. Yes, you still need to use them – it’s a numbers game – to hopefully get the user back in the App.
But…its easier to get the user to their “AHA” moment while they are using the App rather than trying to pull them back.
Fast No-code Tools to Engage and Educate the User
Remember that you should stop wasting developer time? Coding can become one of the toughest tasks when it comes to your business, so instead of focusing mainly on a hardcoded platform, a contextual one already has no-code tools that allow you to use marketing to your advantage and craft users’ experiences.
Analytics to Evaluate Product Features and Engagement Rate
You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring – the only way to increase conversion rates and your revenue is by measuring the impact of feature adoption and product retention based on the Contextual Marketing you serve. Setting a Goal: did a guide, a video, a tooltip increase users completing that Goal?
Then you can iterate or double-down.
Element 4: Use Contextu.al Tools ????
Our platform was designed specifically to focus on context. Besides that, we offer you some no-code tools that are easy to use and ready for you to integrate with your strategy:
Contextual tip: Web Tooltips and Mobile Tooltips designed for feature adoption and onboarding and it helps you emphasize features or functions to your users.
Onboarding carousel: gives your users an overview and lets them swipe through pages of pictures and text
Announcement: gathers all the relevant announcements and pop-ups in one place and can be used for welcoming messages or feature updates
InApp Video: creates a more interactive experience by showing users a video from YouTube or any other source
Survey: enhances your feedback strategy and lets you get valuable insights from your users.
Contextu.al understands your consumers’ needs and helps you display only relevant material based on their user journey. By making product adoption simpler and faster, we help your business grow without writing code.
By now you are overwhelmed by the daily volume of blog post notifications, newsletters, and relentless social posts on LinkedIn and Twitter.
A daily tsunami of content marketing fills our inboxes powered by platforms automating: cold-email, drip email and newsletters. Product-led companies use email as low-hanging fruit. The problem is as McLuhan said: “the medium is the message“*.
Your Content Marketing competes for your user’s inbox attention along with: other SaaS/App/PLG products, marketing companies, e-commerce platforms and plain-old-spammers. I’ve even noticed one smart startup only emails on Saturday (no weekend rest for you dear reader!)
Your Content Marketing might be well-targeted, but McLuhan tells us the user will just see it as more junk mail. Add to that floods of App push notifications, social media posts, PR strategies, inbound marketing etc.
The user is fatigued.
Content marketing** in an internet (SaaS/Mobile App) product was popularised by one of the most successful SaaS companies, HubSpot.
A Brief Description of HubSpot
HubSpot’s slogan reads: Helping millions grow better.
When the company started out in 2004, they were considered trendsetters from the get-go. HubSpot was the first one to recognize that the disruptive marketing strategies of those days were outdated and didn’t seem to work anymore.
Hubspot created inbound marketing – this focuses on offering help to users and clients instead of interrupting and harassing them with advertisements and solely sale-oriented strategies.
HubSpot’s strategies attempt effective content marketing, to help the user solve their problem they indicated they had.
The only problem is:
a) not all leads are qualified
b) the granularity of audience segmentation is rarely nuanced.
c) it often has no way to update based on a user’s journey. (similar to when you still see ads after you bought a product!)
If Content (inbound) Marketing is perceived by the recipient (not you as the sender) as spam, then we should all stop spamming right? ????
Well, no….Content/Inbound is a valuable component of bringing the user back into the app – so lets just get better at segmentation.
From Content to Context
Product Led Growth is about making your software at the center of the users happiness (and buying) journey.
Context marketing is the conscious recognition of the 80:20 rule:
a) new user acquisition is costly – 80%
b) existing user retention (if you have a product that solves the user’s JTBD) costs 20%. Retention is the most effective spend you can make.
c) your App is a Context marketing platform.
Like Content Marketing, we aim to help and educate the user – but with Context:
a) Your UX and the customers data
b) the timing of the user journey is available to you.
Being contextual is critical when it comes to user journey and experience. The key point here is to be there for the right person, at the right time, in order to deliver the right content.
Product-led companies should deliver (or allow self-service) targeted helpful InApp content to their users; then user engagement deepens and user happiness increases.
Tools, such as Contextual, can simplify parts of the user journey: such as onboarding or feedback. User journey data also helps with identify the best time to trigger availability of specific and unique content based on the user experience.
Credit: thewayofdamasio.com
The Importance of Context Marketing
Context matters. But why?
Because of the 80:20 rule discussed earlier, we argue that Product Managers and inApp Growth teams are significantly better contributors to company revenue than acquisition personnel!
As mentioned earlier, timing is one of the defining elements of context marketing. With proper timing, product-led companies can easily deliver useful, helpful content that adds to the user experience and boosts user engagement.
But there are other reasons why context is important.
Let’s consider Dave McClure’s AARRR! Pirate Metrics through the lens of content and context marketing. McClure’s Pirate Metric is a simple tool created to help with product and business growth by analyzing five concepts, as follows:
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
The five parts of this model each represent a tactic that, once focused on, can help with product adoption and user retention.
Does Context Matter?
Based on this model, content marketing responds to Acquisition. Content (or inbound) represents the channel through which potential users get to know your product and your company. They might hear about you through SEO, social media, content creators, and so on. However, this step alone might not be enough to get to Activation, no matter how diversified your content marketing is.
To get to the next step, you need context. Activation is about a potential user familiarizing themselves with your app or product. For this, you need to be more specific with your marketing by finding a niche that resonates with the potential client. Optimization leads to product adoption and to Retention.
Just like Activation, according to the Pirate Metrics, Retention is also context-dependent. Through context marketing, customers can better understand the benefits your app brings to their workflow and their life. At this stage, the key focus for product-led companies should be reducing user churn by optimizing the content each user sees, be that through email or in-app notifications. Style the content to the user’s needs to make them feel heard and validate their needs.
Referral represents the likelihood of your users sharing their thoughts about your product with their friends. Think of it as the equivalent of the NPS survey’s question: “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?” Happy users lead to more referrals. How to make your users happy? Pay attention to context.
Revenue is the sum of the success of the previous four concepts. It grows exponentially with each happy user.
We can see that the majority of these concepts are greatly influenced by context marketing vs. content marketing. Optimizing your marketing strategy to be useful and helpful for your users results in happier people who are more likely to go through with product adoption and spread the word about your app.
It’s Time to Focus on Context Marketing
But how do you do that, you might wonder. That’s simple. Use Contextu.al!
An easy-to-use and helpful platform such as ours can simplify your life when it comes to context marketing. As our name suggests, we are all about context.
Contextu.al knows your users and helps them in their user journey to product adoption and retention by putting the most contextual content in front of them. With us, you can also measure the uplift or increased engagement by the user, to know if we helped them!
To get the best tips, notifications, and guides for your users, book a demo with us today at contextu.al!
* The irony is not lost on us that some readers will have seen this from an email newsletter.
** Benjamin Franklin is apparently the first content marketer when he published “Poor Richard’s Almanack”
*** Banner image credit: freepik.com
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