Table of Contents (Click to show/hide)
Monthly
Active User Rate
Daily
Campaign Budget
Increase
Click-through Rate
Growth
Return on Investment
Customer
Segmentation
Prioritisation of
Limited Resources
Competitive
Responses
Consumer
Change
I have been working in marketing in different industries (Mobile Gaming, Advertising, Foreign Trade) for five years. With that in mind, there is a urge inside for organising my experience. What's more, I need to build a foundation for better clarity and efficiency. After finishing the IMC specialisation from IE business school, I decided to take this opportunity and record what I have practised for the past five years.
The beginning of a market implementation
Marketing is a comprehensive skill that requires various knowledge such as your sales technique, creativity and task management skill. The rest of it would be just like tools or frameworks to deliver the message. All you have to do is master those tools.
Regardless of the format of a product (brand, application or a physical subject) or promotion channel (online or offline), I would start with a framework to build a basic structure of my marketing strategy（I use ProcessOn - Create diagrams online in real-time as my drawing tool):
Understand Your Objective Value:
There are a few blocks that need to be identified in the first place:
- company status,
- product market share,
- product budget,
- customer needs,
- executive framework.
Take Dragon Blade, a Mobvista mobile game published on South-east Asia, as an example. After a month of operation,<Dragon Blade> achieved many good outcomes: the CPI was 3 USD，there were about 4000-5000 installs per day, daily revenue was approximately 20,000 USD, the pay rate was around 4%, ARPU 30-40 USD and the 1-Day Retention was around 40%. This is a good sign for a promising market, and the company was making a profit in a short time (Company status). The in-app community feature increased social bonding among users. Online marketing like a Facebook event and in-game activities were no longer satisfying customers needs. So we decided to hold a medium-size player party to provide a natural area for players to meet up and reconnect in the real world (Objective).
Create Value For Your Target Audiences:
A cross-functional meeting between operation team or R&D department is required. There are two critical components in creating value:
- Positioning
- Targeting
Targeting means evaluating each market segment’s attractiveness. Positioning means occupying a clear, distinctive place relative to competing products. Still, take the dragon blade’s mini party, for example, I have several base questions:
- What is the demographic profile of players in Singapore and Malaysia?
- How should I attract more people to attend the party?
- How should I attract more potential users to download the game and top up?
- How should I retain more players to keeping playing and top up?
- How should I spread my brand through this offline event?
- How should I measure the effect of this event?
I will begin with the following steps to identify the unique selling points:
As a conclusion, I need to increase loyalty for the old players and need to be more informative and educational for potential customers.
Deliver Value To Your Target Audiences：
The rest of the actions will be the implementation process.
Usually, for the consumer information processing procedure as the following:
First, I ran some online survey for qualitative research on the Facebook fan page. I also asked our operation team to set up an in-game notification and questionnaire to cross-check whether the needs of the players match with the result as we predicted. We mixed with the Facebook and Google campaigns to improve the awareness of our event and the brand. Thanks to the cooperation with local partner Gtoken, we have the manpower to hand out leaflets. As such, we reach the active & potential users (which is selective exposure), and those who are interested and willing to respond were rewarded. For the selective attention process, our customer service team will make a phone call to confirm their attendance.
Second，people will choose what they want to involve with during selective comprehension stage. So at the party, we have several highly-interactivegames, top-up event, and physical prizes to engage the audiences.
Capture Value:
At last, we are in the final stage. Capture value is closely related to selective retention in customer information processing. Users will decide whether to stick to the product or just toss it away and leave. In my position, I need to measure the effect of every campaigns and promotion. AIDA model and Hierarchy effect model are great tools for measuring.
Take the mini-event, for example.
- For the cognitive stage, we can collect the data about how many impressions conducted in the online campaigns and offline promotion.
- In the affective stage, we can have a real number like campaigns clicks, likes & share, comments, questionnaires responses and actual attendance number.
- Final in behaviour stage we can calculate the period change in retention rate, pay rate, top-up amount and purchase orders.
For the best scenario, it would be great to have some interviews and the survey to collect feedback from the users who participated.
An excellent feedback report can help you find the problems and tackle the issues, besides, it’s a unique performance report to your boss. And with a full assessment of the whole campaign, you can gain more experience in refining your marketing strategy that will be the most effective to attract customers.
Clcik here to check more details of my events:
Thank you for reading.
