The world of marketing is changing fast. It seems like the strategies companies employ to dominate their categories are continuously evolving and as a smart mobile marketer you have to stay on top of your game.One of the most important developments of the past years is the shift from funnel-thinking to growth-loop thinking.

This definitive guide (which will be updated regularly), will cover all modern mobile growth loops that the best mobile brands employ today, both apps and games, to reach global success and dominate their categories. You can and should view this as a type of growth menu. As a person in charge of growing a mobile application, a great growth strategy will usually involve a combination of one or more of these growth loops.

What is a closed loop for mobile marketing growth?

The traditional funnel has a core problem that separates successful apps from unsuccessful ones. The problem lies with the fact that the mobile marketing funnel is inherently one-sided.

You put in some effort at the top, driving awareness to your app, and get some percent of the top-of-funnel exposed users as installs, and then a percentage of those installs as high LTV retained app users. There is nothing in this traditional view of growth that connects the output of the model (an install, a retained user, or a paying user) with the input, it needs to generate an additional user.

A growth loop is, as the name suggests, a closed system where the input, through a series of steps, generates an output that is naturally re-invested as the input of the next cycle of the loop.

How to design a virtuous cycle for an App

When you have at least gone through the business closed-loop validation, this does not mean profit, but you have found a sustainable, repeatable way to export the core value of the product and earn revenue. Then on top of that, you should have found quite a few for the transaction, for the supply side to bring positive, or negative impact of various events.

Next, how to design the circuit, we are divided into three steps.

Step 1: The most important thing you need to do is to find out the core events that bring the strongest positive effects and prioritize them according to their strength.

 

Step 2: We divide the core values/events into three broad categories, demand side.

 

Step 3: Sketch the loop using the components that have been identified. Where does the loop start? What's at the top of the loop? What's next? What's next? Each component of the loop should drive the next stage of the enhancement loop. Sketch out the path back to the top of the loop and be able to explain why the loop is able to loop back on itself with accelerating momentum in your particular context.

The supply and demand enhancement loop is actually the same bilateral network effect we mentioned earlier, a more refined embodiment because the events in these loops will have more demand and supply sides entering, thus further increasing the value to each other and thus enhancing the value of the entire platform network.

The different operational phases of mobile marketing growth

App and other kinds of products also have a life cycle, which can be divided into these four categories according to the coarse dimension: exploration period, growth period, stability period and decline period. The operation methods corresponding to different product phases are not quite the same, and are simply divided into.

Exploration period: In this period, the operation needs to work with the app, through user research, market competitor analysis and other work to clarify the positioning of the product: what problems to solve for what kind of users. At this stage, the product may have just been launched, and many of them have not been verified by data. Operation needs to gradually improve the previous product positioning by selecting users, cultivating seed users, and continuously verifying data.

Growth period: When the product positioning verification of the exploration period is feasible, the operation needs to start using all resources and means to do rapid growth and occupy the mobile application market in this period. Mainly will do all kinds of ASO promotion, and gradually start to refine the operation, providing different services and operation means to different users.

Stable period: At this stage, there will be no significant growth in user volume, and the focus of operation will be mainly on the three directions of app maintenance, user activity maintenance and commercial realization.

Declining period: At this stage, the operation of the app can only rely on maintaining the previous operation methods to extend the life cycle of the product and do a good job of recalling the lost users. At this time, if there is a good opportunity or a new product, you can choose to jump over or pick it up.

Identifying problems and needs

Through the data to find the problem, for example, APP in a certain version release, found that the App Store and Google Play download users suddenly increased, registered users plummeted. Through investigation and problem recurrence, it was found that the app market had upgraded the mobile operating system and the technology was not adapted to make some models incompatible, and it happened that the new users from this app market were the most.

Through the data to discover the demand, for example, tools products in a certain version to increase the social function, the user volume continues to rise, from the new version of the data to see the main reason for user growth is to increase the social function, thus discovering the potential demand for the product -- social function.

Identify metrics and conduct A/B testing

The metrics are not numerical indicators in the traditional sense, but are likely to be a trial and error hypothesis. Rapid trial and error is now a self-correcting method for rapid Internet updates and iterations. Trial and error is often not balanced by numerical values, and only through the actual data generated for comparison can we verify our hypothesis.

The best way is to first determine the main content and main framework of the app, and then create the app, which can use different design layouts and design ideas. Push the app to all users first, then compare different designs with A/B testing to verify which one is better, and push the best design solution to all users.

Then use this version as the basis to do further optimization, including showing different content and ideas to different groups of people. For different groups of people, a more effective classification method is to classify according to user needs, for example, from what search terms. We can use targeted trials to show them different versions of the app.

Of course, such a personalized display strategy, or to compare the original that does not personalize the benchmark page, A/B test to see which is better, and then only the better strategy to go online.

How to turn & feed the virtuous cycle

By identifying the problem - determining the indicators - product design - development and testing - after the product is launched, if the decision is correct, then from a closed-loop perspective we are solving the problem of experience to feedback, will continue to attract traffic, thus forming a closed-loop user growth. The next step is to go deeper and keep improving and optimizing the feature to drive the product to form a closed loop.

If the decision is wrong, go back to the first step and re-analyze the data for a different trial and error direction. If the growth is not obvious after the iteration, you can make a plan B while continuing to observe, verify our decision through operations, marketing, and features, and then judge whether the decision is correct and be ready to give up.

Enhancement loop for mobile marketing growth

A great way to optimize many of these loops is to improve conversion rates from one step to another, by understanding the exact messaging and creatives you should use in the app stores and in your mobile install ads to 'close the loop'. It happens to be that we have developed the world-leading platform for creative experimentation and you can check it out to build/improve or unblock your mobile growth loops.