Note: We have a growing community of mobile marketers!

 The Mobile Growth Lab Slack: A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

ABOUT GRACE: LinkedIn | Go & Co Growth Consulting

ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤰🏻 Why Poppy Seed Health followed a non-linear path to portray pregnancy

🌵 How absence of IDFA informed the creative strategy

🐚 Unique depictions that drove growth and why

🍁 Building creatives that are favored by the algorithm on Facebook

🌼 Authentic creatives that were challenged by ad networks

🌊 The process of producing authentic ads

👨🏽‍🎤 Recruiting creators for UGCs

KEY QUOTES

Keeping a creative-first approach

In order to convey who we were serving, we really thought creative first, and that the creative would help illustrate the personas and the use cases for us, and could do some of the work that we were losing in the targeting. So how can we portray that nonlinear pregnancy-postpartum journey in a way that could be compelling and really go creative-forward, messaging-forward and then think about how the channel supported each of those elements. So I think it’s a way that I like to work, but it makes it even more imperative that we work that way. How can we work the algorithm to our favor?

Authentic creatives that struck a chord with the audience

 What were those actual questions that we were getting combined with leaning into the idea that this is not a linear path but that every day actually presents challenges that many birthing people don’t think of as rising to the occasion of needing help, but are pretty universal. So for example, we showed a person breast pumping for milk and then wondering, “Am I producing enough milk?” 

And as they’re doing that they’re typing the question into Poppy Seed Health. We had a diaper blowout because we know that that was a very visceral real experience that people have. How many of these are normal in a day? So we tried to really take those moments and illustrate them in the most compelling way possible, and then connect them directly to how they relate back to the product.

A tracker doesn’t talk about the common worries during pregnancy

And then also knowing what things were unspoken. We were a texting app and a space that was safe for birthing people to ask questions that they may be ashamed to ask. So we had an image of someone combing their hair and large clumps of hair that nobody wants to see come out of their head, but larger clumps of hair that they were used to. We were highlighting postpartum hair loss, which is something that’s quite common, but isn’t often talked about. So it was also a little bit of things that people were asking us and that aren’t highlighted in a tracker pregnancy app. In a pregnancy test ad, just think of all the creatives that speak to that life stage. What’s shown is a happy mom with a baby bump. Or a baby on their hip or something like that.

Overcoming algorithm challenges

From a tactical point in our setup, we created distinct campaigns for new creatives to try and overcome some of those algorithm challenges. So they weren’t all just in one campaign or in campaigns that were in competition with each other. Also just making sure that they are distinct enough so it wasn’t like, we’re having 15s cuts of the 30s video. 

That’s how we just sort of did it tactically and tried to least get four to six weeks of concrete learnings by having them as their distinct campaigns, with a distinct budget, and making sure they’re different enough, did help us discover some additional winners, and actually some of the original, more pared down content that initially was being beat by that 30s video.

Why some creatives may work better than we anticipate

We had a couple of different scenarios that we shot and portrayed and this pulled them all together. So there was the breast pump and diaper blow out. There was also what we tried to simulate like late night in the bathroom wondering “Am I okay”, for the pregnant person. We showed a video of the hair loss I had mentioned. So it kind of pulled together all of those stories with some thematic music and then an overlay at the end basically, like we’re here for you through it all, pregnancy, postpartum and all the messy in betweens. 

So because it kind of went through all the stories, my initial thinking was, I think the micro stories are going to do better, right? Because someone’s going see themselves in one of these scenarios, not all of these scenarios, because they can’t happen all at once. Some were clearly for pregnancy. Some were very clearly for postpartum. Some were a little bit ambiguous. But I think what was the takeaway for us was just taking folks through that journey. It was different people being depicted. It was different stages. It wasn’t like one person going through it in the right order. But I think there’s something about foreshadowing that in this life stage is really powerful, because if it’s your first pregnancy, and you just don’t know what you don’t know, and you can imagine, I may need help with that or like that.

And even if one of those scenarios resonates with you, I think it just built trust that we understood what the journey looks like.

Recruiting creators for UGCs

We try to be as open ended with a brief as possible, because we really wanted to honor the style of that creator. Because we have a lot of the work on the front end in terms of vetting and looking at all the applicants. And we worked out a loose formula of number of followers based on what we knew the going rate was, the type of engagement on your most recent videos, your tone, etc, how that felt fit through our brand filter, which we had to find pretty early on. So that made it so we were identifying people that we trusted enough and that we thought their style was compelling enough and that their audience engagement was compelling enough that we can give a somewhat open ended brief in terms of what we want, we absolutely want you to create this in your style. We’ve chosen you because we think that you are brand aligned, and then you’re interesting and that we liked your style.

Tracking conversions brought in by influencers

We’re primarily tracking conversions through promo codes. So that was the simplest way, we also gave people a tracking link. One of the requirements is to have a link in bio, going back to us for at least 48 hours, they would often keep it up longer. And then there was worry about tracking direct downloads from there. What we saw most commonly was code usage. And then also just overall incremental installs around that 24 hour period of video is usually what we noticed the most, because Tiktok is not necessarily a platform that people want to leave and then go take an action, but they will absolutely use that code and then go to the app store later. So that’s what we saw the most.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth 

I’m very excited to welcome Grace Ouma-Cabezas to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Grace, welcome to the show.

Grace

Thank you. Happy to be here!

Shamanth 

We are thrilled to have you. We’re going to talk about something very interesting in terms of the way you approach creative and creative strategy. It’s a unique topic and I’m excited to dive into that with you today. It would be perhaps good to start by giving our listeners the lay of the land, and tell them about the product you’re working on, so they have some context as we talk about the strategy down the line in this interview.

Grace 

Absolutely. I head growth at an app based tele-health solution called Poppy Seed Health. We connect doulas, midwives and nurses with pregnant and postpartum people via text, 24/7. It’s a unique text based product for this very unique life stage that folks have. Our doulas, midwives and nurses are there to provide well being and emotional support. 

Shamanth 

Generally a lot of ads portray pregnancy as a linear path. In our last conversation, you shared that, unlike a lot of traditional messaging out there, you guys decided to focus on a very different track. So can you tell us what led to the insight to portray pregnancy not as a linear path? And what was the path you guys chose?

Grace

The product itself had about a year of beta testing to wind down the actual offering. But additionally, we were looking at our competitive set  from a creative and messaging standpoint. We saw that most of the products that folks were interacting with around pregnancy are trackers. Trackers by nature are linear – week 1, week 2, week 3 of your pregnancy up until birth. Those products assume what we would call a positive path, you’re happy about that pregnancy, and then it goes to a healthful conclusion, which is a healthy baby on the other side. But we knew through our research that that was not always the case. Even if the end result is a healthy baby, and a healthy birthing person, the road is windy. And that’s why Poppy Seed Health exists. So that initial insight was the foundational product offering for us.

Shamanth 

That’s very interesting, because what you’re also saying is for a tracker, maybe that messaging is right. But for emotional support, it’s not. 

Grace  

Yeah.We have to contend with the reality that we’re sitting in the same competitive space. We’re a pregnancy app. So you have to be able to grapple with that even if your offering is not the same.

Shamanth 

Obviously, everything we’re going to talk about happened after ATT, when a lot of the tracking and measurement was broken. How did the absence of the IDFA inform creative strategy?

Grace 

I think it was a little bit of a blessing and a curse, especially when I talked to other mobile marketers about this, because we knew what we were dealing with upfront. We launched in April 2021. So actually, it was kind of freeing, in a way because we knew that we had already been seeing signs across the market: DTCs no longer had a roadmap of almost infinitely scalable, highly targeted Facebook ads. So that was a known entity then, losing a lot of that visibility. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to refine as much within the algorithm that could get focus of what life stage that person was in. 

Of course, it was never perfect. I’ve seen a number of ads even before IDFA went away, that didn’t necessarily relate to my life stage based on my browsing behavior. We knew that we were going to lose a lot of those inferences. So initially,

in order to convey who we were serving, we really thought creative first, and that the creative would help illustrate the personas and the use cases for us, and could do some of the work that we were losing in the targeting. So how can we portray that nonlinear pregnancy-postpartum journey in a way that could be compelling and really go creative-forward, messaging-forward and then think about how the channel supported each of those elements. So I think it’s a way that I like to work, but it makes it even more imperative that we work that way. How can we work the algorithm to our favor? 

Shamanth 

I think that absolutely makes sense. You can’t laser target specific micro audiences. Speaking to the specifics of your creative strategy, what were some of the standout moments in somebody’s pregnancy journey that you guys featured in ads? How did you decide on these specific moments? Why did you think they worked?

Grace 

It was a combination of things that we had heard from initial beta members for our product.

What were those actual questions that we were getting combined with leaning into the idea that this is not a linear path but that every day actually presents challenges that many birthing people don’t think of as rising to the occasion of needing help, but are pretty universal. So for example, we showed a person breast pumping for milk and then wondering, “Am I producing enough milk?” 

And as they’re doing that they’re typing the question into Poppy Seed Health. We had a diaper blowout because we know that that was a very visceral real experience that people have. How many of these are normal in a day? So we tried to really take those moments and illustrate them in the most compelling way possible, and then connect them directly to how they relate back to the product. 

And then also knowing what things were unspoken. We were a texting app and a space that was safe for birthing people to ask questions that they may be ashamed to ask. So we had an image of someone combing their hair and large clumps of hair that nobody wants to see come out of their head, but larger clumps of hair that they were used to. We were highlighting postpartum hair loss, which is something that’s quite common, but isn’t often talked about. So it was also a little bit of things that people were asking us and that aren’t highlighted in a tracker pregnancy app. In a pregnancy test ad, just think of all the creatives that speak to that life stage. What’s shown is a happy mom with a baby bump. Or a baby on their hip or something like that.

Shamanth 

What I also find fascinating is that the primary focus is on the actual lived experience of these people and not on the highlights alone. And if all you did was show the text window, it would be nowhere as compelling to the actual experience of these folks.

Grace 

Yeah, because a large part of it is also tied to the need that exists, but because in the market, there wasn’t a solution. I think people just didn’t know that they were looking for a policy to help to put it that way. So showing the inside of the app, wouldn’t be as compelling as showing a real life situation that you could be in, and then connecting it to that moment to the product.

Shamanth  

Sure. Did a lot of these ads depict the solution? Which is talking to somebody, feeling somewhat reassured, was that a part of the ads?

Grace 

Yeah, we always wanted to integrate the phone and the texting without showing it on screen. So in every image there was the person, who was on their phone texting. We had a couple iterations where we showed the text bubble over that context image that was also really compelling. So you can kind of pull it together.

Shamanth 

Very impressive. To switch gears a little bit, in my experience on Facebook, I’ve often seen creatives that just don’t look special win the bids. These can be simple JPEGs or a very short video. But the algorithm favors it so much that it sets off an effect where this particular ad eats up all of the spend. Or, in fact, I was talking to somebody and they were like, we have this really simple ad that’s winning. Everybody on our team hates it. Because we have all these ads that are very strategically thought out and we look at some stupid JPEG which looks ugly, winning. 

Generally, the biggest challenge is ensuring that any new creative gets love from the algorithm. It builds up enough history over time so that it actually gets performance. So we talked about the actual concepts, which certainly were very emotionally intense, and I can see why they would absolutely speak to users. How did you account for the fact that even though these ads spoke to users, they may not get love from algorithms, at least early on? And how did you address this?

Grace  

That’s a really good question. I think it’s really interesting that you bring that up, because in the context of Poppy Seed Health, ads actually are more evocative. When we were looking at the overall distribution strategy, and looking at how we’re going to use this, our initial photoshoot and maximize the assets, I actually requested a lot of simpler pared down assets. Focus on one story, a little bit neater kind of packaging that kind of highlighted the product. And then we also created a 30 second compilation video that could be a TV commercial. That one did the best, it was like the flagship brand asset from a creative standpoint and it also performed the best.

That being said I can’t remember a time when that kind of an asset did the best. I almost wonder what shines through. But we still had the situation where we had this one winner that was gobbling up all of the impressions and all of the reach and we did want to test into different concepts based on what we learned. It was a compilation that told a lot of different stories. But then we wanted to try something that was more tech. We wanted to try testimonials and other things that kind of went beyond the great brand feeling to get people a little bit further down the funnel.

From a tactical point in our setup, we created distinct campaigns for new creatives to try and overcome some of those algorithm challenges. So they weren’t all just in one campaign or in campaigns that were in competition with each other. Also just making sure that they are distinct enough so it wasn’t like, we’re having 15s cuts of the 30s video. 

That’s how we just sort of did it tactically and tried to least get four to six weeks of concrete learnings by having them as their distinct campaigns, with a distinct budget, and making sure they’re different enough, did help us discover some additional winners, and actually some of the original, more pared down content that initially was being beat by that 30s video. 

Shamanth  

So you’re building those conceptually different ads so that these are going to speak to completely different audiences and you’re isolating them away from the historical winner. If I may ask a follow up, if you’re isolating new ads for the historical winner, until the new ads get enough love from the algorithm, performance of those ads is going to suck at least for a little bit of time.

So how did you treat that as basically a test budget that we are prepared to completely lose? How did you think about allocating the budget?

Grace

Exactly, we treated it like a test budget and considered it like a percentage of the whole for that channel. And I think you sometimes have to just stay the course.We saw it as a test budget and thought, probably for our spend level we thought of it as no more than a quarter for four weeks to go against this new concept. And then at the four week mark, we could evaluate and if it really was tanking bad, then we can make a decision in the moment. I think overall, there was more gain in using that and having that creative testing mentality. 

Shamanth 

I also imagine you could turn off individual ads off that tactic. Maybe three are really bad, but hopefully some of the rest could keep them going. Thank you for getting a little bit in the weeds with me because there’s so many things I’m curious about because of frustrations we face.

Again, not to get into too many follow ups, you did express that the brand asset was doing very well. What was that about?

Grace 

We had a couple of different scenarios that we shot and portrayed and this pulled them all together. So there was the breast pump and diaper blow out. There was also what we tried to simulate like late night in the bathroom wondering “Am I okay”, for the pregnant person. We showed a video of the hair loss I had mentioned. So it kind of pulled together all of those stories with some thematic music and then an overlay at the end basically, like we’re here for you through it all, pregnancy, postpartum and all the messy in betweens. 

So because it kind of went through all the stories, my initial thinking was, I think the micro stories are going to do better, right? Because someone’s going see themselves in one of these scenarios, not all of these scenarios, because they can’t happen all at once. Some were clearly for pregnancy. Some were very clearly for postpartum. Some were a little bit ambiguous. But I think what was the takeaway for us was just taking folks through that journey. It was different people being depicted. It was different stages. It wasn’t like one person going through it in the right order. But I think there’s something about foreshadowing that in this life stage is really powerful, because if it’s your first pregnancy, and you just don’t know what you don’t know, and you can imagine, I may need help with that or like that.

And even if one of those scenarios resonates with you, I think it just built trust that we understood what the journey looks like.

But, that was actually a surprise to me. It was beautiful but I thought, this is one of those beautiful ads, that’s not going to get much reach.

Shamanth  

And certainly it got love from the algorithms after you actually tested that. Did a lot of these ads get love from the manual reviewers at the platforms as well?

Grace 

The reviewers were not as big fans of a lot of the imagery that we’re depicting. Luckily, I was able to contest almost all of those and get ads reinstated. But we definitely got our hand slapped by the algorithm and were mistakenly marked as adult content in that initial robotic review. But somebody looked at it and then appealed. That’s the challenge of being in this space. What I really appreciate is because I’ve definitely been to places where I think it added further context into why other advertisers in this space do what they do. Showing the baby bump, and the smiling person is a very safe ad that it’s likely not going to be rejected and who wants to go through the hassle of that. But I think from a brand standpoint, it was just important for us to be real. And I know sometimes that gets caught in those filters, but we’re doing it with honesty. It’s resonating so much with people that we knew it was the right thing to do.

Shamanth 

Yeah, this is certainly a frustration. I’ve heard from other folks who work with women’s health or sexual wellness, they get tripped up by algorithms all the time. It is frustrating, because these are very important facets of people’s health. 

Grace 

After some hiccups we were able to overcome those rejections. It’s a badge of honor to a certain point.

Shamanth 

Yeah. You described some of the ads, and these are all showing real people. Presumably, that requires prep, rehearsal & scripting? A lot of groundwork. Talk to me about the actual production process for these ads. Especially early on? Because, I would imagine with some of the systems you have now, you can work with agencies, you can have a somewhat more established set up, but early on, what was the production setup? 

Grace

So this was really unique and exciting, at least in my experience. And being at an early stage.

I think our founder just had a vision of how she wanted things to look, which is always helpful. But we had an in-house team, we have a really incredible creative director. And we did all of this in-house. We do all of our concepting or ideating in-house, and we truly did it as a team. So there’s a lot of really great lessons learned actually, from this first production. Like I mentioned, we had real people. They’re not professional models. There are people that we knew in our actual lives. So if we knew someone who just had a baby, who had a friend who had a baby bump, they were invited. So they were able to depict things that were really happening in their life and that helped with the scripting aspect, it was much more storyboarding and it was nonspeaking. Highly recommend that if you’re looking to go this route, it takes off a lot of pressure off the plate.

Because these people were tapping into their real life experiences, it wasn’t really hard. These are not professionals. It really was not hard for somebody who has a baby to imagine that diaper blowout, you know. And the person that was pumping was truly pumping. She had a child that she was breastfeeding, so that aspect helped a lot. We were drawing context from these subjects’ real lives. 

We rented a house and we have got a lot of freelancers to help on the production side. It was quite the operation. And it was a two day long shoot, out of which came that 30s video. We probably had 10 stills and a couple of different video snapshots. So it was a big shoot for a new brand. What we learned is that the core was really the story. So when we went back around almost a year later to do another shoot, it was much more pared down. We realized, especially from the video that people were drawn to, this story that resonates with them. And that we needed to hire actual people, not professional models. 

We didn’t need as much context in terms of sets that we had before that we can really focus on storytelling. So we did another shoot recently, where it was just different individuals in different stages, again, of pregnancy and postpartum telling their stories. One of our designers shot on her iPhone, there, 30 seconds, “tell me about yourself, tell me about where you’re on your journey,” and we were able to compile that into beautiful videos and get these really great stills that still have such a powerful brand impact and this was maybe 10% of the cost of the initial shoot. 

So I know a lot of startups do it the opposite way. And I think that’s driven by I think the sensibility of the leadership team, how we wanted to encapsulate the brand. But it was really big learning and what you can get when you pare down. I’m glad we went as far as we could in the beginning because we were able to capture really great learnings. But it then kind of taught us that we can pare it down. This is what people care about. And we didn’t have to question production value. 

Shamanth 

That’s very impressive. And just to dig in, you said before, not professional models but friends and family. Has that changed? Just the composition of the actors? 

Grace  

I think the first shoot helped us recruit our friends and family. Ironically, people saw that the level of quality was because your friends and family are not just jumping to be a model in a shoot. It’s about their real life experience. So I think in a way, the first shoot kind of built our legitimacy in terms of the care and the quality that helped recruit the people closest to us. But it’s not an easy task, actually. So I don’t dismiss the friends and family route. I think, if you can, it can be really powerful.

Shamanth 

In a certain light, it’s probably harder to recruit friends and family, because you could conceivably compensate somebody enough to do it in a certain manner. But for the friends and family to be on camera in their most vulnerable moments, that’s not easy. So if you recollect, what was the pitch to them? Was there any hesitation? 

Grace

We were able to lean into our overall mission that we’re building this product that is helping pregnant/ postpartum people, this is what we want to provide. So a lot of people were connected to the mission of our brand. So that’s super helpful – people who actually believe in what you’re doing. 

On the compensation piece, you want to be fair, you want to compensate people for their time. And also acknowledge the fact that these aren’t professional models. So you’re not paying the same rate as you would for a professional model, but we always want to ensure compensation for the time and their travel is covered. Those are things that we bring up upfront. And then we also want to talk a little bit about impact. For the second shoot this was easier, we had a year’s worth of being live in the market and we could say, these are the people we’ve touched. These are people who’ve helped, and you can be a part of spreading awareness of who we are. That was the best hook other than the tactics of, we’re going to pay you something, we’re going to cover your travel and transportation.

And we gave people a chance to ask questions. I think it’s a big thing. I mean, like you said, these are not professional. So making it really clear what we want from them. What the time commitment is, those details are incredibly important. 

Shamanth 

I would imagine that money is not the most important part but it’s important. They obviously have to get paid. 

Grace

Yeah, they’re not looking to get rich off of this one day shoot.

Shamanth 

We’ve worked with a number of kids apps. Those moments are not as vulnerable as what you’re describing. But for parents to have the kid on camera that is a big ask. And I think we found out that folks that were the most enthusiastic, were also the ones that were excited and proud about what the kid was doing and about using the product itself. Because again, these are products that help kids do well. 

You guys have worked with creators? Talk to me about what that means, what that direction of producing creatives looks like.

Grace 

When we were launching post IDFA, we wanted to start off with a little bit more of a diversified channel mix. One of those opportunities was Tiktok. And as we were thinking of how to engage with the channel, it just was clear to us that, we had to start through creators, like it was going to take time to build our organic presence, we had to figure out what we even wanted our point of view to be, and we knew you had to create content that works for that platform. So working with creators was basically a no brainer to kind of get ourselves on there. 

I should mention that most Tiktok creators are charging a fraction of what similar creators on Instagram would charge. I don’t know how long it’s gonna last. But there’s just a greater incidence of virality on Tiktok, and there’s just more people and individuals that have large followings. And it’s based on what they’re putting out into the world, not purely aesthetic. So for a number of reasons that were appealing to us, when we’re looking at creators and sort of how that workflow was, we’re thinking about people that fit into this nonlinear journey. So folks that had children, but maybe had also experienced a pregnancy loss, people that have gone through fertility treatment, people that were just in these different life stages that were very contextual to us. And then we also thought it was a way for us to also test tone too. 

So there are folks that are funny and people that are a little bit more serious and get deeper into their personal lives. And there are people who do exclusively family content, people who maybe do a little bit more lifestyle content, but they’re also parents. So it also gave us an opportunity to test different tones in a way that we just didn’t have the resources. I described what we did from a photoshoot perspective, but aside from that, we needed other footage. We put together a pretty simple briefing process, we then evolved it, if there was something particular in the month we wanted to focus on, etc. But it’s become this really wonderful bank of assets that we can use across reels, on Tiktok itself, and then help further contextualize who we were and it’s been pretty powerful.

Shamanth 

If you want to contrast the way you approach the creators with how you describe your approach to the friends and family for the photo shoot, how would that approach be different for the creative? What does the brief look like? 

Grace

We try to be as open ended with a brief as possible, because we really wanted to honor the style of that creator. Because we have a lot of the work on the front end in terms of vetting and looking at all the applicants. And we worked out a loose formula of number of followers based on what we knew the going rate was, the type of engagement on your most recent videos, your tone, etc, how that felt fit through our brand filter, which we had to find pretty early on. So that then made it so we were identifying people that we trusted enough and that we thought their style was compelling enough and that their audience engagement was compelling enough that we can give a somewhat open ended brief in terms of what we want, we absolutely want you to create this in your style. We’ve chosen you because we think that you are brand aligned, and then you’re interesting and that we liked your style. 

And then we just had a few key points around call to action, I think that’s something that can kind of fall away, especially with a lot of the Tiktok creators, many of which we worked with, we were one of their first brand partners. And actually, thinking about the differences of the pitch, many of them were compelled by being a part of growing something that they felt was important. So that was, I think, one line between the friends and family recruitment and the content creator recruitment, especially being a new brand that they resonated with, the product we’re building and who we’re serving, and they saw themselves in it. 

So I think that was the common thread. But for the creators, it was a bit more open ended. Here are the things you must say on the call to action sides, it’s easiest to get missed. We normally gave parameters around timing, etc. But other than that, we kind of kept it pretty open.

Shamanth

To get into a tactical detail, are you evaluating, installs and downloads from the creators as well? And if yes, how are you thinking about it?

Grace 

Yeah. We’re primarily tracking conversions through promo codes. So that was the simplest way, we also gave people a tracking link. One of the requirements is to have a link in bio, going back to us for at least 48 hours, they would often keep it up longer. And then there was worry about tracking direct downloads from there. What we saw most commonly was code usage. And then also just overall incremental installs around that 24 hour period of video is usually what we noticed the most, because Tiktok is not necessarily a platform that people want to leave and then go take an action, but they will absolutely use that code and then go to the app store later. So that’s what we saw the most.

Shamanth  

Yeah. All makes sense, especially with broken tracking around, right. You’ve talked quite a bit about some of the different angles you guys have taken? What did you think about the volume of creatives, or the number of creators you produced? And maybe the answer is different for the photo shoots and the creators? What do you think about that?

Grace

For our own assets that we created, we did have to kind of have some discipline around the number, and that was mostly mitigated by our spend. We had a certain budget, and we didn’t want to dilute so much that there were things that were barely getting any reach, and they were over producing. So, it was actually a little bit of a learning on the creative side and the growth side around what that looked like and also how to spend our time and energy. I kind of look at marketing resources very holistically, including what you spend to create an asset, not just how much is spent on the media. 

So, as reflected in the second shoot, we were able to calibrate what we should spend, how much we should produce but a lot of that was mitigated by the budget. On the creator side, It was much more open because each creator has their own audience. They have their own style. I guess we’re all mitigated by everything we would have gotten by budget, there was less of the thought of – we don’t want to have four or five of these things live at the same time. Creator A has a completely different audience from creator B, they’re not even in competition with each other in the same way that too many assets are running on Facebook with the same theme.

Shamanth 

I know, you said this was mainly governed by the budget for the growth side, and on the creative side, but what were you thinking about? If it would have been just Facebook, we need to have X number of assets in testing at any given point of time. Was there a rule of thumb of some sort that you were looking at?

Grace 

Yeah, I think we had a rule of thumb similar to that. It was based on our spend, we had maybe four or five ads in play, and one or two of those in a given time would be a test. So that’s pretty much constant. And then we would swap in and swap out of position based on performance. 

Shamanth 

For the photo shoot, are you looking at an X number of new ads every month or every quarter? 

Grace  

I can think of them in four to six weeks sprints primarily. One of the learnings with the second shoot was, the costs were reduced so much, we took a lot more stills. So we’d have more things to be able to test. With graphic design, you can create different versions that are text based. Having more raw assets gives us more options to mix and match as time goes on. But I normally thought of it as four to six week sprints, and thinking about shoots that are years worth of assets. I think that that’s the most sustainable way to think about it. Even two years worth of assets, you can get away with it. If you’re going to capture a video in a more pared down way, there’s more of it that you can capture and use over time versus getting a professional videographer and agenda and costs, mitigating how many of these things you can actually produce?

Shamanth 

This has been incredible. I think we’ve gone on for a fair amount of time. 

Thank you for being so vulnerable and open about everything you guys have done. It’s certainly a very unique perspective and interview for me. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. But before we do that, could you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you did?

Grace 

Actually, this is an exciting moment. I’ve officially launched my growth consulting, so I can spread all these amazing learnings and make an impact across several different consumer companies. So you can find more about that www.go&co.co. You can search for me on LinkedIn, always happy to accept new connections. That’s the best way to keep tabs on what I’m up to.

Shamanth 

Excellent. We will link to your LinkedIn and of course to your website in the show notes. But for now, we will let you carry on with the rest of your day. Thank you so much. 

Grace

Thank you

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!