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“Talk to your users.”

“Do user research.”

Common advice for coming up with ideas to form and shape ad creatives.

But if you’re a small team and short of time – or if you’re a marketer without easy and direct access to users, what are you to do?

We’re often in this position – where we’re typically brought in as an external marketing team – without the mandate or resources to set up elaborate user research exercises to help inform ideation for our creatives.

And we find a number of smaller and indie app developers that we work with don’t have the resources or time to set up user research activity either.

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So. Here is what we do – and recommend to everyone we work with.

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The lowest hanging fruit we typically find for nearly every app we work with is app store reviews.

App store reviews are first person testimonials from actual users that are sharing their hopes, dreams and frustrations – and telling us exactly what their experience of the product is – and these can be gold for understanding and framing messaging and copy for ad creative.

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But how do we actually use these reviews?

For every app, we review and analyze our users along these dimensions:

🥸 User Personas

🩹 Pain Points

🔑 Alternatives

🎁 Benefits

🗂 Features

What is important and often missed by many folks is that it’s critical to retain the users’ language exactly as is in our analysis.

As has been said: take quotes, not notes.

Here are some examples for a fitness app that we recently analyzed:

User personas:

I’ve had knee issues for many years and normally I couldn’t follow or complete other workout programs, but this one I find to be really effective and I’m able to complete it each day which motivates me more.

Pain points:

For someone who does not want to spend an hour or two a day working out, these 20-minute workouts are great.

Alternatives:

Other apps left me with a sense of missing steps or not understanding the tangible benefit it gives.

This is a great app for someone who works and does not have time for the gym or simply cannot afford a trainer. 

Benefits:

Love that the exercises concentrate on what I have issues with, and get my heart pumping. Another nice benefit is that one can choose different exercises in each according to your age, strength, and preference. 

Features:

 The app has video and written explanations for each exercise and allows you to make substitutions for any of the suggested exercises. 

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As you can tell, many of these reviews give a clear picture that just pie-in-the-sky brainstorming never would – and even diligent use of the app would not give(if you were a marketer, would you know that users valued the fact that the exercises were short and 20 minutes long? But if you pored over hundreds of reviews, you would definitely know).

The hundreds of reviews that our team goes through tend to be pure gold – and they give a crystal clear picture of the kind of user that we were serving.

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We often take these quotes and use them directly in ad creative, typically as:

📐 Overlays for display ads

📗 Messaging and headlines

📽 Overlays for video ads

📝 Scripts for UGCs

★ Quotes and social proof in various parts of the ads

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And yes: this exercise typically takes a handful of hours – and yields very deep insight that doesn’t need focus groups or user research studies.

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 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!