Setting the right goals for your growth strategy with Lisa Kennelly ⎮ The App Marketing Snack #22
Interview
December 8, 2022
For our latest App Marketing Snack episode, we’re hosting Lisa Kennelly, Growth and Product Marketing Strategist for Klarna. She helps us figure out how to get started on a growth strategy and set manageable goals. For more growth tips, you can even sign up to Lisa’s growth class.
Below is the transcript of the video above.
My name is Lisa Kennelly and I work as a Growth and Product Marketing Strategist at Klarna, the buy now, pay later and shopping app
What’s the first step you take when getting started on a growth strategy?
The first thing I do when creating a growth strategy is to understand what we are trying to achieve. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, you have no idea what you will need to do to get there. So what is the kind of growth we’re trying to achieve, because growth means different things to different people so identifying “We’re trying to reach this point in 6 months” or “We’re trying to do this thing in one month” or “We’re trying to invest in one year”, whatever that is.
Then you can figure out what are the steps we need to get there based on all the information: what our app is, who our audience is, how much money we have… All these things, how many people we have on our team, what are our resources. Once you know where you’re going, you can figure out how to get there.
What’s the key to setting manageable goals for your growth strategy?
I think setting a proper goal, it needs to be motivating enough so it should scare you a bit but it needs to be… You can see how it could work, right? So if you set the goal, you say we want to reach let’s say this many new users or this many paying subscribers by a certain date you should be able to do the math backward and be like we will get this much from this, we will get this much from this, we’ll get this much from this, like a pie chart.
And you can maybe have a level of confidence like I feel pretty confident when it comes to this, this is a bit more of a risk factor, but you should be able to not just set the goals but then work backward and understand this is how the math would break down, this is where this growth would come from.
What are your top 3 tips for app growth?
One would be: to understand the space that you’re in, and what’s your vertical. So whether you’re in the health and wellness apps or you’re a gaming app or you’re a utility app. There’s so much within the app space which I think is great that you learn from other people you see what other people are doing but something to be careful about is understanding what’s this space you occupy in your consumers’ minds and then fitting your strategies and tactics to that versus being like oh well this app did that so we should do the same thing, it might not be so applicable in your vertical. I think that’s really important to understand.
The other thing is really to understand what your business model is because again, there are different ways to have a business model behind the apps and of course, there are different kinds of subscription models or, you know, in-app payments. There are all these different ways it can go but understanding what you’re doing, how you’re planning to make money if you are planning to make money, and being clear about that and having that be a really informed decision.
My third tip would be: consider the role of your brand and how important is brand to your app at what point in your journey. I think brand eventually becomes important for everyone but for some types of apps, more important than others earlier in the development journey.
What’s a mistake you see a lot of people make?
I mean, I think that the big mistake that I often see is not understanding what your key growth drivers are and what your key growth channels are. And I think, you know we’re all, in the app community, especially over the last couple of years, have really learned to not have a reliance on some of the paid channels we used to which I think is healthy in some ways.
But being able to look critically and objectively at, based on our customers, based on our product, what is the smartest and best way for us to grow right now. And again, not just looking at what everyone else is doing but if you look at what everyone else is doing and then you see this is why this makes sense for us. So, understanding what growth channels make sense for your app, that’s the biggest mistake I see people making.
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