Episode # 6 – Louis Tanguay – On the future of Marketing

Sixth episode of the Smartketers Podcast: conversations with marketers using artificial (and human) intelligence to make smarter decisions.

We talked with Louis Tanguay, MD & Founder of App Growth Summit. about:

• The future of marketers’ roles
• The importance of building a Community
• Keeping things authentic and honest to reach people better
• Nonsense (but hot) topics in Marketing
• What’s true and not true about AI in marketing
• Content Quantity vs Quality
• Building a consistent Brand story

Special speakers: Mariano Saenz from Winclap and Louis Tanguay from AGS

Timeline

• 00:00 – About Louis and App Growth Summit
• 05:00 – The Role of Marketers after IDFA
  
• 06:00 – How to reach people better
• 07:00 – AI being more A than I
• 07:30 – The importance of Community Building
• 10:30 – Hot topics in marketing that are just nonsense
• 12:00 – Being real to your audience
• 14:00 – What’s True and not True about AI in Marketing
• 16:00 – Content Quality vs Quantity. The 50/50 rule
• 18:30 – How to make the most out of your content
• 21:00 – Telling a consistent story along the User Journey
• 22:30 – The Gap between Product and Marketing Teams
• 23:00 – Growth as a Holistic Approach

About Louis and AGS

His linkedin profile describes him as a 𝗠𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗽𝗽 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 & 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗿, 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿, 𝗞𝗿𝗮𝘃 𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗮 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗕𝗲𝗹𝘁…& 𝗗𝗼𝗴 𝗗𝗮𝗱. For us Louis is a person who likes to keep things simple and real, and we like that. He advocates on the importance of connecting with humans and building communities.  App Growth Summit is one of those communities.
AGS is a global conference organization of highly curated event, helping the world’s top mobile apps discover how to increase their performance & sustainability.

You can check their last events here

Transcript

Marian: Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of smartketers, a conversation with tech experts using artificial and human intelligence to make smarter decisions
In today’s sessions we’re going to focus in the future of marketing.
Well, thank you, Louis. For joining us. My first question, always the same one, going straight to the point: Who is Louis? Tell us.

Louis: I don’t know. If you find him, let me know. No, just kidding [laughes]
So I started this company App Growth Summit and that’s actually a real background. It’s not a fake one.
It’s like yours, it’s real too. Right?

M: Yeah, mine is also real [laughes]

L: So I started this company in 2018. And we started it because we noticed that I used to do events before this one for a different company. And we always used to hear from the attendees “Hey, I wish that we had an event that was smaller and it was limited invite, only “stuff like that.

 So I said, “oh, we can do that!” So I just started this company and that’s what it is. And it is an invite only limited vendor, VIP events. And we have all original content. We’re always looking for new ways to make things very educational and fun. 

M: Amazing. And, and I can see over there, you’re in a four regions, right?
Like 140 events during the year. 

L: Yeah, technically it is four main global regions north America, Latam, Europe and APAC including Australia. But then, you know, we just had an EMEA event where we brought in some African apps, like Sub-Saharan African apps.

So this way we’re truly global except Antarctica, but we’ll get there by 2025. Right.[laughes]

M: Amazing. And you switch to a hundred percent online during this year, right?. [00:02:00] 

L: Yeah. For the last year, our last live event was in March of 2020, and then the lockdowns happened and everything. And we’re going to return to live events September in San Francisco.
So it would be just about a year and a half of all virtual.

M: Amazing September is going to be a hundred percent offline. We’re gonna be all there? . 

L: Every speaker is going to be live on stage. And we actually, during this whole lockdown, we built our own proprietary virtual event platform, which, you know, you’ve seen it. Cause all the others, like it seemed like they would just cookie cutter and they didn’t really have a lot of personality.

And we wanted something that would work for us and what we wanted something we can control. So we said “it doesn’t exist. So let’s just build our own platform“. So since we built our own platform, even when we go back on September 2nd, live to in-person audiences, we’re still going to virtually stream it through the platform.

This way, if you’re down in Argentina or if you’re in Berlin or wherever you are in the world, that has an internet connection, (even Antarctica with the penguins) you can just like dial in to our proprietary platform and then watch the live stream.

So this way you can always see our events now, wherever you are , through our platform and we’re still going to go in person. It’s about 200 right now, 200 people in person in San Francisco. But we’re hoping that increases when we got closer to the day.

M: Amazing. Amazing. Well, thanks for the update.

Hopefully, , I’m going to be there in September. I’m willing toto travel and to go away from Zooms . So hopefully we’re going to meet each other over there. 

So jumping directly into the first question. And I know this is something that you have been discussing in all your events.

My question: is which are the things that are going to remain on marketers’ field over time? And what is going to be the role of marketers during the next years?

L: Well, I think because of ATT and IDFA deprecation, I really think everyone’s going back old school.

Old school is new school again. So some marketers did this, but I think especially in a mobile app marketing, because so many people were relying on so much great data that they had, they kind of lost touch that on every single data sheet, every single tick on that data sheet, unless it’s fraud, is a human being that made a conscious decision to click something, buy something, open an app, or something like that, or search for an app.

And I think that has gotten lost a little bit. So this could be a good thing for the industry because it can make marketers smarter again, or at least more in tune with other humans again. So they used to be an on old thing in marketing, it was called a creating a user personas or avatars. Like basically who is your perfect user or customer. 

You would design your copy, your brand, everything to appeal to that person. So when the advertising, went out into the world, those people were more likely to respond to your advertising because they are the people you’re trying to connect with. While as other people might just brush by it and not pay as much attention.

And if you hear some snoring, which you probably might, my dog is snoring, right? 

M: Yeah, don’t worry, don’t worry [Laughes]

L: So then I think that’s gonna cause people to go back and become smarketers again.

M: Something you mentioned offline that I think it’s interesting to discuss about that, is we have two choices: we are going to need to learn to code or to be experts in humanity. 

Your approach will be, we need to go back to being humans experts, right?

L: Yeah, because I think the learning to code made a lot of sense when you’re running data reports and everything, and you’re running your own analysis. Which I think you should still do as much as you possibly can. I guess it’s better than just being tied to spreadsheets. But at the same time, I think if you’re in marketing, you should understand user psychology. And what makes the humans do the actions more than than diving deeper into, into parsing data?

I think that’s the wrong direction to go. Not that you shouldn’t go there. I mean, that’s the wrong primary focus. But your primary focus should be on how do I reach people better? How do I understand people better? And humans are weird, you know, it’s hard to understand them, so you’re always gonna keep learning there.

And I think a lot of people talk about AI. But I think right now, AI is more A than I. I think people use that term when, I mean, machine learning, they just say AI because it makes it sound cooler like that it’s actually intelligent. But it’s really still a very much a work in progress. Which I guess you could say talking to humans is too after all these years.

I think we could predict that if we go back to grab some of the old school methods, Of understanding how to communicate your message better, be succinct. And instead of just blasting out a bunch of stuff. We don’t have the budgets anymore to be able to handle that much testing. So I think if we’re just more strategically focused, I think that will do people better. That will serve people better. 

M: Makes sense. So you think content is going to be super important, right?
Like creatives, building a message and all that stuff. 

L: Content is good as an engagement and a retention tool. But also I think the hidden aspect, the hidden gem, is going to be, depending on your app, of course, community building.

Now, of course, if you have something like Mathematical graphic calculator [App] or something [like that, you’re not going to build much of a community around that. 

But still, you want to build a community around your app and your product, because then that increases engagement. Because they’ll have to engage with the community in your environment. That also increases retention because it keeps them coming back to continue the conversations with the community. 

Then it also increases your organic user acquisition because then your users become evangelized. And then they’ll start talking about your app. As if we know ASL, we know that more higher reviews and longer retention will help you with your ASO as well. 

So I think community is like a hidden gem, so to speak. When it comes down to like retention. So I think that should be a focus for people as well.

M: Well, thank you. Thank you for the for the answer, moving to another topic. This for me, it’s a super interesting question. Which things are completely nonsense topics that are just hot?

L: I think, I would say like, you know, going back to what I said earlier, I think AI is overblown. I think that there’s a lot of people talking a lot about AI, but they really should be talking about machine learning and talking about how it’s a work in progress and not a science. 

I also think half of what you read on LinkedIn is a lot of BS. You just see how they try to be super smart and get a following. And they’re saying things to get likes. And other BS thing is Companies that post on social media for social causes, but they don’t back it up through actual action.

For example, during last year with Black Lives Matter, you saw so many companies posting black squares, and then they just do that so they don’t get called out. But then, if you look at their roster, they don’t have a bunch of black leaders. They don’t, you know, they don’t do any work in the community. They don’t support through charitable efforts. 

They just put that on there. “We support you” and it’s like, cool, but you might as well, not even do it if you don’t back it up. So there’s just a lot of it is this type of stuff. There’s a lot of grandstanding that goes on. And I think that is what’ kind of resonated with us, is we just have a low BS factor, you know, it’s like, we just want to be real.

And when we say something, our audience knows that we mean it. So for example one thing is, instead of just posting a black square, we posted like, you know, “here are ways that you can make a difference“. “Here’s like 10 things you can do“. And one of the things, one of the many things we did is we actually a portion of all of our American event proceeds go to black girls code.

Cause I think to make a big change you have to be able to facilitate and support education, property ownership and entrepreneurism. If you can help out in those three areas, then the people that have less means now they have their own, they have agency and they have their own abilities to float their own boats and not have to expect someone’s gonna, you know, try to lift them up themselves, which is a whole other topic.

So I think a lot of that stuff is basically if you believe in something, you should say what you believe in and you should back it up and you should say what you mean. And I think a lot of people kind of oversell themselves and their companies and their efforts. Or some people will talk about failure too much.

I just think like we just need to get real. I think that, that we just need to get back to reality and say, what are the things that are actually going to drive effective change? And since this is a marketing show, like stop bloviating about all your numbers and what you’re doing. Just focused on what you do and do it better.

That’s what I think would be a good thing. Let’s talk and more action. Right? 

M: Makes sense. And regarding machine learning and AI will this also show what we discuss a lot about those topics, technology in general, what’s your opinion [00:12:00] regarding that?

What’s true and what’s not true about machine learning or AI in marketing?

L: Well, that’s a whole other topic to get into like the knit, the nitty gritty of that stuff. I think the main things are, it’s machine learning, not AI. 

That’s my personal opinion. I think we should call it what it is.
There is no intelligence behind it that’s not programmed. it’s really machine learning. 

I think we just need to focus that no matter what you’re doing with this stuff, you can’t forget that there’s a human involved, you know, that’s going to receive this information.

One thing that I did notice though, if you’re doing like machine learning acquisition campaigns or stuff like that. But if you run a campaign that utilizes machine learning to optimize your campaign, that you want to make sure that you don’t want to stop the campaign for over, what is it? Seven days seven to 10 days? Something like that. Because then it will have to learn all over again. So a lot of people will take a budget, like let’s try this out. And then by the time it fully optimizes the campaign and targeting that could have changed. Then people are now stopped an t hen they have to restart. But they start from the beginning again.
So that’s one thing I’ve learned about that, that I think a lot of people should know. 

M: Great. I’m going to jump to , one of my questions that has to do with your previous answers. That is regarding content. I think we all know the answer you’re going to give us, but I’m going to ask you:

Quality or quantity while building content?

Which is your opinion over here? How can you help marketers do a better job?

L: Well, I think you’re expecting me to say quality, right? 

But actually. I’m going to say that it’s 50-50. Okay. Cause you want to make sure how can I spend something and get more utilizations out of it.

For example we’ll have a speaker present on a particular topic. But then we’ll keep that video of their presentation. We’ll ask them to write a full article about it. And then this way, instead of having an article and the presentation separately, then we’ll marry them together on one article. And then this way you could watch them abbreviated presentation.

That’s about 10, 15 minutes or whatever it is, or read the more in depth article with some extra details and additional data information. So that you can utilize in multiple ways. 

Now you can have a blog, which of course is good for SEO . You can put that content in. You know this I’m talking is for us specifically [i.e. Content marketers]obviously, if you have an app, that’s irrelevant.,
And then you can put the content on YouTube and stuff like that. 

So I think it’s important to try to think about how to maximize your saturation of the information you could put out there. 

For example, you got somebody like Eric Seuffert [marketing thought leader and author] that once IDFA was announced that it was gonna go away and ATT was going to be in a norm, I think he’s probably written a million words on this over the last year. And people say he is a content machine, like he’s just constantly pumping out content. 

Now he says something different and always has a way to spin it and have a different take, but he’s getting it out there. And I would say he’s like 50-50. You know, it’s good content, and it’s also a lot of content.

So if you say I’m only focusing on quality, then you might do a lot of research and come up with like a five scroll blog. That’s going to be well-written and something that you would have read. Sports fans would know this, like [the work] () from grant land or something like that. Sports illustrated, The New Yorker. Any of these magazines that are known to have really great articles.

But Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t have to write all of your articles. You can write something that’s decent and then write something else that decent instead of waiting to just get one amazing piece. Or if you’ve got one long piece break it up into multiple blogs, do like a three part series.

There’s multiple things that you could do. but you always want to focus on get content out there, but I also don’t just pump content out there ,just to do it and have it be crap. 

Then you have to have analytics, right? You have to look at which contents getting the longer view times. And then if it’s video, the longest play times, things like that. And then do more of that. Don’t do too much more where that’s all you do and your audience gets sick of it. 

But it’s like, it’s a constant, you know. It’s like surfing . Content creation is like surfing. You look there’s the wave, I’m going to try to ride this wave. But I want to get out before I crash.

So you’re always looking for the next wave that you could ride at the right time for as long as you need to. Then move off to something else.

M: Makes sense. So what , I got from your answer is that you can build an amazing piece of content of a specific topic, and then you can have different formats to show that information on different moments and get the most out of that piece of content, right? 

L: Yeah. And don’t try to write like a masterpiece, like write a very good piece and do multiple ones of them.

And if it gets to be beyond a certain length, let’s say if it’s like more than 1500 words, break it in half or break it into parts because then you get better SEO juice that way.. 

M: Amazing. Two more questions. The first one: from an app marketer perspective, 

What happens after the download? How important is user experience after acquiring a new user ?And what should marketers do from there on?

L: I think that’s where marketing will talk to Brand. And I think that’s where like the Product people should be talking to Brand. And that’s how you marry together the pre and post install.

Because you never, you know it’s an old cliche, but you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Right? So once someone launches your app for the first time, now it is technically out of marketing’s hands.
But the story that marketing tells has to be consistent .Because if they’re setting you up with a story of, this is what you’re going to experience when you download the app, and I open the app after downloading it,my first launch and I activate it and I look at it and it’s not what I was promised. I might close it or definitely not converting or buying anything. Especially if you’d throw up a paywall right away, because then I’m confused. 

You have to think , does this tell the consistent story? And if not, then you have to adjust your marketing to make sure that you paint an accurate picture.

Painting an accurate picture to get people to download and then use it for a long time is way better than painting a glorious picture to get more people to download it, then your churn will be higher. You know? So I think that kind of like almost everything I’ve said here kind of has that same through line. 

It’s better to be honest and real And, you know, show the benefits of the app. I’m not saying just be good. It’s an app to calculate stuff, you know, like show the benefits of it. 

M: Do you see a gap over there? Between product people and marketing people? Are they working together nowadays? Or you see a gap that we need try to merge them more?

L: I’d say generally speaking. Yes. There’s a gap. Is there a gap all the time and every single company? You know, it depends.

I think smaller companies might do a better job of this because people are usually in the same room or these days, not in the same room, but at least in the same Slack , Where they are knowing what everyone’s doing.

But in the bigger companies, you have more likelihood to be siloed. I think that’s where we have to deconstruct how our teams are constructed. And figure out is this what’s best now that we have to work together more so than ever. 

Because your target, your marketing has to be smarter because you can’t target as effectively. So when you finally do all that work to pull in some good users, you have to make sure the onboarding experience is great. And it continues that story. And the user experience is good because then they’ll continue to engage, retain all those other catchphrases that we love that end up at LTV and monetization.[laughes]

M:  I was thinking about this growth hacking methodology from Sean Elly [Author of Hacking Growth] and from my experience, I see that there is an important gap over there. I do not see teams working like Growth Hacking teams. 

Or what you mentioned from big companies being super divided. The marketers usually have a goal, like CPA and their main focus is CPA. And they will use their intelligence and technology to get the user to a certain event. 

But then, on the other side, you have the product people. They have other methodologies to improve the performance of that user. But there’s split (between them) and there’s something to work over there.

And I was about to ask you a question, in your events do you see Product people participating? 

L: Yeah. because when we say App Growth Summit, I know, like “growth” and, words like that were mostly used for “User Growth” . And that’s another pet peeve. We should make a distinction between paid UA [User Acquisition] and organic UA.

Cause like everyone says UA and they think, you know, ads. But technically ASO is also user acquisition because you’re acquiring users

So we shouldn’t just let, to paid media, have all the fun, right. There’s also organic.
If you can evangelize your own user base effectively, that’s also User Acquisition. Because they’re evangelizing and sharing and bringing in people organically. And you haven’t even done anything, you haven’t spent any money. That’s users coming in and they’re highly qualified and high quality users too.

You know, we just need one focus. Even the old school design of a user’s journey of a funnel, is even wrong, you know?

Because when you think about it, it usually comes in through the funnel and then everybody is “let’s do different down funnel techniques to eventually get them” [They set] multiple goals like monetization, long-term retention. But [the problem with] that visual, when you think about it, users are just going down and dropping off or they just stay there.

The way I like to look at it is Growth in general, because growth means more than just users. If the users stay, then you’re growing your attention. If they stay, they’re more likely to give you more money. So your monetization is increased, and your revenue. Everything gets increased, which is growth.
So I think of growth more like a circle. Where the circle is spinning and then a user comes in and then they go through the different points that you’re trying to get them to. 

But instead of just falling through the funnel and stopping. We have to remember how to create that community. Evangelize them to become magnets, to attract new users to then come in organically. That’ll save you money and make your growth efforts more efficient . 

M: Great Louis. I think we ran out of time.
Any final thoughts for the audience that you’d like to share?

L: I think just to summarize everything, don’t forget that all your marketing efforts, you’re talking to human beings at least right now. We’ll see what the future holds when AI becomes more real . Or the UFO’s or whatever we’re trying to. [Laughes]

But just remember, you’re talking to humans. Understand that humans are every step of the way and that telling them a consistent story is very important. 

Whatever you say, pre-install on your marketing, you should know that you can deliver post-install. And not know that you can deliver because you believe in yourself. But like, what is my product truly offering that’s of the most value. We should be promoting that. And then our acquisition efforts will theoretically retain more users because the story is consistent. 

M: Amazing. Well, thank you Louis for joining us. it was great having you. See you next time.
And of course see you in September and virtually before that.
And if anyone wants to join, go to appgrowthsummit.com and sign up.
When is the next show? 

L: We have one in Seattle, we have one in LA, that you guys will be joining us.
There’s San Francisco, Austin, Texas. Singapore, APEC, we got them all over the world. 

We don’t stop and I don’t sleep [laughes]

M: Amazing! Full of opportunities to share our thoughts. Thank you Louis!

L: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.