The vital connection between user acquisition and product – Product Marketing at Tactile
Product Marketing Managers at Tactile serve as a vital connection between user acquisition and product. They guide users through the marketing funnel, from first ad impressions or app store visits, all the way to app installs and in-app engagement. They’re central in finding the best way of promoting our games to our target audience through the right creatives and messaging. We sat down for a conversation with our Product Marketing team, Aliaksandra (Alex) and Volha, to learn more about what they do and how their marketing efforts impact our games.
Staying up-to-date with marketing trends
In their day-to-day, the role of a Product Marketing Manager involves crafting compelling narratives, developing marketing collateral and closely analyzing market trends. Staying up-to-date with the market and competitor data is essential, given the dynamic nature of the gaming industry. Volha elaborates: “For us, it’s really important to closely monitor installs, revenue and ranking not only for our apps, but for our peers as well. This helps us to understand what is trending on the market and what we can do to make our games stand out.“
Alex emphasizes the collaborative nature of their role, working with diverse teams such as creative marketing (animators and designers creating our visual marketing assets such as ads, trailers, icons, screenshots etc.), user acquisition and product owners..
Both Volha and Alex also collaborate closely with their team lead, Terra, who is our Head of Growth. This collaborative structure creates effective communication, streamlined processes, and creative ideation, as ideas about product marketing can come from any side. But that doesn’t mean that collaboration ends within their team! Volha and Alex work very closely with teams from all functions within Tactile – product managers, game designers, user researchers, and player care managers – to ensure alignment between marketing strategies and overarching product goals.
Connecting marketing and product
One notable project that reflects the collaborative efforts between the marketing and product teams is the full-funnel strategy for mini-games. Over the past year, we have explored a variety of mini-games such as pull the pin and several others. The mini-games initiative is a great example of how product marketing managers can influence new feature implementation on the product side through marketing research and tests. Mini-games therefore offer a unique avenue for marketing.
Furthermore, Alex shared the importance of connecting our marketing efforts with real-world events, such as the Mean Girls movie release. Alex used the Mean Girls inspiration to create a campaign for our most recent game, Makeover Match. “Connecting with real-world events enhances user engagement, creating a bridge between popular culture and our games,” says Alex.
Another fun part of a Product Marketing Manager’s job is forming hypotheses and testing them. “We always need to understand why we are testing specific ideas, visuals and texts,” says Alex, “Sometimes even a tiny change can make a huge difference and impact on marketing performance. For example, simply making banner colors brighter helped us to significantly increase conversion to installs.”
Other times, marketing tests just don’t show the expected results. At the end of last year, the team ran a Christmas-themed app store experiment. Their hypothesis – having a Christmas-themed app store during the Christmas season should lead to installs – failed. However, it offered a valuable lesson in understanding user preferences.
The world of product marketing also comes with its own surprises, and smaller initiatives can make a huge impact. Alex and Volha shared a story about a newly released character on Makeover Match which they decided to feature in a particular in-app event promotion. Volha explains: “One thing led to another and eventually Google Play featured the event very prominently, which led to 5x higher app install numbers than in previous months.”
Turning app users into players
Product Marketing Managers play a crucial role in leading users to install our games, turn them into players, and make them want to come back again and again. Their dynamic and collaborative approach, coupled with their ability to adapt quickly to marketing challenges, sets the stage for continued growth and innovation.
