Marketing an Award-Winning Language App Through Offline Channels

0:00this is the third leg of the sub Club podcast World Tour so we've been in London and Vegas we're going to be with app promotion Summit in San Francisco and Berlin later this year talking with experts in the subscription app space and today super excited to have Stephen from Babel so let's get going tell me a little bit about your role at Babel and what Babel is Babel's a language learning subscription platform we're best known probably for our app but we do live classes podcasts games you can find all of that stuff in our app we've been around since pretty early on 2007 so we actually predate the IOS app store

0:42but uh yeah we've had a successful run over the years cool so what I was super excited to talk to you about today is offline ads like everybody in the app industry is how do I make meta work you know apps search ads one of the things I've talked to so many people on the podcast about and kind of been beating the drum for a while now is like marketing is marketing like find creative ways to find those top personas that people are going to spend in your app but so few people Venture Beyond those kind of like standard practices and know Babel is kind of a master at

1:15just trying whatever works so first off tell me like what's the philosophy behind the expansive marketing that Babble does yeah I mean I think it starts there where we're open to anything that works and it's kind of interesting like where generally known as an app but I think we've really made our name on the offline marketing side of things and a little bit the reason behind that is like we don't really view ourselves as just being an app so we don't behold ourselves to the traditional app marketing channels like our users are everywhere and so we feel like our marketing should be everywhere and I think we found pretty early on as

1:56we were experimenting with different marketing channels that we had struck a on some offline channels and we're talking traditional TV radio Podcast you know and I think there weren't a lot of our our competition wasn't really there yeah so we kind of were able to carve out a little space for ourselves one of the things you told me that really struck me is that you know too many apps think of themselves as just an app but really you're providing a service to users and people don't think of you just as an app they think of you as like I want to learn a language and like yes

2:29one of the ways facilitate that it's through the app but like you're just providing a service in their life and thinking about your business more broadly in that way helps you then think about Marketing in a more broad way yeah yeah absolutely and I think probably most subscription companies even if you have just an app are hopefully trying to do a little bit more than just get a download and you know that's a little bit of the way we we think about it is we have metrics much beyond the download and for offline channels since we're we're talking about that it's a little bit of a different audience than you

3:03might get on some of your traditional app-based marketing channels the audience tends to skew a little bit older they actually tend to be a little bit non-technical when you're talking linear TV radio and for us it worked really well these people are usually High income and they buy so it's a little bit of a different audience um if you're trying to monetize a subscription app it works pretty well so it's always surprising me that a lot of apps kind of ignore this category of things yeah we talk about that a l on podcast that for a lot of apps they really struggle to monetize in that under 30 age so if you

3:40know that about your app like we're struggling to monetize those younger users those are easier to find on Snapchat and Tik Tok and stuff like that but if your high monetization users are older there's so many channels to meet them at and so one of the cool things yall do is is a ton of radio spots what does that look like advertising on radio like are there minimum buys like what would an app thinking okay I talked to an app yesterday they know their audience is like is moms in the Midwest and that's probably a good like buy a spot when you know moms are going

4:16to be in the car dropping the kids off at school or picking up the kids from school like looking for opportunities like that how would an app go about that or the minimum spans how do you approach radio as a channel so you just started with probably the hardest CH that you could have when it comes to offline marketing so as far as targeting on radio much more difficult to do you have a few options when it comes to radio you can do kind of direct host specific buys where you contact a host and you get them to do a very personalized read for you and generally if you do it that way

4:53you are going to hone in on a particular audience the type of people that listen to that particular host the downside of that is it comes at a much higher cost so the way we tend to buy radio is pretty broad we buy it nationally and we kind of scatter the entire country and it comes at a much much cheaper cost so as far as targeting you kind of have to balance the idea of like am I willing to pay more for a highly targeted audience right or am I willing to go a little bit broader and kind of get power of numbers that way um so we tend to go the ladder

5:27where we're buying much much broader our audience is quite Broad and I think if you feel like you have a pretty broad audience like an offline channel is a pretty good option for you in in that regard is um and that's where the efficiencies get is when you can buy a little bit broader and not as expensive like it's it's actually pretty surprising I think most people would view offline channels as the more expensive channels to go after and when you buy a certain way you can actually achieve cpms that are probably much much cheaper than uh Facebook for example right and then linear TV another thing

6:05you'll experiment with a lot what does that look like yeah I mean linear is a little bit different for those that don't know linear that's your traditional cable TV Watchers but you know what's interesting about TV is it is highly measurable at least a lot more than it used to be it's not the same type of measurement as you might have with a traditional digital channel and I'm sure we can into that topic at some point in terms of how you measure all this stuff but it is pretty similar how we're buying TV it's pretty broad it's the cheaper cpms we're buying a ton of spots at very very low costs um and it

6:45plays out really well for us yeah what are some of the other crazy things Billboards or direct mail or any other crazy things you've experimented with that you think app should try like it's worth an experiment yeah I mean I've done it all we've found a really good place with linear TV radio and podcast the other places you can go there's out of home so if you're talking Billboards Subway ads that kind of thing you can also go direct mail in my experience like those things tend to be more costly and have much lower reach they work pretty well if you're a GEOS specific type of business where it's like I need

7:26to only target people in a particular G right so I found that like it gets pretty inefficient for companies that are just more broad it doesn't matter where you are you're much better off sticking into yeah like those larger scale channels like TV and radio and podcast so I think the the next question everybody would be asking and you kind of alluded to it already is I think the scariest part for an app marketer thinking about offline ads is how do I measure and like how do I know this is actually going to be effective so what are your kind of top strategies for understanding the effectiveness of this

8:04yeah so I mean I can give a quick rundown of how we're measuring it and I will say like we're not Big Brand marketers like we're not coming at this like just throwing money at the wall we don't care how it performs you know we're trying to grow our brand you know which is how most people probably view the offline marketing channels in this day and age I don't think it's like that I think a lot of startups a lot of app based business that are doing this like they're looking at it pretty similarly to how they measure digital we go about it in a different way so for digital you're

8:39generally you know measuring an ad click and offline we're leveraging how did you hear responses it's just another data point that we get to better tell the story of what is happening and wh everyone's coming from and so that's a super effective way to understand how the offline channels are working we kind of combine all of these elements we have click-based things coming in we have a whole bunch of people that are coming into our site or our app organically and some of those people are saying that they heard about us through TV or radio and that's a way that we get to fill in the blanks so it helps to like have that

9:21extra data point and I'm not quite sure you can really do offline marketing if you're not if you're not open to like collecting that information I mean there's a ton of ambiguity in measurement anyway and now it's probably a good time to like Embrace that ambiguity because you're not getting the kind of signals you used to with the idfa and Google's making big changes and everything else like that so babbles had to be had to embrace that ambiguity for years and probably came into this postat world a little more prepared so what are some of the specific I know like with TV you could potentially do some temporal

9:55like you know when the ad drops do you look at those kind of signals media mix modeling incrementality those kind of things so what's the mix of like how you try and model what is actually working the reality is even before all of the new regulations and data privacy laws attribution was always messy despite what people think there's no perfect solution and there actually probably never never will be so we never really changed our model after those events there was always a number of different signals that we look for and that's I think the number one thing to think about is that you can't just rely on one source of

10:35data or one model so we combine a number of different things just to get closer to reality that's all we're really trying to do is we're trying to get slightly better than having nothing so we are looking at again web clicks and where they're coming from like your traditional digital marketing attribution we do run incrementality tests we do have some mmm models we are looking at the how did you hear responses that all of our users are telling us where they came from and then for channels like TV you can look at what's called Spike attribution where you actually look at when all of your spots your TV spots ran and how much

11:16that drove up traffic or downloads to your website and you can actually measure the incrementality on that for every single TV spot that you run so you can start optimizing for different channels and different different networks and different times a day a lot of the same things that you would do with digital marketing channels so yeah when it comes to attribution I think the number one thing is look at different models and different sources of data and try to find the best truth within that right what does that look like on the back end as far as like MMP and data modeling like how how do you make sense

11:53of it on a tactical level yeah I mean you do need some level of data sophistication but there are a lot of platforms out there that help you you know we have at Babel we have both you know an app and a website so we're getting web traffic you could use Google analytics to track you know web events we use adjust on the mobile side and all this stuff comes with click data attribution data campaign data everything associated with that and yeah we aggregate all that data together we do have a wonderful data team that will help make sense of a lot of this you know we've come up with kind of a

12:33proprietary model that we feel like is the closest closest thing but yeah I mean one of the hardest parts is bringing all the data together the fortunate thing is yeah there's a bunch of tools out there that can help you do that yeah and then for apps that you know don't have a whole data team and a sophisticated model looking at Blended stats can be a really powerful thing like how much should we spend last week and then track that cohort over time and you as you grow you can become more and more sophisticated but but you can see in the data like how much should we

13:04spend that week and then how did that cohort perform and and the model doesn't have to be always be super sophisticated especially as you're ramping up spend like as you're spending less you don't have to be as sophisticated once you get to the size of a babble spending quite a bit of money on Advertising then you do want to be more and more sophisticated about it but you typically would have the resources to do that yeah I mean I think that it's a good point one of the amazing things that Google brought to the table when it you know it came about is that it made advertising more

13:34accessible you didn't need a massive budget to get going but I have found that offline is headed in that direction a lot more over the last couple years where it doesn't take a massive upfront investment to get started you can start small B Babel started small and our model has gotone much much better over the years so yeah you can really start anywhere I think cool a couple other things I want to talk to you about one was this idea of customer centered metric so Babble is a hard pay wall app and as you and I have talked about that being a hard pay wall kind of forces

14:14different reality on the business so I wanted to start with I thought you had some really insightful ideas around kind of things to watch out for for premium like subscription is almost Anonymous at this point with the premium model but that comes with a lot of drawback so what are some of the from from the outside in and not everybody here in the room will have the opportunity to like switch your app to a hard pay wall and that's maybe not the right answer for most apps but understanding from the other side of the table somebody who does have a hard pay wall kind of understanding some of the pitfalls that

14:48you see in the premium model I think could be really helpful for folks and then for some folks maybe hard pay wall is the right answer I think that's a really interesting question and I I do love this topic because we have gone the non-traditional way of having a hard pay wall we do offer a free lesson in our app so you can experience it a little bit but there's really not that much you can do and there's a different way that we've approached it but I will start off by saying that like fremium is not the only option for an app and it really might not work for everyone you look at

15:25a few companies that have done it really well and you think that that applies for all apps and I really don't think it does and for me personally I don't know if I've ever purchased an app through a free experience that I wasn't already going to purchase anyway so it's really difficult to get someone in and help them make a decision that they wouldn't have otherwise done especially when you just drop them into a product and into a less optimized product this the suboptimal version of what that product is going to be maybe we can do met a quick metaphor right now but like okay we're at the app promotion Summit like

16:05maybe you're deciding if you want to come to this event is it worth it for you you're an app developer you have a new app and you want to learn about you know the app Marketplace how would you decide whether you want to come to the app promotion Summit let's say you went and you Googled you know app promotion conferences and app Summit came up you came to the website they were like hey come on in for free you can watch via video the last conference that we had and like you sit there and you go around and you maybe like don't have you're watching you

16:40can't hear that well you don't know which talk to listen to and you kind of just you're like okay that was cool I didn't get much value out it that you leave the first thing is like app promotion has no way of understanding why that didn't really work for that experience I find that that's the experience that a lot of people get with freemium the way that we've taken it with Babel and I think with any sales process what's kind of like the number one thing that A salesperson or sales advice that someone gives to other salespeople it's focus on the Discovery stage when you're selling something to

17:18someone what does the customer need find out what their needs are where their gaps are and figure out how you can fill them and that's the approach that we've taken at Babel where instead of just like dumping you into our product and letting you figure it out we try to discover as much as we possibly can up front and that's through a registration and sign up experience that asks you a bunch of questions and tries to figure out as much as we possibly can about you up front and in that process we're able to talk about ourselves and tell you how we fit into what your needs are and by

17:56the time you get to the end of that experience you feel already compelled to buy you don't need to actually test the app on your own so that's the approach we've taken and so I think there's maybe two trains of a thought on this topic and it's worth experimenting with your app to figure out what works best for you guys I think one of the most impactful things for fremium apps is to understand what the fremium Bas is doing for you are they seeing ads are they sharing the app like is there a reason for them to exist it like provides business value and if not that's maybe

18:33when you explore a hard pay wall one of the things you were talking about too is like how freemium can lead to this like delusion looking at vanity metrics versus like really understanding the business there's some of these metrics that you were talking about with customer centered metrics like really understanding the customer and the value they're deriving from the app versus these like big ma numbers but like they're never going to pay you know a certain number of people are never going to pay Babel only deals with the people who are actually paying so you understand your customer base in a really different way so you could you

19:06talk to that for a sec it's probably pretty funny but I couldn't tell you what our daily active user number is or our monthly active user number because it's not what drives our growth model right know we are a mission driven company we are here to help people learn languages and that's what our customers goals are to their customers goal is not to open an app every single day or every single month like maybe that's what helps them get to their goal but we are very focused on helping our users achieve their goal which is to learn a language and so at Babel we do have a

19:49proprietary metric that we optimize for it's called learner success we've invented it I think it's worth every app and every company coming up with their own metrics whether you know it's something that aligns with what your customer's actual objective is if you're a company that's optimizing for a metric that's not in your customer's best interest you're probably not going to end up in a really good place at the end of the day and I found that a little bit with many apps which is like you just immediately assume it's daily active users and monthly active users and that's the number we need to optimize for it's very easy to fall into that

20:27trap but it might not be in best interest of your customer if you're looking at that so that's how we think about it yeah and how do you think about the impact of that on retention and like kind of having money on the line and the investment people make well I mean I think if you are meeting your customers goals then you're in a pretty good place to keep them around for a lot longer and so like having those checkpoints with the customers so that they know that they're actually on track that helps us we're not sharing you know how many daily active users or how many times

21:01you've used the app with our users because again it's not what their objective is you mentioned having money on the line you know when yeah there is something to that when you're paying for an app already that you're going to stick with it a little bit more because you you're paying for it you know there is a little bit difference between a free app and a paid app so we see that a little bit I think we definitely see like the people that are committing to our most premium subscription offerings like they're sticking around for a lot longer mostly because they there's money on the line yeah um it drives that

21:38motivation money's a a good driver of motivation so yeah that's that's a little bit of what we've seen awesome so last topic as we're wrapping up I know you know babbles had the web product for a long time and optimized for web for a long time but it's kind of a really hot topic in the industry right now of web to app driving people to the web I know a lot of your advertising goes web first you know people really struggle to crack that flow any top tips for apps struggling to make web to app work yeah I mean I think this gets back into the

22:12the original conversation around around offline channels and where people are where they are and where they come from you know we've designed both an app flow for our users as well as a web flow because we found that different people go to different places with our offline channels it's kind of interesting if someone sees a TV ad it's a 50/50 chance that they're going to visit you on your app or on the web we can't figure out how to change that it's hit or miss so yeah we've we've optimized both for the App Stores and the app experience as well for a web experience there's honestly not a lot of difference between

22:52them most of the time people are coming on their phones anyway there's only a very slight difference between like being on your phone and going through a website and being on the phone and going through an app I think the difference we have and why we optimize a lot for the web is you don't have that upfront download blackbox exactly we have a lot better data on web you know and just getting someone to download is a big step and to not have any touch points with your customer I talked about the discovery stage like we do the discovery stage on web immediately there's no commitment from the user at

23:31that point all they've done is visited the website and now we're talking to them through this kind of quiz like survey experience and understanding what their needs are collecting data on them as well whereas on the app experience it's like it takes a big hurdle for them to download the app but they haven't had a conversation with you yet so there's a few reasons why we want to optimize for web it's we get better data and we can have a deeper conversation and a better discoverability stage with them but also just because they're going there and we can't control that so yeah there is if you are going to get into the offline

24:06space you're going to want to design an a web experience yeah yeah all right well thank you so much for sharing all these great insights you know if if you're an app and haven't considered offline ads or just being more creative about your marketing strategy like there's just so many ways to get people's attention think Beyond those just kind of standard channels that everybody's talking about because there just are so many opportunities to be more creative with marketing and Babel's been making it work for a long time and doing some really creative stuff so like get out of that little box I will add I'm not a traditional offline marketer I

24:41think five years ago if you asked me that I'd be talking about offline marketing on a podcast or on stage I would have laughed at you like my I'm a digital marketer background so it's not too late to get into this you can learn and yeah it's definitely something I think every company should explore yeah anything else you wanted to as we wrap up not too much it's it's great to be here thanks for having me if you guys are interested in learning a language Go download Babble or go to our our website and or even just just follow us in in terms of all the marketing and growth

25:12related things that we're doing so thanks thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community yeah [Music]