Moburst is a global mobile success company that helps leading brands and startups master the mobile arena. In this interview, Moburst COO
Lior Eldan talks about how companies can conquer their toughest challenges through cost-effective, creative, and innovative mobile marketing campaigns.
Please describe the background and vision behind founding Moburst
Moburst was founded in 2013 by myself and my partner, Gilad Bechar. Back then we identified a need for mobile marketing specialty, which traditional ad agencies didn’t really address as a different medium. Put simply, they were copy-pasting the things that worked on the web, but that didn’t work so well.
We started initially working with startups and established our reputation in the Israeli market by working with emerging companies like Fiverr, Gett, and many others.
In 2014, we got an offer from one of our client’s investors who liked what we did for their portfolio company and decided to invest in our company so we could expand our operations to the US. So less than a year after we founded the company, we already had our offices in the US, working with tier-1 brands like Umika, Reddit, Duncan Donuts and other Fortune 500 brands.
In 2015, my partner Gilad has moved to America and that’s when we really took off.
Today, we are ranked as one of the top agencies in the US for mobile marketing and app optimization.
What’s unique about Moburst?
We provide 2 types of services.
- App store optimization is about perfecting how the app looks on the app store and its discoverability. For example, we worked on promoting Google maps in Japan, so whoever searches the word “Navigation” in Japanese, will find google first. It’s a bit like SEO but the keyword targeting is much more limited than on the web, so you have to be precise with your keyword strategy. We’re also making sure that whoever gets there will actually download the app. We help our clients with keyword optimization, conversion, AB testing, and data analysis.
- On the user acquisition side, we run ads across all mobile channels: search, social, display and media buy. We don’t only get users to install the app, but we also look at what the business metrics are, and focus on those channels which get us high-quality users.
We also have a lot of experience with product marketing, how to improve the onboarding process, and how to get users back to the app. Often when we run media campaigns, and we see there is an issue with one of the in-app conversion metrics
, we offer tailored solutions to improve their in-app funnels. For example, we recently helped redesign an app for the National Association of Pharmacists (NABP). We don’t develop apps, but redesign them from a marketing perspective, making it more marketing oriented and engaging for the users.
What are some use cases for Moburst?
One use case is big brands like Google and Samsung, for which apps are just one of many marketing channels and they are looking for expertise, so they bring us on board.
We take care of their app store visibility and discoverability, making sure they do mobile right.
Another use case is for mobile app-centric startups which leverage our experience from the strategy phase all the way to launch and post-launch optimization. For example, we recently helped launch an app called SAY which is a messenger app that aims to bring the family together in a fun and engaging way.
How would you advise marketers and brands to keep up with the rapid changes in the digital marketing world?
It’s true to say that the market is very dynamic and changes often. 6 years ago when we first started, it was a complete jungle out there, but now there are more and more best practices and lessons learned, as well as a huge amount of data that you can tap into.
The best advice I can give you is to have a trusted advisor to walk you through the basic setup. It’s hard to find the right people and get them on board with you, but there are also some great tools that are must-have apps like AppsFlyer, which deal with mobile tracking and enable us to manage our campaigns and understand things like how our campaigns are performing, how the users behave in-app and which users are translating into loyal customers.
It’s important to build a mobile app oriented marketing stack so you’ll be able to monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, your in-app user behavior, user LTV, churn, etc.
How do you see the future of mobile in 5 years from today?
I think we’ve seen a few major trends in the past years.
One is Google and Facebook getting more market share and power. They obviously will continue to be very dominant, but there’s also a lot of media opportunities outside of this duo, e.g. ad networks and other social channels like SnapChat and Pinterest. I think we will see more consolidation of the smaller networks, eating each other to become bigger and compete with the other big players.
Another trend is that two years ago there was a sort of bubble burst of mobile fraud. Mobile measure companies like Appsflyer and Adjust revealed that a significant portion of all mobile media is actually fraud. The industry is getting better at identifying fraud, but it’s still an issue that requires advertiser’s attention.
This trend will not be eliminated, but I believe it will be much more suppressed and hopefully advertisers who were very afraid of fraud will be more comfortable going outside of Google and Facebook.
Another major trend is AI and automation. Google has changed their entire system for promoting mobile apps to stay ahead of the trend. If you want to promote mobile apps these days you have to use Google universal campaigns, which leverages machine learning to optimize across all it’s assets (Search, Display, and Youtube).
Similarly, Apple introduced a Basic campaign in its Search Ads platform where advertisers of up to 5000 dollars, can still benefit from advanced technologies like machine learning, without getting too sophisticated and complex.
That being said, the larger companies who spend a significant portion usually need better tools and knowledge to manage and optimize their acquisitions, with more data science on the low end and much more automation that any advertiser can tap into.
Another trend is the whole notion of data and user privacy. Before GDPR, there was a big push towards giving advertisers lots of free data in return for digital services. Today users are more aware of the data collected about them, so much that Facebook took out a lot of the optimization abilities presented to advertisers. So I think on the one hand advertisers will continue to push towards data-driven advertising but at the same time, platforms will be more limiting in order to maintain their user’s privacy.
Facebook has recently declared that users can now choose to opt out of the data collection conducted by Facebook advertisers beyond the platform. This change implies that marketers might need to recalibrate their strategies in certain domains. Nonetheless, they will retain the ability to amalgamate data from their current users and enhance it, aiming to identify the most suitable users for their applications.
Companies who have their customer list use it as a basis for finding similar audiences such as Facebook lookalike audience tool, and Google is also going to offer something similar. Doing that without any in-house data will become more difficult because the platforms are more concerned with user privacy.
