Marketing like a Three Year Old
Ran Avrahamy knows what’s up. And he knows how to measure it.
He’s grown AppsFlyer’s marketing team from one – himself – to 70 strong. The analytics company has a multi-million dollar event budget and has squarely set its goal on complete brand ubiquity. Which is really, really hard.
In this episode, which kicks off season 2 of Marketings in Capes, together with the G-CMO, we take a look at how they hit that brand presence, how personalized, bespoke events change the game, three tips for B2B marketers getting started, and how Ran’s three year old daughter inspires him to market better.
Links:
- Appsflyer’s MAMA mammoth resource library
- A recording of MAMA London
- Ran’s favorite tools:
- Slack, Asana, and Zoom for communication
- Looker and Amplitude for analytics
- Infogram and Invision for design
- Zapier ?
Episode Transcript
Eytan Buchman
Ignoring the rules is a whole lot easier when you don’t know the rules. No, I’m not saying this to sound edgy. I don’t have a motorcycle, have no tattoos, and my idea of a late night is staying up till 11pm and playing Madden on my Xbox, before curling up with a crappy sci fi book on my Kindle.
But setting your own marketing rules is a key thing I walked away with from my conversation with Ran Avrahamy, the CMO of AppsFlyer, a huge marketing analytics and attribution platform.
During the course of our conversation, we touch on a Bohemian Rhapsody-inspired educational platform, how creating a customer-obsessed mentality actually starts at home with your employees, some tips for getting started with B2B marketing on Day One, and how his daughter shapes his marketing approach.
But first, some news.
If you haven’t noticed, you’re listening to Marketers in Capes. And unlike Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I just lasted more than one season. The really exciting part about season two is being recorded together with G-CMO, a community of Israel’s top CMO’s from global companies, on a mission to power the startup nation. I’m part of the GCMO through my day job as the CMO at Freightos and am super super pumped about interviewing some of the best marketing professionals in Israel this season.
But let’s dive in to the reason we’re here – after all, I have a 9pm bedtime. Here’s Ran.
Ran Avrahamy
Hi, my name is Ran Avrahamy. I’m the CMO of AppsFlyer. I’ve been here for, wow, almost five and a half years now. And incredible journey with a company that started less than 20 people when I joined, first marketing person in the team, with a mission to help marketers better measure their marketing campaigns, and really understand what they’re spending their money on.
…and only as we end every presentation that we have 1% done.
Eytan Buchman
Over the course of over $80 million raised, and customers like eBay, SkyScanner, the Weather Channel and Jet.com, Ran’s team has grown from one to 70. But they kept one mission.
Ran Avrahamy
A lot of things have changed over the years but something that we tried to put a focus on is how do we keep on being creative and unique and creating an exceptional experience for our customers and future customers and the entire ecosystem that we’re in. So may be you know, focusing on the experience of even people coming to our office, you know, candidates or friends and families and, you know, delighting our customers throughout their journey.
Eytan Buchman
It’s easy to print up a poster that says you believe in providing exceptional experiences. But one example of how AppsFlyer really lands this is with new employees. They actually send out a restaurant gift certificate to new employees and their significant other when they start.
And speaking of starts, the way that Ran started AppsFlyer’s marketing is pretty special, especially for a company that lives and breathes metrics.
Ran Avrahamy
Since the beginning we’ve tried putting a focus on thinking always about the long-term value versus the short-term gain. And it’s pretty odd for a small start up of you know 20-50 people to think about long-haul brand plays versus you know, we need to make this quick marketing win to increase our acquisition or our MQLs and to reduce our customer acquisition costs.
Eytan Buchman
Focusing on brand is hard, especially in earlier days. But this still remains a permeant fixture of AppsFlyer marketing. And it stemmed, in part, from starting with that Day One clarity that AppsFlyer needed to be everywhere. And that’s what made a strong case for focusing on brand ubiquity, not funnels.
Ran Avrahamy
You know, at the beginning, I didn’t go on Google search for B2B marketing playbook, right, and build this infrastructure and these reports and you know, these channels and this is the cap of customer acquisition cost you need to achieve and the does and the don’ts. And I think, you know, this is probably one of the main reasons why we were able to run so fast. We were focused on the mission, we had a sticker that we called it be everywhere at the beginning of the journey. And we kept by it…
Eytan Buchman
Some things have changed, specially around geographies and persona.
Ran Avrahamy
If I would say new methods of acquisition would be, opening up new regions and new location that we’re now operating in more than 30 territories all over the world. So that’s been something new and exciting every year and really opening up to different types of personas. So if originally we’re focused on the marketer, you know, the cycle is being changed. And you know, now we’re talking to more people within the chain of the brand. So maybe the product folks or developers, or you know, going up to the C suite.
Eytan Buchman
But lets talk about that brand again.
Ran Avrahamy
And the vision was actually that we want to create a global tech brand and in order to build a real global tech brands you need to invest for the long term and invest a lot in the relationship and the experience that we make, so for example, we created this sort of educational arm of AppsFlyer.
Eytan Buchman
I’m going to double click here. Every marketer knows that you need to drive value for customers, even before they’re a customer. And this has created a crazy nuclear arms race to be the most helpful as possible for every single customer. And that’s why content marketing has has evolved from Tollhouse recipes on cookie chips on packages to blog posts to white papers. And now, events are kinda the new bar for education.
Ran Avrahamy
…we focus a lot on offline experiences and making meaningful relationship with our, with our community. That has not been changed and you know, honestly only being increased since…
It was a long time ago was five years ago it has a funny name it’s called mama funny story on why recreated mom and how we came up with the name hint Bohemian Rhapsody. That happened a quite a while ago, and since then, we’ve made almost 20 different offline experiences all over the world, which connects you know, our relevant ecosystem and it can be different types of, of engagement. So we have more of the C suite mama that you know, it happened in southern China for more than 100 of China’s largest marketing executives. It happened in Napa for For the same reason, and on the other side, it can be like a large conference, a thousand people last July in Minsk, 600 people last August in Brazil and so on and so on. So, we create and tailor the experiences the offline experiences that we make for this specific region that we do this and for this specific community and for this specific target audience.
Ran Avrahamy
We love these, I mean the feedback both the experience feedback from from people coming as well as the product feedback that we bring back home and start integrating on product to is just, you know, precious and one of our core values of the company’s is is customer obsessed.
Eytan Buchman
If you’re educating a user, you need to speak to them in the right way. So it’s not one size fits all.
Ran Avrahamy
So for the ones that we have more of a close smaller engagement for like you know, anywhere between 70 people and 150 people, it can be two to three days and like a you know, isolated resort that we we meet, we greet we network, we have a lot of fun and then we dive into the specific topics that the audience curated and asked to discuss.
And on the other side of their You know, we had more than eight mega conferences or you know, between 300 and thousand people all over the world. And these are more like the standard type of conference.
But with an emphasis on content on really good content. We don’t have any sponsors, for example, or other vendors. And we don’t we don’t pitch we don’t sell ourselves within these events. I think that’s gaining the trust of the community that they’re not going to come and get pitched by everybody else. This is something very unique in today’s conference world.
Eytan Buchman
Whether you’re at Day One or Day One Thousand of marketing, here’s three things Ran recommends for marketers.
Ran Avrahamy
The first advice is really don’t listen to people that tell you that there’s like you know one thing you need to know about marketing or this thing, you gotta try this thing. Go with your instinct.
Eytan Buchman
In other words, marketing podcasts are kinda useless. Awkward. Still listening anyway?
Ran Avrahamy
Second advice is try. You know? Try, and worst case fail in a glorious way and to learn from it but if you don’t try it, you don’t know.
Eytan Buchman
and last but not least, recognize that buyers have changed.
Ran Avrahamy
third thing not necessarily in that order is investing the long term brand. You know, the buyer journey has changed completely and it’s focused more, a lot more on the experience and the emotion that the brand creates on on the buyer. You know, we have here more than 60 buyers just in our marketing team, every buddy’s a buyer right now it’s not just sets with a procurement or with you know, CIOs or CMOS. Everybody today can you know going to their phone and buy a tool because they need it right? They did, you know, use their own credit cards and then get reimbursed or whatever. So, the, you know, the old school B2B buying cycle has completely changed to a more human type of interaction and the things that drive buyers today is a lot more emotional.
Eytan Buchman
A big part of the GCMO ethos is educating. And when the marketing world develops so quickly, it’s hard t stay up. Ran’s best way to stay up to date?
Ran Avrahamy
Likely my daughter, I think that our you know, kids are the most creative creatures in the world.
what you know that way the kids are the most creative creatures in the world that they just don’t have boundaries.
They don’t know the rules and they make their own rules and I think all of us as marketers, you know, we need to think of ourselves more of you know what three year old Eytan will do and breaking the barrier.
Eytan Buchman
Following that advice, I just blew my entire 2020 marketing budget on Daniel Tiger swag. But seriously, try to pull out from whatever you’re doing and ask yourself which constraints are legit and which are self-imposed. You can see some of AppsFlyer’s incredible educational content at appsflyer.com, you can see more about GCMO on LinkedIn, and you can see what’s happening and they don’t have a clue if you’re Pumba watching at Simba and Nala.
My name is Eytan Buchman, you’ve been listening to Marketers in Capes with GCMO, and I’m getting back to my Xbox.