Appi Camper is an interview series that shines a spotlight on today's mobile elite, showcasing their expertise and knowledge. Growth leaders share trends, strategies to navigate the current market, tips to overcome present challenges, and how they approach these impacts to successfully emerge as an Appi Camper.

Spotlight with Hagop Hagopian

Hagop Hagopian has been working in mobile growth and specifically in gaming since 2012. His last 4 years of experience have been at Zynga where he has climbed the mountain of Growth Marketing and led a team responsible for $60M+ in annual growth marketing budget.

In 2020, Hagop established his own growth marketing consultancy and has been dedicating his time to helping mobile app developers, ranging from gaming to education categories, all varied in company size, to drive growth through user acquisition and mobile marketing.

What are the trends you are currently seeing? Any notable effects or strategies you can share?

The positive trend we are seeing in gaming due to COVID-19 is the great influx in the volume of game players. With people being locked down, we are seeing more people downloading games on their phones and spending time playing games. The only caveat with this influx in volume is we are getting a high percentage of users, whom we will call "non-payers", that are not making any In-App Purchases in the games. Those "non-payers" are dropping the average LTVs of the games down.

To counter this, the following strategies can be applied by gaming companies:

1) Increase In-App Monetization for "Non-Payers": Since those user bases are highly engaged, incentivizing your game advancement and levels with in-app advertisement will help drive the LTVs up for those users.

2) Segment Your Audience by LTVs: in the first scenario, it is highly important to separate your audiences into different segments specifically by their LTV level. You don't want to cannibalize the high LTV users' activity with in-app monetization. Instead, continue business as usual for those segments. This gives you the opportunity to re-adjust your product by adding in-app ads for the low or even zero LTV highly engaged users.

3) Bring Back Starter Pack Bundles: Starter packs have been a staple in games for a while. Now is time to bring these packs back and offer it to this new wave of users that are coming to your world. These starter packs offer pretty good value, considering that you are willing to spend some cash. Economically speaking, this offers a good value for the buck for those users who are willing to spend.

4) Drop the Price: There I said it! Extend an Offer Sale to those users who are not willing to spend $4.99 on a bundle package. Offer it to them for $0.99 as the lowest priced option. Again, the importance of segmenting your audience should be considered here.

What are some of the challenges for growth marketing during this time?

Generalized across all industries, and not just limited to Growth Marketing, is the challenge of losing the human touch with your colleagues and external partners.

Obviously, Zoom conferences have been a lifesaver in these times and we have continued on, business as usual. However, we're missing the human touch that adds a lot of value to the work that was being done. It is something unquantifiable, however, the value that human touch added was significant. Being in person, we were able to showcase the importance of a project through body language and influence others to drive more progress. These days we are struggling with that and we're seeing less excitement in the "room" during zoom conferences.

To counter this, I believe teams and companies should change their rewarding system and motivate their colleagues through other components and elements whether it's financially or through other forms.

What are you doing to stay positive and balanced while working remotely?

The pros of quarantining have helped me a lot in becoming more disciplined and persistent with work. I haven't been more focused and organized in my growth marketing career than I am now.

It's all about filling up your schedule and balancing between work and "pleasure". The reason why I put pleasure in quotation marks is that the pleasure here is considered cognitive pleasure.

• I have dedicated a lot more of my time to reading books, not just work-related topics, but anything that awakens my interests.
• Watching educational podcasts and staying up to speed with the latest trends.
• On the other hand, I have been playing a lot of video games these days and they have been helping keep my brain active.
• Lastly, I have been exercising a lot more lately and been following a healthy balanced diet.

All the above activities have kept me positive and more focused on my work and it gave the extra boost I was missing.