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 Miray Alanlar

Miray Alanlar is a full-stack mobile app marketer. Previously, she was a Mobile Product Marketing Manager for Mozilla Firefox titles on App Stores, working all things related to Retention, Acquisition & Engagement while finding herself in-between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Prior to that, she worked at Phunware, Google-backed startup as a User Acquisition Manager, and Snapchat’s Product Revenue & Growth team. Miray frequently speaks, advises, and consults on growth, including ad-tech startups and mobile apps.

She is a spin fanatic (big Soul Cycler) and enjoys traveling and hosting people through her side Airbnb venture. She is passionate about internet privacy and startups with a social mission focused on solving real-world problems. She is currently helping Growth & Expansion of an initiative called MRACLE2020 to help solve personal protective equipment shortage and match international suppliers with the institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

What are the trends you are seeing during this time (COVID 19)? Any notable effects or strategies you can share?

 

As more individuals and families are socially isolating themselves, they are turning back to their mobile apps and try to continue their work, school, work out routine and keep themselves busy during their time of quarantine. The change of lifestyle has definitely pushed more people to use apps that caused a tremendous increase in social networking, education, productivity, shopping, fitness apps while adversely affected some categories like travel, food & drink apps.

I would recommend growth marketers to continue to feed the top of the user acquisition funnel via paid, social, ASO but to prioritize owned channels and begin re-activating the churned users. This is a great time to bring users back to the app and keep them engaged as users spend more time on their apps.

Maybe this is the time for you to build your robust lifecycle automation and unlock more opportunities?

 

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

 

There is still a lot of uncertainty around what’s happening in the market. User behavior has changed so fast it’s almost impossible to know what’s next.

Also, there isn’t a ton of data out there to guide our decision making.

I wouldn’t recommend growth marketers to make decisions on cutting costs or changing the metrics that they pay attention to.

 

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

 

I’m trying to maintain my morning schedule and keeping the same routines. Instead of going to my cycling studio, I’m mostly on my fitness apps and youtube for a workout. I used to visit my meditation studio, Unplug, but now they are offering all of their classes online at Zoom. So I didn’t feel like I’m totally disconnected.

However, I found myself spending more time on video calls, facetime with friends and family than usual. I can’t complain. It’s really keeping me grounded and positive when I see everyone I know is healthy and safe.