After many years of scaling user acquisition activities on Google and Facebook and reaching a well-established mature audience, with a very attractive ROAS, PhotoSì was unsure how to approach their next app growth challenge: reaching beyond the duopoly and expand their user acquisition opportunities effectively.
For this reason, our UA team decided to take a cautious approach when identifying and testing new acquisition channels. REPLUG met several times with the PhotoSì app marketing team, trying to get a clear picture of all the current means used to reach the current audience and analyzing trends in CPIs and CPAs over time. A key factor our UA experts understood from the meetings was that influencer marketing played an important role in acquiring new loyal users on Instagram.
With this in mind, the team immediately identified TikTok as an alternative performance channel to reach a completely new audience, where competitors were still underperforming, and create a blue ocean opportunity for PhotoSì.
Our team had to lay down a clear plan to ensure we wouldn’t hurt the brand positioning Photosì had by talking to a very different target audience in the same way it approached the established customer base.
REPLUG’s team worked closely with PhotoSì to identify the best creative assets for this new acquisition channel. On top of that, we established a direct communication line with the TikTok account management team that directed efficiently in creating the best setup to scale activities.
Our focus has been on:
- Explore – We started exploring the opportunity by testing other channels’ creatives to verify our hypothesis and possible reach opportunities.
- Influencers – We created a list of micro-influencers that could create original content to be used for both organic and paid interactions.
- A/B test creative messages and types – We extensively designed alternative versions of creative assets with the aim of testing what would work best.
- Campaign performance optimization – We carefully optimized costs and activities to keep the CPA and ROAS under constant control.
- Audience identification – We tested and optimized UA activities for the best subset of audiences available to reach on TikTok.