Recently, Admiral Media Founder Andre Kempe (left) teamed up with Tobias Boerner, Co-founder and Advisor at Fastic, to help apps and brands improve their user journeys and help them grow beyond performance marketing. In this interview, they talk about their new endeavour, mistakes in marketing, and the importance of a well-designed user lifecycle.

Mobile Marketing: Tobias, youve worked with Andre before. How would you describe him in one sentence to someone who’s never met him?

Tobias Berner: Andre is the living example of HANDS-ON MENTALITY.

MM: Andre, how would you describe Tobi in one sentence?

Andre Kemp: Oh, that is easy: Tobi is an energetic, fast thinking and perhaps one of the most innovative and inspiring people I worked with.

MM: How is this new offering different from what you have been doing the last few years, weren’t you always helping apps to grow?

AK: Admiral Media in some way always did growth consulting, but with a very strong focus on performance marketing. With Tobi on deck our expertise has now become much broader and with him, we are able to look much deeper into the product, your app itself and help with improvements in onboarding, user journeys and much more. Which will certainly have a massive impact on our performance marketing as well because a 5 per cent better conversion rate on your paywall will easily enable you to bid higher for more customers, which means we will have more budget available to scale your Facebook or other ads.

MM: What are the main services you are offering?

AK: So far, we were focused on ad operations and campaign management, help with tracking and attribution, creative services and content creator acquisition, but now we can offer consulting around app onboarding, paywall optimization, user journeys and CRM but also build landing pages for our customers who have a web flow or run web-to-app campaigns.

MM: What does the process look like?

TB: Our experts analyze the brand or apps over a period of two weeks. We get a picture of the customer journey and the entire communication. Based on this, we develop a report with improvement possibilities to make your application even more successful.

For those who are interested in getting a light version of this: we are offering an exclusive first workshop in Marbella where 10 people will get the unique opportunity to dive deep into the above topics and get advice from me as well as mobile legend Thomas Petit.

MM: Where do you usually see the biggest levers for growth and engagement in the customer journey? 

TB: The biggest impact often comes from small adjustments without much effort for the dev teams. This is preceded by natural years of experience and thousands of A/B tests. We like to call this Low-Hanging Fruits, and it should be well known to most app companies.

What’s more effort is the installation of a well-thought-out user lifecycle. We often see very advanced brands that have no or insufficient mobile CRM. On the basis of this, we are, of course, talking about a completely different dimension of activation, monetization, or reactivation.

MM: What are some common issues and common threats that you see in CRM?

TB: Communication with the user always resembles a tightrope act. It’s about finding the perfect balance between communicating with the user often enough so that he integrates the use of your app into his or her natural behavior, and not annoying them with too much communication. We’ll explain how you can find that balance. It depends on what stage the customer communication is in, but it can be said that very often the right execution fails. Another problem, which is not uncommon, is that the CRM team is hardly listened to by the product manager. This circumstance makes it very complicated to really develop the full potential.

MM: What kind of clients do you work with, and what should a company bring to the table that is looking to work with you?

AK: Admiral Media has many customers with subscription-based apps, often from the health and fitness segment, but we also have food and grocery deliveries, fintech, some great gaming titles and mobility apps. I do not see a big difference between app categories or business models, to be honest. Like saying “only gaming agencies can promote games well” – from my perspective, this attitude doesn’t match reality: if you are having a broader experience from many different industries, you will always be able to make better decisions and learn new tools faster and adapt to new situations faster.

If you are interested in working with us, we have some minimum requirements in terms of budget or scalability, and, more importantly, we are also looking to see if a company is a fit for our values, which I hold very high. Our core values need to be met not only from our colleagues, but also from our partners and customers.

MM: Do you have a dream company you admire or always wanted to work for?

AK: We love to work with founders and decision-makers or teams who are as passionate about impact as we are!

MM: With your combined decades of marketing expertise, what are three annoying mistakes that companies are still making in 2022?

AK: They become slow and anxious. Advertising becomes more and more homogenous, boring and less innovative. Most advertisers embrace a new technology and create stunning visual effects, e.g., the large 3D displays you see on your social media lately, but that is not innovative or long-lasting campaigning with a sales effect. It is only a gimmicky use of technology.

Also, I see us discussing LTV and ROAS every day all day, investing millions in media but forgetting to allocate the right percentage of budget to creative directors, let alone copywriters. When was the last time you spoke with a copywriter about how she or he discovered a headline that drove sales for six months? Exactly.

For those who are interested in a light version: we are offering a first workshop in Marbella as a warm up for our GrowBoat Event! See more information here: https://growboat.io – max 10 people have a chance to dive deep into the above topics with Thomas Petit and Tobi!