Strategy

Marketing is not just the thing that comes *after* the product.

Great marketing is integrated in the product development stage, whether your offering is a service, a t-shirt, or an app.

What is, and always will be, *the* most powerful marketing? Word-of-mouth.

After the rampant adoption of Wordle in 2020 on the back of users sharing their scores on social media and the following growth from that network effect, our vision was that Cwis Bob Dydd had to facilitate a way for users to share their scores straight from the app to social media in a visual, native way that would result in more and more people seeing the posts, feeling the FOMO and hitting 'download'. The digital word-of-mouth way.

Our marketing strategy from the start was split into 2 parts:

• Facilitate word-of-mouth

• User the player data (at a macro level, not identifying individual users) to tell stories about our players in a creative way.

Social media advertising

What we did

1. We ran an initial ad campaign targeting a warm audience. As the app had already run for one season, we needed to attract those users back as well as gain new users. Initially targeting a narrow audience allowed us to test several creative assets to measure performance, and allowed us to gather a strong user base for social proof before investing the rest of the budget to reach colder audiences. This gave us valuable data for consecutive ads and certainty that the budget was behind the best-performing creatives.

2. After the initial ad campaign, the app had been running for a couple of weeks and we could employ social proof by referring to the number of people already using the app, the star rating from app libraries and some user testimonials.

3. We continuously switched up the creative assets by testing hypotheses, monitoring results and switching off the poorer-performing creatives to allow the budget to focus on best performers. We experimented with a range of content including professionally-shot video, UGC video, UGC images, locally-focused creative assets targeting specific areas in Wales, social proof assets, graphic-led and presenter-led graphics, and more. The data always informs our choices and strategy moving forward with paid social