App branding 101: How to build an app that people will love | Lisa Kennelly, Clue | OnBrand '17

[Music] okay so yes hi I'm gonna talk about app branding 101 how to build an app that people will love so yes my name is Lisa I'm the director of marketing at clue I'll talk a little bit about in detail what clue is but suffice to say clue is an app we're based in Berlin and the reason I wanted to talk about building an brand for an app is because when I looked at the other speakers who were here and the companies that are presenting I didn't see any apps correct me if I'm wrong maybe there are some but I thought that was interesting because it's one thing to build on an app after you've already got a big brand or it's one thing maybe easier to build a brand if you've got like a website based service but for an app I think it brings some special challenges so that's what I wanted to talk about because that's what I've done it clue over the last four years so just a bit about me for my background I've done a lot of stuff all in communications and marketing basically I started out as a sports journalist in New York I covered the Yankees for a couple years and then I left that and went to work at a PR agency doing social media strategy in Seattle and then after that I worked at a startup incubator in Vancouver Canada doing marketing strategy for different startups so all different things in communications and then four years ago I moved to Berlin I am American as you can probably tell but I moved to Berlin to work at a startup called clue and I was the first marketing employee there and went from doing community management and building up the brand building up the communications to now I lead brand PR video events canta strategy product marketing anything to do with brand and the app and the company I'm in charge of now alright so I'm gonna talk about today first apps in the App Store you all use apps probably I'm curious to know how much you know about like apps and app branding and app marketing but I'll give kind of a groundwork for that first then I'll talk about clues specifically and sort of what we are and what we do talk about how we built our brand at clue over time and how it's evolved from the beginning and then finally I'll talk specifically about App Store optimization and how you can test your brand and build your brand through app store tools all right so App Store right now I don't know how many how many apps do you have on your phone dozen several dozen hundred I mean that's a lot but there's even more than that in the App Store so there's millions of apps in the App Store literally how many million there are over two million each so Android as of March had 2.8 million and iOS had 2.2 so that's a lot of competition out there in addition to that on average 80% of users delete or stop using an app within the first three months and probably all of you have done this I know I've done this I download an app I use it maybe one time and then like never again or it just sits unused on my phone forever so not only is there a lot of competition with like just what is out there but even when you get someone to download your app it doesn't mean that you've like hooked them as a customer forever the attrition rate is super super high so you really have to think about like how how do you keep people coming back and there's a lot you can do of course we look like we're tension in an app and that kind of thing but part of that I believe is is having a strong brand that people can relate to this is just you know a look at a lot of the apps there in the App Store in our category and you can see how hard it is to stand out I mean if you just scroll through the apps or scroll through the most popular apps the top apps for any category it's truly overwhelming and even if you get it narrowed down and like they search for a term and they found a few apps they're looking at what's the difference like how can you decide between these three apps what makes one better than the other how do you stand out and research is showing people decide if they're gonna download an app with less than five seconds so you have like no time to grab their attention here's how I stand out from the other apps you search for with this keyword it's it's like it's a very challenging thing to do right setting up the problem it's hard oh I know what the problem is they don't have my fonts shit oh well what is power forward so okay so how do you build brand affinity when you have such a limited attention span right I think you have people to connect with your brand in like five seconds and beyond that how do you build an entire brand based off of just an app so we didn't want to be just a utility we didn't want to be just like oh it's my map app whatever I don't care about the brand I don't care what they're about I just wanted to do something for me we wanted to go beyond that we didn't want to be just an app that did something for you we want it we want to be broader than that okay so I've talked a lot about what we do what we do this is what clue is so clue is a female health app it's an app to track your period to know in your periods coming no and you can get pregnant or not know when your PMS is coming in addition to that which is pretty cool is you can track all these different other aspects of your health that relate to your cycle or can your cycle can impact them so that means like hair skin emotions sleep alcohol use all of these things have been shown scientifically to be related to the menstrual cycle so you can track all of those things in clue you can also share your cycle with a partner or with your friends if you want to so clue has been downloaded more than 20 million times around the world we're in 15 languages and 190 countries we're a team of about 50 people based in Berlin Germany and yeah we've yeah I said we've been around for about four years we're on iPhone Android and Apple watch but we really we want to be more than just an app right we want to give female health insights to people around the world that's our broader vision it's we think that's where we can really make an impact because this is something that is affects 50% of the population right female health it matters it matters to you and it matters to you if you don't have a period because you're probably going to be interacting with someone who does either that or you're gonna have kids someday so we really believe that there's a lot of value in providing insights about this type of health to everyone all right so how did we build our brand so what it is today so I've shown you to screen a few times of all these different apps and something you might have noticed is they tend to be really really pink and that is a problem or at least a tendency in the female health space and the period tracking app space it's that um a lot of especially when they five years ago when the app store was like really spinning up there were a period tracking apps around before clue launched but they all tended to be really pink because they were made by like big app companies that cranked out a ton of apps and it was probably designed by some dude he was like oh yeah girls like pink let's make it pink pink and shrink it right um and our founder is a woman named EDA and she was like why would it be pink I don't want any of my stuff to be pink I don't like pink that much it should just be like a nice tool like my calendar app or my mapping app so that was really important um this thing says it's gonna turn off okay well we'll see um so you wouldn't think like at the beginning that just looking different would be enough but it really was and we heard constantly from people oh my god thank you for being not pink and we use that in our marketing a lot we were like the period tracker app that's not pink that doesn't have butterflies that doesn't use euphemisms that doesn't say Aunt Flo we you call things what they are this really was a unique point of different for us in this space it was like a gap in the market that we saw when we looked at all of these other apps out there like we could just really stand out by not relying on this sort of traditional girly color scheme the same time we knew it wouldn't work forever because it wasn't defensible so once we started to get traction and people started to see it worked the way that our competitors could could catch up would they just be also not pink right you can change the colors pretty easily so we knew this wouldn't work forever could someone turn the screen back so I could see what I'm talking about anyway so this is what our marketing looked like at the time so we talked about it being confident scientific and not pink pretty straightforward clearly not pink at all and this worked for a while okay I'll just kind of come up here so then we had to evolve from that right because I said that not pink was not really defensible so we're like okay what is more defensible position than just the visual look of it so being really scientific that was something that we thought okay we can stand on this and the reason we went with really scientific was because we heard from users all the time that like oh I love that you're so based in science and you're explaining things to me in a way I never got before I never got this in sex ed I never got this from my parents the scientific information you're telling me oh this is how the menstrual cycle works this is what ovulation means thank you we were able to provide the most reliable medical information possible so there was over there are over a hundred pages of scientifically researched content within the app with references right it's super reliable and that we knew was like a lot harder for someone to copy like yes you could yes you could also go and work with doctors and researchers and put all this medical information in the app in your app but it's a lot more work than just all my designer will reskin it so we felt a lot more stable doing that and then this was what the branding evolved to so we still talked about the beautiful look of it and people said oh it's so beautiful but it was more like its scientific as well still pretty straightforward red Red's important but one thing that was really nice about shifting to more of a science focus was that it allowed us to go from like just being an app into a content marketing that made a lot more sense for us before the content was sort of like yeah you could talk about periods you could talk about women's health sort of generally but when you're based in science you can do really really helpful specific content so like on the blog we also had a medium page we have a medium page where we can do scientific articles written in a way that people can understand where it's like okay what is PMS actually what does it mean if you spot during ovulation and then we have the scientific research at the bottom the references but it's also explained in a way that people can understand and then we started distributing this through a newsletter on a monthly basis and now we do it twice a month so it wasn't just like I go and I use this app one time and that's the only time I encounter it but now you're getting this information that's supplementing it that's helping you understand better delivered your inbox and then also we started to produce it on social media as well so you go on Instagram and you say okay now I'm learning this other thing about my cycle that I didn't know or on Facebook I'm seeing an interesting article that this company shared so again keep going from being just this thing I go and I track my period once a month and that's it instead I'm starting to encounter the brand in a lot more ways so here's what this looks like so on the left side you see like what it looks like the blog if you're reading it on your phone and then also on Instagram and so this was a piece we did about how strength training is related to your cycle and we had someone who's an actual someone our team who's a crossfitter and a weightlifter talked about like when in her cycle she does strength training because it actually depends where you are your muscles can feel different in that sort of thing and so we were able to go again beyond just like periods periods periods to like this impacts my life this impacts something else that I do this is relevant to me in a lot of ways this is what our Instagram page started to look like so you can start to see more illustrations kind of a really defined brand we also started to do videos we started to do photos more and more and then we started to include this section in our newsletter called clued in where it was once we had this basis of science right and it was a copay they're trustworthy they are talking about science we can trust them on this topic then we were able to comment on hey here's this latest research that came out you probably saw a headline we're gonna explain to you what it actually means and whether that headline was true or not so it allowed us to again comment on a larger thing and um be able to address things that were not just about this one time in your in the month and we knew this was working because we started to hear this kind of feedback from people all the time people would say yeah thank you for coming this app it's really helping my life but also I'm learning from it I'm learning things I'm not getting anywhere else I love the newsletters you sent me I mean how often do people say I love your email marketing we hear this all the time all right so went from not pink we went to scientific but we didn't stop there because that also like I said it wasn't super defensible ultimately and we wanted to go beyond that our bigger vision is being the trusted brand for female health because that does not exist right now there's there's like like we saw a gap in the market for not pink there is no trusted female health brand and that's what we believe we can be and yeah we're just an app right now but like that is where we want to get to so some of the ways that we are starting to build that trust one is with we were rated the number one most reliable period tracker by an objective Council of doctors and Gynaecologists and that is really helpful because it shows people that like objectively speaking you were rated the most accurate right it's not just us saying that it's like outside sources we also started to partner we wanted it to be about more than just periods right we wanted to be like the entire female health sexual health reproductive health so we partnered with the Kinsey Institute in the United States they're a big institute that does research on sex and sexuality and we partnered with them for a major survey of over a hundred and forty thousand people on how technology is affecting your sex life and how how do you sexed and does mote having a mobile phone change the way you think about sex and that was something that again I showed we were broader than just this one topic and we were also partnering with really legitimate outside people we also were able to do content that was around like these are women's issues you should care about right because if you really do care about female health you need to understand that female health is related to you know workplace equality and parental leave and all of these different other issues so going beyond just this one thing and think about actually how does it tie into a larger conversation another thing that is very important because we are based in Germany especially is data and data privacy and so we really had two beings an app that takes care of your health and especially female health we have to have a stance on data we have to have a stance on privacy people ask us about it all the time and they want to know like okay so I'm tracking in your app when I'm having sex is someone gonna find that out so we wanted to talk about like yes data is important to us because we believe that by collecting these large quantities of data we can do a lot of good in the world we can contribute to female health research but also we want to you know we want you to trust us we want you to know that we're gonna do the right thing with your data we're not gonna use it to like you know exploit you so that was something that has been really important for us as we're building a brand of trust that's why we actually we changed our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and we told everyone about it and we explained it in plain language and we like made a really big deal about it the point that people were like we don't care it's fine but it was so important for us and the reason that all of this data is so important is because female health is such an under research field so the most recent I mean the before now the biggest studies on menstrual cycle research were with a couple of thousand people over a few years and we have literally millions of menstrual cycles being tracked in our app all the time there's this vast opportunity for data right so what we wanted to communicate to people is like you can trust us with your anonymous data because we're doing a really good job with it we want this to do something it will benefit you will make the app better that'll make the world better so just a quick summary again of what what did we do on our branding over time we went from not pink to scientific to trust and that was something that you really we kept doing because we kept having to stay ahead of the market and we think again that being the trusted brand for female health is something that the rest of the field cannot catch up with however it is important to say that those sort of big branding visions for the company do not work on every channel or at every platform so like this is the left is the Instagram and on the right is a I believe that's a Facebook ad yeah and when my growth team came to me and showed me these I was like oh my god this one on the right it's so ugly is so not on-brand and they were like oh but it's performing so well I was like okay so I'm really like not pink still works in some contexts as well as like no when your period is coming just the basic basic use case you still need to do that kind of basic initial stuff to get people in the door and then once they understand okay I've got this app I'm using it then you can open up the conversation to like and we're also about female health insights and building this larger company that you can trust with your data so the basic use case is still really important all right so what I want to talk about now is App Store optimization how many people know App Store optimization is your hand only a couple great I love it this is my favorite topics so App Store optimization right it's kind of like SEO like search engine optimization but it's specific to the App Store so the way I'm going to think about it is if you walk into a mall and the mall is the App Store the first floor of the mall is like the first or the ground floor of the mall is like the first page of apps in the App Store so you walk in and it's like just what you see you're probably more likely to go in there because it's just right there right so that's why being on the first page of the app store matters a lot but it's not enough to just like be on the first page you have to look really nice you have to have a really nice storefront because if you walk in to the mall and yeah there's on the first floor but their store is not very nice it's not very appealing you're not gonna go in right so that's why it's important both to be on the first page and also look really good and look really compelling so people will want to walk in or download or at least look at you right I could talk a lot about App Store optimization I'm happy to talk about it afterwards if you want about like the right keywords to go after and all that stuff but specifically what I want to talk about now is the branding side of things and how you can use the app store to test your branding so first of all you can think of a brand positioning you want to test right in the app store because you have all this real estate you have these M screenshots you can use so you can think of it okay we want to test this new brand positioning let's say for us it was I don't know originally not pink you could test that alternatively you could say I want to do some brand messaging that appeals to a certain specific segment so let's say we wanted to say we want to target people who are trying to get pregnant we could make our app store marketing really really targeted to them to get that kind of download for awhile on the other hand you could also validate your current brand positioning so we can be like yes we're going after trust Trust is really important we're gonna see what messages really convey trust and how do those work to get people in the door so you can stress test that on specific markets like we really want to make a push in Canada or you can say we're going into a completely new market we want to see if this works in Brazil you can also do it to make sure you're still relevant so if you have something that's been working for a while and maybe you're seeing a drop off and downloads or conversion then you can like do a little more effort to say what if we tweak the messaging and we're doing the same positioning but we changed it a little bit will it perform better we could have tested a lot of different areas and we wanted to pick trust for this example I'm gonna show you but we could have tested you know diversity education all these different things all right so I'm gonna show you three examples of things that we test and I'm gonna have you vote on which one you think perform best all right so this is the first one we said trust it we straight-up trusted by millions of women around the world right just calling it like it is why do we trusted second one was we're the number one period tracker recommended by doctors I showed you the Facebook ad that worked really well for that we're like okay number one trusted by doctors and white and sitter red and then the third one was the official research partnerships with Oxford Stanford and Columbia so does it like having that affiliation with big research institutions does that help who thinks it was one who thinks it was two thinks it was three it's kind of a mix Wow so it was it was three is this one it's the green one and this one performed in the US a percent better in the u.s. eleven percent better in the UK and fifteen percent better in Canada so it's like a serious impact in what I say perform better it means like the conversion was better of people who saw this they were more likely to download then the control group which was just basically just screenshots the new illustrations no additional messaging and the first two actually hadn't performed worse than they've just screenshots so they actually had less downloads which is interesting so basically to take home my key lessons here about building a brand for your app uh I think you have to think about your brand top to bottom from day one so it wasn't like we scaled up this app we got tons and tons of millions of downloads and then we're like oh yeah we should figure out our brand it was always part of it from the beginning like the voice and tone was super consistent from the beginning we that involved making a lot of choices about like how we sounded and how we didn't sound and what we look like and what language we used and we did that across the board and we were consistent about that everywhere we were so that meant that like once we scaled up to being more than just an app we had to make sure that brand was really really consistent throughout because I'd be different like what is in the markets if every other app out there is pink then not being pink it's a good way to start you can there is still like yes the app store has millions of apps but if you're in a space there are stuff you can be doing that is unique and different and maybe it is just like showing more care in your brand and design than what the app Factory is cranking out and once you know like how you're different you should really double down on that and know what makes you different and really be specific and be like we are gonna own this space we're gonna own the space of being scientific we're gonna own the space of being trustworthy and we're gonna build up what we do so no one else can come and get that thank you very much Wow big hand please [Applause] [Music]