7 tips to maximize your paid mobile advertising efforts from marketers at Poshmark, Zillow, and A&E

We’ve done considerable research to uncover the impact paid installs have on organic lift, but we wanted to hear straight from the marketers who are in the trenches every day, working to improve their paid strategy to get the most out of every dollar. Below are seven tips for how to improve your own balance between paid and organic advertising, from marketers at Poshmark, Zillow, and A&E Network.

P.S. Prefer video version? This was part of a panel at Postback 17 and you can see the full 29-minute video on YouTube.

7 quotables on paid and organic mobile advertising, featuring:

• Jen Taylor, Senior Director of Digital Audience Development at A&E Network
• Esther Hwang, Senior Marketing Manager at Poshmark
• Richard Ha, Mobile & Social Marketing Manager at Zillow
• Moderator: Sean Ellis, Chief Executive Officer at GrowthHackers

1. There’s a place for both paid and earned advertising, but to scale, count on paid.

“If you want to increase exponentially, you need scale. You’re not going to get that without leveraging paid outlets. I think you need paid. Without it, you can’t grow at the same rate. It’s going to flatten out because you’re going to hit all the people you can hit.” — Jen Taylor, Senior Director of Digital Audience Development at A&E Network

2. Don’t overdo one channel.

“I think the main challenge that Poshmark faces — and I think a lot of other advertisers face — is finding scale outside [the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests, and Snapchats] that’s scalable and comes from a different source. Because after a while, the users that you hit are going to start overlapping. The more diverse you can get with your channel portfolio, the healthier it’s going to be.” — Esther Hwang, Senior Marketing Manager at Poshmark

3. Follow your cohorts to new partners.

“We use social, search, and a lot of network partners. We’re network agnostic, so we just follow the cohorts of people who are installing on all the channels. We know our goals for paid, and we are constantly mixing them up based on performance. We don’t have a set list; it’s always changing.” — Richard Ha, Mobile & Social Marketing Manager at Zillow

4. Expand your reach by targeting customers based on affinity.

“We do a lot of our targeting based on affinity, which is why social channels are so great. Or where we can leverage our own data. So anyone who we can pass our data to, where they can either retarget or build lookalike models off of those people, tend to perform well for us.” — Jen Taylor, Senior Director of Digital Audience Development at A&E Network

5. Ask people in the industry.

“Knowing people in the industry is very helpful. Saying you know, ‘What works for you?’ Having those conversations frequently is very helpful.” — Esther Hwang, Senior Marketing Manager at Poshmark

6. Trust your hunches (but measure them with data).

“We also do considerable amounts of A/B tests … Somebody will have a theory — we had one channel manager on our team who had this theory that the CTR set the delivery for Pinterest within the first few hours of the morning. So every morning she’d get up at 5 a.m. and check with the CTR is. We just run all kinds of tests to test out our various theories.”  — Esther Hwang, Senior Marketing Manager at Poshmark

7. Work with what customers already love.

“I find people who already love Pawn Stars, and let them know they can watch Pawn Stars in all these other places, too. A lot of the marketing that my team is doing … it’s not making people aware of something that they don’t previously have any engagement with. It’s taking a brand that they already know and love, and getting them to engage in other places.” — Jen Taylor, Senior Director of Digital Audience Development at A&E Network

Now it’s your turn

Which new tip will you implement, or have you already had success with? Tell us in the comments below! See more from the panel on YouTube, or watch the video below.