Beyond Clicks and Conversions: The Synergy of Product and Marketing

Vytis has been in the marketing industry for over 12 years, a journey that has taken him from cold-calling potential clients out of the Yellow Pages to founding his own marketing agency. In a recent interview, he shared a wealth of insights, emphasizing that in the world of mobile applications and digital products, marketing and product quality are not separate endeavors - they are a single, symbiotic system.

From ‘Yellow Pages’ to a psychology-driven business

Vytis's career began with a simple but effective strategy: selling Google Ads over the phone. By quickly outlining a company's lack of visibility and tracking, he secured over 20 new clients a month. This early experience taught him the key to sales: to help the client understand their own problem first. He learned that people often tend to lie about their level of technical sophistication to avoid looking foolish, a common pitfall he's learned to navigate.

After honing his skills at some of the biggest marketing agencies in the Baltics, he realized a common pattern: most companies face the same, recurring issues. This realization led him to start his own agency three years ago, with a model designed to avoid these common pitfalls. The biggest challenge, he says, is scalability. In a service-based business, it's easy to become complacent when clients come in through recommendations. His agency is now actively working to overcome this by investing in its own marketing, proving that even the best marketers must practice what they preach.

The high stakes of app marketing

For an app developer, a successful launch is a delicate process. Vytis outlines a three-stage strategy that his agency follows:

1. Technical test: Before spending a significant budget, they run a small, cheap traffic campaign from countries like India or Indonesia. This isn't for conversions; it's to test if the app's servers can handle a high volume of users without crashing.
2. Soft launch: Once the app is stable, they do a "soft launch" in smaller, English-speaking markets like Singapore, the UK, or Canada. This is a crucial step to avoid making a big mistake in the U.S. market, which, if a product gets poor reviews, can be a trust-busting setback that's very difficult to recover from.
3. Global launch: If the soft launch metrics prove successful, they proceed to a global launch, capitalizing on the "honeymoon period"—a phenomenon where platforms like Facebook give a new app a significant performance boost in its first month.

To execute this strategy, Vytis stresses the importance of powerful tracking and attribution tools. He recommends a combination of Firebase for crash analytics and A/B testing, and AppsFlyer for a holistic view of user acquisition across multiple channels. This combination gives them a single source of truth for all marketing data, helping them understand what's working and what's not.

The synergy of product and marketing

Vytis uses a simple analogy to describe the relationship between product quality and marketing: "Marketing can open the door, but when you go inside the house and it's all stinky, you will not feel comfortable there." His point is that a great marketing campaign will drive users to your app, but a poor product will ensure they never return.

He provided a powerful example of this synergy from a mobile game his agency marketed. Using AI analysis on their ad creatives, they discovered a striking finding: ads featuring the main character looking straight into the camera had a 40% higher conversion rate than those where the character looked to the side. They brought this insight to the game's developers, who then adjusted the in-game tutorial to include this direct eye contact. This small change led to a measurable increase in tutorial completion rates, proving that marketing insights can directly improve the core product.

Scaling and the psychology of a sale

For many businesses, a key sign of success is an unlimited marketing budget. Vytis shares a surprising anecdote: he has worked with mobile game publishers who had so much money to spend that their biggest problem was his inability to spend it all while maintaining a high return on investment.

This led him to his core philosophy on scaling:

"It's very easy to sell one champagne bottle during New York's New Year's Eve, but it's very hard to sell a hundred over time."

He explains that the higher your ad spend, the more difficult it becomes to maintain profitability. To get past that spending limit, you must invest in improving the product, the creatives, and the marketing channels.

This approach is driven by an understanding of human psychology. When marketing different app genres, Vytis says the core approach "doesn't matter" because human motivations are similar. His agency uses a framework called the "eight motivations rule" to create campaigns based on universal desires such as social connection, power, or the need to relax.

Vytis's final piece of advice is simple but crucial: "Never stop testing and never stop experimenting." He believes the future of marketing will be more personalized and automated, with AI streamlining the creation of assets and even app functions. The core of success, however, will remain the same: a powerful synergy between a great product and a relentless pursuit of what the customer truly wants.

Speakers in the episode

Guest: Vytis Bareika

Founder of Defined Chase Digital Marketing Agency

As the Founder of Defined Chase Digital Marketing Agency, Vytis leads a team that develops effective digital strategies, managing over $100M in ad spend to boost brand growth and revenue. With over 12 years of experience in digital marketing across sectors like E-commerce, Retail, and Real Estate, Vytis has a strong track record of driving global brand success and innovation.

Host: Adrians Miņins

A/V Technical Project Manager

Adrians Miņins is a certified Project Manager who has worked at TestDevLab for several years now. With experience in the industry and a strong passion for software quality, Adrians is the perfect person to lead discussions with industry experts and delve deeper into exciting and thought-provoking topics.