Category: Marketing Strategy
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This app made $4 million last month and convinces you to pay for a subscription before you've even downloaded it. The best part, their ads double as an onboarding flow, complete with a sneaky payw wall.
And the result, $48 million a
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year, and that's being under reported. In this video, I'm going to show you the hidden method they're using to market their app.
The simple way I accidentally discovered the secret recipe and how you can spy on your competition, too. The app is simply piano.
Learn the piano on
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your phone, on your iPad, on your piano. And this app is generating serious revenue.
But does that mean that we should all stop everything we're doing and create our own piano app? No.
No, it doesn't. Actually, that's kind of like a really bad idea.
On a completely
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unrelated note, I'm currently building a piano app. I originally built version 1.0 last year after wanting to learn the piano and to learn API calls in Swift UI.
My two curiosities really collided. It has note detection to keep up with
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you while you're playing on the physical piano, and it has a slight game element to it where you collect stars and you don't lose lives. With no idea how to distribute this thing except through the app store, I've been keeping an eye on the competition.
Simply Piano ranks number one for learn piano. It has
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93,000 reviews on the Australian App Store and charts at number 35 for the education category. It was awarded editor's choice by Apple in 2019 and app of the day in 2021.
But the App Store isn't their only distribution channel.
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They're actually doing something a little bit different. One of the hardest challenges I found is getting people to actually use my app.
It's not just a matter of downloading a piano app and learning how to play. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The user also needs to own a piece of hardware, an actual piano.
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Simply Piano doesn't wait for these users to find them. They seek them out using the most inspired marketing campaign I've recently seen on Instagram and Facebook.
When I purchased my piano, Facebook immediately knew about it. They seemed to know everything about me, and
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the ads just started to roll in on my feed. Tutorials, courses, and then apps.
Lots of apps. Simply Piano's ads are kind of uninspired.
They're a little bit basic. They're nothing special.
They just focus on a core benefit. This one
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looks like an AI generated image. A family of superheroes and piano with the title our best offer.
Get the family plan now. Okay, I wouldn't expect this to generate much revenue at all.
It's completely uninspired. But stay with me
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here because this is not actually where the magic happens. It's once you tap on the ad that you see what they're actually up to.
There's no marketing spiel. It's just a simple question.
What motivates you to play the piano? And then you're in good hands.
Simply Piano
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has helped millions start their musical journey. Wait a minute.
This is surprisingly similar to what the onboarding screen looks like within an app. Another question, what is my age?
And another affirmation screen. You've come to the right place.
But this one
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has social validation. A 4.5 star review from Mia.
She's 35. I tap the 31 to 50 age bracket.
Coincidence? Like, this is really starting to look like an app here, but we're not in an app.
We're
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still in the browser. I'm still inside the ad here.
How far does this thing actually go? It continues by asking a bunch of personal questions, gauges my skill level, and then highlights one of their core features, a catalog of over 5,000 songs.
Okay, I have no doubt in my
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mind this ad is an onboarding flow. Actually, it's an onboarding flow with 25 steps.
And there's a lot of similarities here to the Cal AI onboarding flow that I talked about in a previous video. Go check it out.
I do a complete deep dive. But why is Simply
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Piano marketing an onboarding flow inside an ad? Surely the objective of any ad is to promote the app, to get people using the app, to get people downloading the app.
Every step of this onboarding flow would surely be reducing the conversion rate and effectiveness of
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this ad. It shouldn't be working.
And then it hits you. Give us your email address.
Okay, there's nothing new here. It's just an elaborate newsletter signup form.
Just your typical sales funnel you see everywhere all over the internet.
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Nice try, Simply Piano. You got me.
I've invested all this time into personalizing my plan to learn the piano. I may as well get a copy of it sent to my email.
Um, wait, what's this? A payw wall?
It's still an ad, right? Yep.
We're still in the browser here.
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And this is the exact moment I realized just how amazing this marketing method actually is. This ad throws a user into an onboarding flow, personalizes their entire piano learning plan, subscribes them to a mailing list, and then hooks
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them into a monthly or annual plan, complete with a limited time only 60% saving. And you're probably thinking what I'm thinking.
How do they actually attribute my payment here in the app itself? But if we go back a step earlier, we have the answer.
This isn't
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just a newsletter subscription. This is me creating an account.
Then when I load up the app and log in using my email address, my subscription is unlocked. This is next level.
I've been researching how to promote my app, what ads work, what sort of creative I should
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be using. My objective was to get people to download my app, but this they're playing 5D chess here.
And that $4 million per month figure, that's from Center Tower. that only accounts for revenue generated through the app store.
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This is not running through the app store. This is separate.
I found this completely by accident. While building my piano app, I've been looking at a lot of content online about learning the piano, researching a piano to buy, watching YouTube tutorials, and consuming a lot of content on Instagram
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about pianos in general. This meant that Facebook and Instagram are well aware of my consumer habits, allowing marketers to target me directly.
This ad appeared in my timeline and out of curiosity, I clicked it. It's one of those rare occasions where I actually like to see
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ads. You get to see the strategies your competition is using and you get to learn something.
And if I didn't absorb myself into this world, Instagram would never have delivered this content to me, which highlights an important and easy way to spy on your competition. Start
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acting like the user of your app. Start doing what they do and the ads will just automatically appear in your feed.
This ad onboarding flow is a powerful marketing method I'm going to use on my piano app. It's simple, it's effective, and most of all, it's targeted to people
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who actually own a piano instead of waiting for users to come to me. This is one of those situations where I will go to them.
Using Facebook and Instagram to market my app with an in-depth onboarding flow and payw wall seems like a solid distribution method.