Watermarks on content for traction
Hey everyone,
This is Viktor from VixT, and today I want to ask you something.
We’re a bit undecided about something here at VixT. We’ve been debating this for a while now, and at the moment we’re a bit schizophrenic.
It’s about traction and building relationships.
Some of us on the team are saying that when launching an app, you should prioritise traction, whereas others say you should focus on building a relationship with your users.
They say in business that the moment you get traction is the moment when everyone wants to know what you are doing. Investors suddenly become interested in your company, tech blogs start writing about you, valuation goes up and funding floods in.
This can come in many different forms depending on the nature of your business.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce you might define this by looking at your revenue growth or your number of customers, whereas if you’re a freemium SaaS company, you may reflect this through the number of conversions to paying customers, or by your average lifetime customer value.
Regardless of what metric you may use, one thing remains constant and it’s that getting traction is one of the most desirable situations for any business of any form.
But, and this is a very important but; you also need to build a relationship with your users in order to be able to grow.
If you look at apps with viral content that allow you to take videos and photos with filters and animations, you may recognise that there’s a certain ‘model’ when it comes to scaling up.
Take apps like Dubsmash and MSQRD for example. When you send a funny video to your friends and family, the application automatically adds a watermark on the bottom right corner.
They do this for a very simple reason: so that the person watching knows what app he or she has to download or purchase to be able to take photos or videos with the same filters or effects.
They can be very subtle like MSQRD for example, where the watermark is 10 pt and covers no more than 25% of the span of the screen, or they can be more obvious, like Dubsmash, which is 12pt, and covers about 50% of the span of the screen.
Having a watermark on all the videos and photos users send is good for traction as the more people who see the watermark, the more people who will recognise the brand and download the app. There’s no debate about that.
The question is how much traction can you gain while blasting your company name in your users’ faces, and how much traction does having a huge watermark get you before it starts to slow down growth?
The hardcore marketers will say that traction is king, and that it’s necessary for building relationships with your customers as they need to be able recognise a brand even if it does cause them some annoyance.
On the other hand, the more vocational app developers will say you can build a relationship with your audience just by getting traction, regardless of whether there’s a big logo there or not.
But we want to know what you think.
What’s more important: traction, or the relationship with your customers?
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Thanks for reading!
