How did we get here? Content — key to app growth

Flo’s mission is to improve the health and well-being of every woman and menstruating person in the world. One of the ways we aim to achieve that is by providing educational and tailored content in the app. We’ve been on a long journey to turn expert-based, static information into data-driven, personalized content. Upgraded content has increased both user engagement and monetization.

In this article, I’ll share tips and tricks on how we did it — it might work for you too.

1 Define your goals

You are not creating content for the sake of creating content. All things must serve a business need. The main metrics might differ depending on your business model and goals. For example, for a subscription-based app, it’s important to convert to paying users. If your app is built on showing ads to users, then the time spent in the app is more important. If you are improving premium users’ experience, retention is what you are looking for.

High-level metrics should have a clear impact on the business, and you should make sure that your team is focused on one main metric. If you choose a metric like retention, you’ll find that it’s really hard to improve it, and single projects might not have any influence on it. So what should you do? You might want to find a more sensitive proxy metric that would have a greater impact on your main metric. You could try defining important features that encourage users to stay in your app longer and then use days spent as your metric.

2 Think in funnels

To see improvement in your high-level metric, writing marvelous content might not be enough. You also need to check if users are actually able to find it. Start thinking about your content as a system and monitor holistic metrics for it (quite similar to the AAARRR framework).

First of all, your users should be aware that there is content in the app. You can achieve this by having content covers or other equally visible paths to reach the content.

Secondly, this cover/path should be intriguing and attractive so users decide to click on it. While getting users to click on the content can be difficult enough, making sure to catch their interest can be even harder.

Look at Flo’s main screen. Here we have three placements for content: “My daily insights” (stories), an insight icon on the tab, and the widget “Later in your cycle.” Stories have the highest visibility, as they are on the main screen. To see the content placed in the insights tab, the user needs to click first. To see content in the widget, the user needs to scroll down. That’s why users will pay more attention to the content in stories than in the two other placements.

The only way to get users to reach the paywall is by creating interesting and optimized content that piques their interest while they consume it. Furthermore, relevant content is the only way (in this case) for users to decide whether your content is worth spending money on.

So the funnel is:

What if your major metric is one-month retention? The steps are similar as those above: Users are aware and willing to click on your content. But they should also be incentivized to look for the content again, and again, and again! Most likely, you will need to create useful content corresponding to the daily needs of your users. That should result in consecutive daily app usage from your users.

Let’s build another funnel:

3 Optimize your funnel

Two important thoughts here.

First, the top of the funnel is likely to be the same no matter what high-level metric you choose. Users should be aware of your content and want to click on it.

Second, if you’ve never optimized your content before, it’s better to start optimizing the top of the funnel first. Genius content will never have a high impact if only a few users see its cover or the cover is not attractive.

To optimize awareness, think about content positioning in the app. Could you move it to the first screen? Could you advertise it via pushes or marketing campaigns? Do you mention your content during onboarding?

To optimize clicks, consider if you’re showing the most clickable items first. Could you improve your covers by changing their design or titles?

A common mistake in this part of optimization is that teams tend to start redesigning covers with the worst click rates. That’s not the right approach. Because you are redesigning covers to improve the overall click rate, you should start with the most popular ones, even if their click rates look good enough already. Trust me, the impact on the system will be higher.

4 Be aware of data insights

It’s not all about running the correct A/B tests. The magic and growth only happen if everyone (and I mean everyone) is aligned on the goals and all recent insights. What do users love to read about? What design style do they prefer? Should we be writing long reads or making short TikTok-style videos?

All these questions will influence what the content team will produce, so it’s much better if the data insights are presented simply, clearly, and accessibly. Demo days, insights shared in Slack channels, and simple interactive dashboards will all help a lot to democratize your insights and align the whole team.

What’s next?

If you’ve never optimized your content before, all the above-mentioned simple actions will assist the growth of your content business metrics rather rapidly, even with static content. Although, at some point, you’ll reach a plateau where no new effort brings any significant uplift. That’s a great sign that it’s time to start segmenting your users and thinking of building machine-learning models for content ranking. What a great topic for a future article — stay tuned!