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If you want a content distribution strategy to copy, this might be it. AppsFlyer is acting like they read Ross’s posts religiously. They know how to create content worth sharing and keep distributing it forever.
Content marketing doesn’t work without distribution.
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) December 17, 2021
Which is why we’re about to break down their entire marketing strategy — because there isn’t any single part that’s driving their growth. Instead, they’re taking a holistic approach that crosses mediums, channels, and segments to create the maximum impact possible.
Let’s dive in.
AppsFlyer’s Journey to $2 Billion
AppsFlyer, a leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics, achieved a $2 billion valuation by building a great tool and backing it with a careful and strategic marketing strategy.
Founded in 2011, the company provides data that helps businesses fine-tune advertising strategies and improve user engagement. Notably, their most recent funding round was led by Salesforce Ventures, the investing arm of Salesforce and a bellwether for industry confidence in AppsFlyer’s potential.
Since that funding round, AppsFlyer has doubled their revenue, driven by continuous technological advancements and an adaptive approach to market changes, such as privacy regulations and digital transformations. But none of this would be enough if they didn’t lead the way with an innovative and highly effective marketing strategy of their own.
AppsFlyer’s Distribution: Multimedia, Multiplatform
AppsFlyer has embraced a wide-net distribution strategy for its content. Outside of their own site, they distribute content across six channels. Let’s look at how they approach each of those channels and how they create content for the general public and developer relations.
Social Media Platforms
Like many B2B brands, AppsFlyer invests heavily in their social media presence. But their level of success across multiple platforms — including some you might not expect — is beyond what many other brands their size see.
With almost 117,000 followers on their page, LinkedIn is AppsFlyer’s biggest platform. That makes sense, since their primary audience is marketers and small business owners who likely spend a good chunk of time on LinkedIn.
But how did they get their target audience to follow them?
By strategically selecting how and when they schedule their posts, how each performs, and what they choose to promote on this platform.
Let’s look at some examples:
In this post, they use their LinkedIn to promote that one of their leaders was featured in an article relevant to their industry. That establishes their brand as the home of industry thought leaders.
This slideshow post gave them some solid engagement, with more than 40 reactions. It’s worth noting that it’s an organic post without a link, which the LinkedIn algorithm may favor over posts with links.
They also cut a clip from their podcast and promoted the full episode with this perfect example of content repurposing:
And here’s a post where they promote a recent blog article of theirs:
This is their full LinkedIn activity for one week in April 2024. It’s frequent, but not a barrage of content. That’s a cadence that fits the platform — unlike X, which benefits from frequent, short posts, LinkedIn tends to favor longer and more detailed posts.
One thing that immediately jumps out is that none of these posts are text-only. There are two image posts, one slideshow, and a video. A quick scan down their feed shows that this pattern is consistent: They don’t have a single text-only post.
If you want to rank well on LinkedIn and gain followers, post regular, longer posts with multimedia elements, and include some posts without links.
AppsFlyer’s second largest platform is Facebook, where they have 57,000 followers at the time of writing this. Here, AppsFlyer seems to focus heavily on video content. (Note: all of the videos they upload to Facebook are also on their LinkedIn.)
They post to Facebook with less frequency, possibly reflecting a belief that their core audience isn’t spending as much time there. But, it seems as if none of these posts are made for Facebook specifically, so the only real cost here is the time it takes AppsFlyer to upload — not too bad for their platform with the second-highest follower count!
Instagram, YouTube, X
AppsFlyer has a little over 12,000 followers on X, 14,000 on Instagram, and 9,000 on YouTube. They also have a separate Life At AppsFlyer Instagram account with almost 5,000 followers. Let’s take a look at how they approach each of these platforms, and where they could improve.
On their primary Instagram account (@appsflyer_hq), they’re posting a few times a week. Mostly, it’s the same images and videos they put on Facebook and LinkedIn, but with different captions.
That seems to be working alright for them, but they don’t appear to use the Stories or Saved Stories features very much, which could be an opportunity for even more engagement.
Their second Instagram account, @lifeatappsflyer, has much higher engagement than the primary account despite fewer followers. Here are two posts with identical content and captions, but one has double the engagement and has more comments.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
It seems like the Life At AppsFlyer account has built a much more engaged following, so even repurposed videos succeed more there than on their larger account.
How?
By posting personal stories of AppsFlyer employees and using the Instagram Stories feature to re-engage their audience. Just look at all the stories they have saved!
AppsFlyer’s X account uses the same multimedia content that they upload to other platforms. However, X’s algorithm puts a heavy emphasis on reposting and commenting on comments in its algorithm. In fact, one of the best things you can do to boost the visibility of your posts there is to reply to comments. But AppsFlyer’s X account doesn’t ever reply to comments, severely limiting their posts’ visibility. That means they have plenty of room to grow here!
On YouTube, AppsFlyer has some videos that see significant success and others that don’t get as much attention. Their most-viewed videos are commercials, including this one that broke 200,000 views in just a couple of weeks:
Other videos don’t have high view counts but seem to serve as sales collateral. For example, this one is a short, compelling customer success story:
These platforms see lower follower counts for AppsFlyer than LinkedIn or Facebook. But as you can see, they have their own success stories and lessons to take away.
DevRel via Medium
Developer relations (DevRel) is how companies build trust with the technical audiences that use their products. Some companies have a hard time figuring out how to create DevRel content: If they publish it on their blog, it could be too technical for their general audience. But not everything they want to write for developers will qualify as technical documentation.
That’s why AppsFlyer has a separate Medium account for developers. On Medium, AppsFlyer publishes articles that delve into the more technical aspects of their products. They also talk about other topics that could interest a technical audience, such as how to lead change in an engineering department. Their rotation of technical professionals creating the content keeps things expert-driven and real, which is especially important for technical audiences who often shy away when they feel they’re being heavily marketed to.
The content on Medium is designed to be more accessible than typical technical documentation, which can often be dense and difficult to digest.
It’s gained them 1,200 followers on Medium (a platform where the very largest accounts barely break 200,000) and the goodwill of developers who see the company putting forward a genuine effort to give them helpful content.
AppsFlyer’s Glossary: Gaining Traffic by Losing Backlinks
We may have mentioned site glossaries once or twice here before, as they’re an easy way to create a high volume of content for relevant terms, and a number of companies have seen great success with them.
But the risk is that everyone else is doing the same. That means you need to analyze whether your glossary is capturing unbranded searches, and you can help that out with a robust backlink strategy. AppsFlyer is a great example of both.
High Unbranded Volume
Branded keywords include the brand’s name or specific trademarks, while unbranded keywords are generic terms related to the industry without specific brand mentions. For a website, ranking high for a diverse array of unbranded keywords is crucial because it captures traffic from an audience that doesn’t know who they are, but wants to know about their products.
One of the benefits of a glossary is that it can help you rank for a high volume of unbranded keywords. In AppsFlyer’s case, almost all of the more than 14,000 keywords their glossary ranks for are unbranded. That means the glossary is responsible for almost half of the total keywords pages that the AppsFlyer website ranks for.
While the glossary’s almost 20,000 monthly visitors may be entirely unaware of what AppsFlyer is, they still end up on their website because they want to know about these subjects. It’s a great top-of-funnel play.
Gaining by Losing
Conventional wisdom would tell you that AppsFlyer would have to build a strong backlink profile for its glossary to rank for so many keywords. This is true: the site’s over 143 million backlinks are nothing to sniff at! But that number has gone down by 60 million since October 2023!
That’s because not all backlinks are equal.
Google values backlinks from well-regarded websites over backlinks from smaller and less widely used sites. If your site has a lot of backlinks from low-DA sites, Google may suspect that you are trying to artificially improve your own DA and de-prioritize your pages on its SERPs.
But DA might not be the only factor that matters. Low relevance, or backlinks that clearly aren’t adding value, may also count against you. From October to December 2022, AppsFlyer saw a huge spike in their total backlink count, but only a slight increase in traffic and a drop in their average URL rating.
Then, they decided to reduce their low-value backlink count. It appears that AppsFlyer conducted a thorough audit of their backlink profile and began removing backlinks that were either low-quality or irrelevant to their content. The results were immediate and significant.
Despite cutting their total number of backlinks by almost 30%, their site started gaining traffic faster than ever before.
By prioritizing backlink quality over quantity, they not only cleaned up their SEO profile but also ensured that their site was associated only with reputable and relevant sources. This selective approach likely influenced search engines to view AppsFlyer’s content as more trustworthy and authoritative, thereby improving their SERP rankings.
AppsFlyer’s Resources: In-Depth Investments
AppsFlyer’s success is not just built on a strong social media presence or an intelligent backlink strategy; it’s also heavily reliant on their ability to create and leverage in-depth, high-value content.
One such example is their resource pages, specifically those like their guide on In-App Advertising. These pages are not only a testament to AppsFlyer’s expertise but are also strategic assets in their digital marketing arsenal.
High Content Value and Ranking for Tough Keywords
The in-app advertising guide by AppsFlyer is a prime example of content that brings high-value traffic, rather than high volumes of traffic. By ranking high for valuable keywords, it brings in traffic worth about $3,000 a month, despite a lower volume of visitors compared to other pages.
The guide ranks high because it is comprehensive, in-depth, and offers information in a highly accessible format. Just look at how clearly it outlines the search term’s basic definition here:
These resource pages typically cover complex topics that require a detailed explanation, which helps them rank for specific queries that have lower volume but higher conversion potential. The use of well-researched statistics, current trends, and case studies enhances the page’s authority and utility, making a highly effective long-tail keyword strategy.
Audience and Value Difference Compared to Glossary Pages
The audience for AppsFlyer’s resource pages, like the in-app advertising guide, is markedly different from that of their glossary pages. While the glossary pages aim to attract broad traffic by ranking for a high volume of unbranded keywords, the resource pages target a more specific, knowledgeable audience. This audience is typically deeper in the sales funnel and looking for detailed guidance or solutions rather than basic definitions or overviews.
The value of these resource pages comes significantly from their potential Cost Per Click (CPC). In industries like mobile marketing, where CPC can be especially high due to the competitive nature of the keywords, a well-ranking resource page can capture highly valuable traffic. This is traffic that’s more likely to convert, given the user’s advanced interest level and specific needs, which translates directly into higher ROI on the content produced.
Value-Based Marketing Like AppsFlyer’s
There’s a whole lot that AppsFlyer is doing right. Emulating everything they do at once would be a pretty herculean — and costly — undertaking. But there are plenty of paths to marketing success.
For example, you can check out our breakdown of 1Password to see how another company built their growth with partners and community. Or, if you’re more interested in learning about content distribution, you can read our article on the most common distribution misconceptions here.
