I Studied 100 Viral AI Apps, Here's How They Market

I spent the last few months going deep into over 100 AI [music] apps generating millions of dollars in monthly recurring revenue. And the thing that surprised me the most from my research, [music] the apps crushing it didn't necessarily have the best product, or the highest quality code, or [music] the most features. The best apps are winning because of their marketing approach, and they all follow one general method which I'll be breaking [music] down piece by piece in this video. And the best part about this system, it can be implemented [music] into any app.

And it's the exact same system that I used to scale my previous app Puff Count [music] to 45K in monthly recurring revenue, and my latest app Posted to over 1.3 million dollars in sales. [music] So, I am living proof that this marketing system works, and there's no need to reinvent the wheel. We're going to take what the most profitable app companies in the world [music] are doing and replicate that for our own products. So, stick around, get your notebooks, take out your crayons, let's get into it.

Okay, here it is. This is the blueprint [music] for how the top 100 apps in the world are doing marketing, and yes, [music] we did actually study over 100 apps. We put together this entire market research document tracking some of the most popular apps in the world. We have their name, their subtitle, the link to the app, the category, their monthly revenue, and the individual marketing links from their organic pieces of content, from their paid ads.

We have the amount of views here, and this entire document is going to be available for you to download in the description. So, yes, we did actually study 100 apps, and let's break down how we got there. First, we're going to cover the approach, then we're going to get in how to do market research and how you can find viral concepts in your niche, how you can scale this with creators or UGC content influencers, how you can then optimize your funnel and your marketing so you can ultimately spend more and get a better return on that ad spend, and of course, how to scale with paid ads.

So, let's start here at the top. How did we conduct this market research so you can do it for yourself? Of course, the first place you absolutely need to go is to Sensor Tower. You should be looking up other apps in your niche.

Sensor Tower will tell you exactly how many downloads and how much revenue they have driven in the last month. So, you should really only be learning from apps in your space that are actually making money. Don't learn from any apps that are doing less than 50K per month in revenue. There's nothing to learn from them.

Next, once we validate that these apps in our space are making money, we're going to find out what they're doing for marketing, and that's going to be in the market research section here in a second. But ultimately, the general formula is they're all creating short-form content organically first, then they're testing on paid ads, and then they are rinsing and repeating. They're optimizing their funnel, their paid ads, everything to get more return from their marketing spend. And they're all using a ton a ton of content creators.

Some are using AI, some are using UGC creators, some are using influencers. We're going to dive into all this in a second. But before we do, there is one thing that you definitely need to understand, and after studying hundreds of these apps making millions of dollars per month, they have a very strong conversion mechanism in their app. Because the one thing you need to understand, the more money these apps make per user, the more that they can spend on content and ads.

And this is why you're not winning, and all the most popular companies in the world, the best apps in the world, are able to drive so many installs. It's because they can spend more on paid ads because they're getting more from each user. The more money you earn per user, the more you can spend on paid ads. So, you need to think of your entire app like a funnel, and if you've watched any videos on the channel before, you're going to know this.

Your entire app is a funnel. The content in your ads need to be optimized. Your App Store listing needs to be attractive. It needs to have a high conversion rate, which will lead to more downloads.

Your onboarding funnel needs to be optimized. You need to have positive friction in your onboarding, and then of course, you need to be AB testing your paywall. I have dropped videos on every step of this process from App Store listing to onboarding to paywall, etc. Check out the other videos on my channel, but as a general rule of thumb, you need to understand that your funnel, your conversion rate in your app, must be optimized or you will never be able to market like the biggest companies in the world.

Again, these companies are able to spend more money than you because they convert users at a higher percentage than you. So, if you understand that and you work on optimizing your funnel, everything that we're going to talk about in this video is going to be so much easier because you will have more money to spend on your marketing. Okay, let's jump into part one, which is market research. The most important part of being successful in marketing, especially in the beginning, is doing market research.

You should never pay a creator, you should never make a piece of content, you should never pay an influencer before you understand what already works in your niche. So, identify your niche. What niche are you in? Are you in fitness?

Are you in dating? Are you in cooking? What niche are you in? And then we're going to do research to understand what's going viral, the themes, the hooks, the storylines, what is working organically in our niche, and how can we replicate that content for our own product.

There's a couple different ways you can do this. Number one, of course, you can go to Viral Ads Library. And on Viral Ads Library, there is a database of all the most popular content, organic and paid, for some of the most popular apps in the world. You filter by niche here, you can go to finance products, finance apps, and you can look at their most popular content.

This is a great resource that you should be looking at. But more importantly, we need to search organically in our niche. So, of course, we're just going to go on TikTok, or we can go on Instagram, or we're going to type in keywords related to our niche. I was consulting an app founder recently who's building a dating tips app, and all you have to do to find the most viral content for that niche is type in dating tips.

Boom, here we go. The most viral content on TikTok right here. 426,000 likes, 300,000 likes, 115,000 likes, 50,000 likes, 94,000 likes. And the craziest part is all this content is so straightforward. Any founder could do this, any creator could do this, any influencer can do this.

It's literally just a story time. This is a golden content niche because a majority of this content is pretty low effort. It's just talk face talking to camera, and all of this content you can easily plug a product in here as a tip. Three things to never tell your man, three tips to get a man, three tips to do dating XYZ.

Plug in your product. This is how you do market research. And make sure you stay organized when you're doing market research. Yes, you should be liking the content, and you should be saving it on your phone, but I like to put them all into a spreadsheet.

I like to save the URL. How many likes did the video get? Views, plays, comments, reshares, etc. You can even download the transcripts of each video and save it all here as market research.

Stay organized, do market research, understand the core themes, and you will succeed. ads as well. TikTok actually has an amazing TikTok Ads Library where they will show you the top ads for any niche. We can go here to the TikTok Top Ads Dashboard. We can go United States, and then we can go into apps.

We can further filter by categories here. These are going to be the most successful ads for apps in terms of app installs on TikTok in the last 30 days. We can go last 180, and boom, here are the highest performing formats. Of course, you got to log in to see more, but here are some of the top performing formats for different apps.

And of course, on the Facebook Ads Library, you can go here and you can type in any app in the world, and you can see all of their active ads. This is a very positive signal. If your competitors have a lot of ads running, very positive signal. And on top of that, you can see them all right here.

You can see what types of ads they're running. You can see if they're running short-form, and you can use this as further market research. So, when you're doing your market research, use all of these tactics. Look them up on Sensor Tower, make sure that they're making a decent amount of money, look them up organically on TikTok, on Instagram, look at their Facebook Ads, look at their TikTok Ads.

And only then should you start creating content. The market research phase is the most important phase in this entire process. If you just start creating content, if you just start hiring creators, if you start hiring influencers with no plan and no concept of what type of content is working in your niche, you will fail. You do not need to reinvent the wheel.

Take the most viral concepts from within your niche on social media and recreate those while plugging your product. It's that simple. Don't make it hard on yourself. Let's move on to phase two, which is scaling with creators.

Okay, moving on to scaling with UGC creators and influencers. One of the fastest ways to grow your app is, of course, to partner with massive influencers. You can reach out to them, and you can pay them to post about your product. Let's go back to the dating example here.

We can scroll through, and we can find one of these influencers like Tash 9 p.m. who has 52,000 followers in the exact niche we're going for. Or we could reach out to this girl, Annabelle Guessan, for our dating app, let's say, and we could have her post content for our product. But the problem with that is, scaling with influencers is not cheap. And again, why it's so very important that you have a strong funnel, a strong conversion mechanism, if you're going to pay one of these influencers thousands of dollars, you need to make sure that you're going to get a return on that spend.

So, you can scale with influencers. It's one of the fastest ways to get off of the ground, but you don't have to start there. I always recommend every app founder start posting content themselves. Even if you don't want to be on camera, you can do faceless content.

You can hire smaller creators. Do anything. Be scrappy in the beginning, and one of the best ways to do that is to hire creators on a results-only basis. Hire creators, and you only pay them when you drive results.

And of course, you can do that through postedapp.com. What you can do is launch a CPM campaign, and you can choose exactly how much you want to pay creators per piece of content and you can set a CPM. You can control your cost based on how many views the creators are driving you. What's cool about running CPMs on Posted as well is you can track deeper app analytics.

For example, we're tracking our first app opens here. So, we're able to see how the views are affecting our first opens in the product. We have all these submissions coming in from creators which we own. We own the video and we own the Spark Ads code and we can track all of the performance right here in our dashboard.

All of the creators are of course following our brief and we're getting views on autopilot this way. But not only views, we're getting content that we own for life. So, you can reach out to influencers and creators manually on TikTok, on Instagram. You can send them an email, you can DM them, or you can use Posted and you can hire creators that way.

But at the end of the day, you need to find which creators are performing the best for you and build a team of consistent creators. Again, whether influencers, UGC creators, smaller creators, micro influencers, whoever it is, you need to put together a solid team. And you need to work with them consistently. Once you find a format and a creator who drives installs and more importantly revenue for you, hold on to them and keep leveraging that content and keep leveraging that format until it doesn't work anymore.

The best way to structure deals and to build a team is to of course pay them on a CPM basis and some flat rate per piece of content. But not every creator is going to accept this. Some of the bigger creators, the influencers especially, will work on view guarantees, however. So, whatever way you're working with creators, make sure you protect yourself.

Make sure that you are only paying when the creators are driving results. That could be through a view guarantee type deal, it could be through a CPM deal with a flat rate, whatever way it makes sense for you. You have to make sure you're on top of your ROI and how much you're spending on these creators. And once you do get that content, once you start posting content, once you get content from other creators, leverage every single channel at your disposal.

Post the videos on TikTok, also post them on Instagram Reels, post some on YouTube Shorts, post some on Facebook Reels to maximize the reach from every single piece of content. And a part of maximizing every piece of content is having your own social media profile and making sure that that profile is optimized along with each video that you get from these creators. So, what do I mean by optimizing your social media profiles? Well, let's take a look at Resumes' TikTok profile here.

Resume is doing $500,000 per month. They got 300,000 downloads last month. Here is their TikTok profile and it is perfectly optimized. They are taking all of their creator content and simply reposting it on their TikTok.

And I bet you they're doing the exact same on Instagram. They have nice little playlist here showing you exactly how to use the product and then of course they have a clean, simple bio redirecting people to download the app and their App Store landing page. I did the same thing on Puffcount. You can look, it's almost the exact same.

This is how you optimize a profile and how you build social proof around your app's social media. What you'll also notice, something that Resume isn't doing that I think they should, is you pin your top performing videos in terms of downloads. These two videos drove the most downloads for me at Puffcount. So, of course I pinned them to the to the top of my profile because whenever someone visits my profile, these will be the top two videos that they see and I know there's a higher likelihood that they will convert.

And of course we have the playlist here, short, simple bio telling people to download Puffcount and we have the link right here. And of course, same thing on our latest company Posted, same exact strategy. Simple link in bio, top performing content right here as pinned videos. Now, there's not only profile optimization, there is also content optimization.

How can you optimize each piece of content to convert the most users? There's a couple different things you need to keep in mind. You need to be sneaky with your call to actions. Your videos cannot feel like a sales pitch.

You should not be selling the features in your app or how your app works or where to find your app. You should be selling the outcome. You should also engage with your audience whenever possible, respond to comments, go back and forth with people in the comments boost engagement. And whenever you can, make videos with replies to comments.

If your video is going viral, reply to one of those comments with another video. I'm I'm going to show you exactly what I mean. Here at Puffcount, our video with 8.4 million views was actually a reply to a comment. We replied to this comment that got a ton of upvotes.

We took apart a vape and then of course a sneaky call to action. Didn't say how Puffcount works, didn't explain the features, didn't explain why, where to download it. No, no, no. We just said it, this app helps you quit.

That's it. Sneaky, quick call to action. Let's take another example of this from CalA that did $2 million last month. Here is one of their marketing videos.

Check this out. This guy working out, jacked, eating a healthy meal and then boom, sneaky little call to action. >> [music] >> Not saying the name of the app, not saying how it works, why it works, why you should download it. Nope. He's just portraying his lifestyle that everybody wants, a fit, healthy lifestyle, and product placement in the video itself.

That's it. Sneaky call to actions selling the outcome, not the features. Always engage with the audience and when you can, if you see a video going viral, make videos with replies to those comments. Once you have done part one through three and you've optimized your profile and you have at least 20 pieces of high quality content, now we are ready to scale on paid ads.

And this is what really is going to skyrocket your app's growth. Because instead of relying on the algorithm and hoping people will swipe out of TikTok to go search your app on the App Store and you have to rank number one on the App Store, all this all this other sort of stuff. No, just run paid ads and you have a call to action in the video itself. Don't sleep on paid ads.

Paid ads are the most powerful way to grow your app. And if you want a detailed breakdown of exactly how to run effective paid ad campaigns for your app, I dropped a full video for that. I'll put it in the description somewhere. A full paid ads deep dive.

But ultimately, what you need to understand is you should be uploading your highest performers from the organic content that we just got and you should be uploading those to the paid ads dashboard. On top of that, when you're building your campaigns, you should be optimizing for money events. Just optimizing for a click, just optimizing for an install is not enough. You should be optimizing for free trials, free trial starts, or subscription conversions if possible.

You should be optimizing for those events because those are your money events. Anything before that could just be window shoppers. The two most important metrics you need to know when scaling paid ads are your customer acquisition cost and your customer's lifetime value. As long as your customer acquisition cost, the amount of money that it takes for you to acquire a paying subscriber, is less than your customer's lifetime value, you are making money.

And then it's simply a matter of how much money can I spend on ads and can I maintain this positive ratio? One of the best ways to find out where your LTV is is to go on RevenueCat. And RevenueCat will show you your realized LTV per install. As you can see here it was for Puffcount, our average LTV per install was about a dollar, a dollar 20, sometimes a dollar 50 at its max.

So, as long as we can get installs for less than a dollar 20 or a dollar 50, which we were, you can scale profitably. And the way we were able to get there and get our customer acquisition cost, our cost per install below a dollar 20 or a dollar 50, was by testing creatives. We tested in mass. And then once we found winners, we rinse and repeat this entire formula.

This will never stop, you'll always be testing new content, optimizing your app's funnel to increase the LTV. And ultimately, you have to fall in love with the process of marketing your app. If you have questions about marketing your app, scaling your app, running paid ads, absolutely anything, drop me a DM on steven.builds and I will get back to you there. I host a weekly call with app founders where we chat about absolutely everything from ideation to development to onboarding to paywalls to marketing to scaling.

We are all sharing tips and tricks together and scaling our apps together. So, if you want me to add you to that weekly founders call, again, shoot me a DM on Instagram and I will get back to you there. If you watched the video this far, you probably enjoyed so I'd appreciate a like and subscribe to the channel because I'll be dropping more sauce just like this all the time. I'll catch you on the next one.

Peace.