As Jeff Roberto rightly states that PicsArt has brought in the visual story revolution, it did create ripples with numbers- 700 million downloads and 150 million MAU! Jeff has a lot more to say.
I lead global growth marketing for PicsArt, the world's #1 creative platform and social editing app that’s leading the visual storytelling revolution. Growth marketing at PicsArt includes user acquisition, lifecycle, product marketing, social media, influencers, ASO, SEO, consumer insights and much more! I’m focused on building a world-class growth engine to drive buzz, WOM, and search. I have 20+ years of experience in consumer and growth marketing and have led marketing functions at popular consumer companies such as Shazam, Friendster, Roxio, Napster, and Priceline.
PicsArt is an all-in-one photo and video editing app, with thousands of editing tools, filters, stickers, photo-enhancing brushes, and templates to make their social content pop.
We have become the world’s largest creative platform with more than 150 million monthly active users - all creating, remixing and sharing close to one billion pieces of content every month. People come to PicsArt to channel their inner creativity, whether it’s to perfect their everyday moments, celebrate their passions, promote their business/organization, or to create awesome art.
It’s exciting to have such a large and growing community. When PicsArt started in 2012, most of our growth came from word of mouth and search focused mostly on our tools - collage making, drawing, fonts, etc. Two years later, we grew to 45 million monthly active users, and now we have more than 150 million monthly active users globally and an app with global fanfare in over 30 languages. We have always stood by the goal of making it easy to create awesome stuff and we’ve lowered the bar for creators on mobile. With PicsArt, anyone with any level of skill can be a creator.
We have adopted a variety of growth strategies, but we rely heavily on social media marketing, paying close attention to trends, as well as amplifying and reposting our users' edits and creations.
We are always looking for ways to optimize our product and launch new tools/features to fuel our community’s editing habits. For example, we recently launched a new tool available only on PicsArt, called Replay. It enables anyone to easily replicate others’ edits on their own photos in just a few taps, making the editing process quicker, simpler and more collaborative.
In our video editor, we recently integrated music. Users can now add songs of their choice to their videos and share their creations directly from PicsArt to social platforms including Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
Absolutely! We were thrilled to be 2019’s #4 top-grossing photo and video app plus the #14 most downloaded app worldwide, and as well as a consistent top 20 most downloaded app worldwide. We hope to continue this growth trajectory and cultivate even more relationships with influencers, as well as continue adding more user-requested features and functionality.
PicsArt has a unique built-in network effect that combines thousands of creative tools, millions of free-to-use content pieces, plus a community that engages. We have the world’s largest open-sourced content collection, with billions of free-to-edit photos, backgrounds, stickers, fonts, frames and more. Our fandoms are also very popular; we have thousands of interest-based communities - everything from Billie Eilish to Anime to Kpop - that users love to celebrate.
Marketing is extremely important for PicsArt -it’s one of the main contributors to our year-over-year growth. While we’re lucky that 80% of our growth is organic, we do supplement it with paid acquisition, co-marketing and partnerships with brands, and influencers.
The first big change was enhancing communication within our global marketing team across two offices (we now have five). I quickly mastered the 12-hour time difference between the US and Armenia and adopted an early workday schedule. Secondly, I began spending two weeks a quarter in Yerevan, building in-person relations and processes, critical for a world-class team. Thirdly, I focused on ASO, localization, lifecycle marketing, and partnership best practices.
We find that trends and viral content take off for many different reasons that are hard to anticipate. With our team’s ability to track and measure these trends, we are able to provide our community with a wide range of ways to stay engaged, including trending images, hashtags, and in-app challenges.
We elevate our influencer marketing with branded partnerships and co-marketing opportunities, which additionally adds to our overall growth strategy. This helps reach new users and retain our current users.
We also leverage partnerships so our community can engage with their favorite artists and brands - all of which garner millions of impressions, views, and engagements. Some of our most recent collaborations with A-listers include The Jonas Brothers, Will Smith, Lily Singh, and Taylor Swift.
Most, if not all, of our features, are user-driven. We listen to community feedback and are focused on delivering a great in-app experience. We learn a lot about our community via reviews -- people love to voice the good and bad and this helps us build the right products!
Absolutely, we use targeted paid acquisition and retargeting plus ASO to supplement our organic growth, which accounts for 80% of our growth.
I’d say the most important factors are (1) your store video and screens, people want to see what the app does and also, for us, what visual trends it may be associated with (2) promotional text that highlights what’s new and/or what’s hot right now in the app (3) ranking and featuring - the higher your rank and the more often you’re featured drive visual awareness of your app, which does lead to longer tail conversion over time.
We don’t disclose specifics around subscriber conversion, but I will say that we have an above-average trial-to-paid conversion rate. We were also the #4 top-grossing photo & video app of 2019 -- that’s definitely an indicator of our in-app subscription success!
We have been cash positive for over a year now and funding is not something we are actively focused on at this time.
Test, test, and test! Experimentation is key. Try lots of creative variants and localize where and when you can.
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