When Ran Avrahamy joined AppsFlyer in 2014, it was a tiny Israel-based startup with a big dream. Seven years later, the company has more than 1,200 employees around the world—including several hundred at its transplanted headquarters in San Francisco. Avrahamy, who gained the CMO title in 2019, attributes the companies continued success to four overlapping factors.

First, the product aims to solve an age-old problem for marketers: measuring the effectiveness of ad spending, specifically in-app media buys. Second, its top priority has never been revenue growth, but customer satisfaction. Third, the software-as-a-service company has maintained its start-up mindset and agility that have helped it adapt to changing marketing conditions. Fourth, AppsFlyer is committed to its employees, even helping them build their personal brands, an effort that has propelled the company despite the pandemic.

You joined AppsFlyer in 2014. What attracted you to the brand?

Measurement and attribution are a big, big problem for marketers. It doesn't matter which type of market you are—b-to-b, b-to-c, enterprise, small companies—knowing where to spend your marketing money and your budgets and what to do with your marketing campaigns is an ongoing problem we’ve had for decades.

Go back 50, 60 years, it was a lot about spray and pray on the creative side. Now we have the tools and the technology to really measure marketing campaigns and really understand what's working and what's not. I was fascinated by the story, by the problem, and I was just blown away by the product market fit at AppsFlyer.

Which marketing tactics helped you gain ground as a startup?

For several good years, our mantra in marketing was, “Be everywhere.” Say you have zero dollars to spend on marketing tomorrow. You have your creativity, your connections in the market, organic traffic, organic social media, word of mouth and partnerships. On one side we really tried to maximize all of those owned and earned assets that we didn’t have to pay for, leveraging our partners and working together with them.

On the content side about six years ago, we did something that we called the performance index, working with all of our partners and ranking them based on their performance of both volumes and quality of installs. It was a very robust report and a good hack at beginning to leverage the relationships that we have.

How do you attribute your growth over the last seven years?

Our goals at the beginning and until today were customer-first with revenue always as a secondary KPI. We’re a very customer-obsessed company, so how do you balance that on one side—stay laser focused on your target and what you want to achieve—while also playing very creatively and agilely on everything that you own and can earn?

Now the goals are a lot bigger and broader, but I think one of the unique things about AppsFlyer is that we've kept the same agile, creative, consistent mentality. So even if you have big budgets and very complex workflows and processes and technologies and content, it’s about keeping that nimble and agile mindset and reacting to things that are happening in your industry quickly with in-depth reports and insights.

How did COVID impact your marketing programs?

It was about being empathetic to the different types of customers that we have, understanding where they're coming from, their pain points and challenges. From a product standpoint, we shifted a lot of resources within the company pretty quickly to tailor solutions to different industries, redeveloping our app and other features within the product to adapt them to work from home.

Then, on the marketing experience side, we were very empathetic to both parties, to folks that have been hurt from COVID, like the travel industry, but also to ones that have high pressure right now with huge traffic, huge spikes. Trying to identify both and cater to each of them in a different way was very, very important. Those quick changes and shifts were hugely important and really appreciated by our customers.

How did you help customers hard hit by the pandemic?

We gave them solutions beyond the financial side—spreading out payments and whatnot—really working with them on that zero-budget marketing mindset. A travel company, an airline—what else can we do with your owned and earned media? How can you maintain relationships with your customers on a loyalty program basis? How can you retain them, how you can you engage with them? We have our own customer experience suite, so it’s a lot about user experience and flows and how you can engage with them pretty quickly in this crazy time.  

How important are employees?

We don’t do employer branding; we do employee branding. We spotlight them. We provide them with small, meaningful, personalized things. It's about showing them that we care, showing them that we work together. Every time that we have a big milestone, we celebrate it internally, do internal training about it, give people assets to share on their social media.

Why is an employee-first mindset so important?

It pays off so much. If your own team members are not your biggest advocates and fans, you won't be able to make your customers and your prospects and your partners and the external circles your fans. The fandom sticks. It's contagious. If people working for the company are so proud of your products, of your social responsibility, of your actions, of your content, it glows outside, and it's contagious.