The TikTok Strategies Behind The Pet Penguin App Generating Millions In Revenue
Slay, a German consumer social start-up and creators of Pengu, just secured another $5M in June after skyrocketing to #1 on the App Store. They’re now holding a desired top spot, next to timeless classics like Monopoly and Uno.
Pengu is an AI-powered social/game app that’s taking the category by storm. It’s a digital pet you raise with friends, and it’s absolutely crushing it.
Pengu grew really, really fast, and part of their growth is their TikTok and short-form content strategy.
Pengu’s parent company made three apps prior to their hit game, and all three gained incredible traction.
They’ve been mastering TikTok and Reels marketing. And so can you.
This article details their strategy and everything they’ve been experimenting and trying.
A Duo-Lingo-Like Strategy. Cuteness + Fun.
They have two main accounts, one international and one German.
On these, they post multiple times a day with their real-size penguin mascot. The mascot will immediately remind you of DuoLingo’s famous bird mascot.
Both apps use it extensively in their social media content. And it’s genius.
What better content than an extra cute real-size penguin doing random funny stuff? And it’s the easiest content to make.
Their stats are mind-blowing, with 20% of videos beating the median views by 10x and 4% by 50x. Check their stats directly on TikTok with profilepl.us.
The German account netted videos with 1.8 million views.
They’re finding a recipe that works, that they can easily produce, rinse, and repeat. Once you find a format that works, localised accounts are the key to winning country by country and scaling that strategy.
Their next move is likely to start similar French, Spanish, and Arabic, Japanese or Hindi accounts.
Regular accounts testing regular strategies
They also have a Slay account, on which they regularly post more regular formats, and the social media/growth manager has a personal branded account on which she posts regularly.
These have less impressive stats but still provide interesting constant experimentation.
In a consumer app, every single person in marketing, growth, and product, should have a TikTok and Reels account where they post daily or weekly.
This game is only about quantity.
Advanced animations generating millions of views
They experimented with more advanced and produced animations on this Pengu & Pendulette account (https://www.tiktok.com/@penguandpengulette).
The stats are mind-blowing, with 14% of the videos beating the median by 10x and one video doing more than 12M views.
They have the same account on Instagram, doing even more views. Obviously, some might be ad-boosted, but most have incredible engagement and high-quality content generating a high return.
They stopped producing those videos a few months ago. They must’ve been too expensive to produce compared to the returns. But if they found a way to reduce the production costs, they could make this an evergreen strategy.
Full-time dedicated influencers producing mass content
They’ve also recently started experimenting with a full-time content creator, doing multiple daily videos in a more “classical” format.
That’s a well-known mass content strategy used by LocketApp and many others. It goes like this:
- Show the creator’s voiceless cute face with a text overlay on top
- Record holding a phone playing with Pengu
And do this 2 to 3 a day per account.
That’s one of their account experiment with this format: https://www.tiktok.com/@simonz.cool
We found two more experimenting with similar simple formats:
They probably have a few more, experimenting for a month or two before scaling. This strategy scales infinitely, as long as you have the capital to hire a content creator workforce.
You can easily hire U.S. creators to perform this at an affordable cost with FindMeCreators.
One-shot video on new accounts and nano influencers
Now, they also did dozens of videos on nearly empty accounts. Most are branded pengu.xyz and have 1 or 2 videos. Similar screen grab formats. Some of those videos have hundreds of thousands of views.
The idea here is to bet on the fact that a new account gets boosted views on its first video and to horizontally scale accounts to pump 1 out of N videos.
Finally, they’re running nano influencer videos. Some might be organic, some might just be fans of the app. Some might be paid.
That’s the most time-consuming strategy to run.
What you have to do to win the TikTok Game
Pengu’s team is doing so much experimentation with short-form content, and they’re smashing it.
That’s the amount of experimentation and content production you need to reach #1 and hold the spot.
TikTok and Reels marketing is hard work but high reward. You can 10x your content productivity with Shortimize. Track every account, only with a link, in one beautiful dashboard, and explore and analyze thousands of viral videos.
TikTok,
Reels, and
Shorts
