A basic approach to Growth Marketing (with frameworks)- Part 1
A search for the term growth hacking throws up over 5.9 million links on Google. A testament to its popularity.
And a search for the term growth marketing doubles that number taking it across the 1 billion mark.
Clearly, there’s a lot of interest in these terms.
Popularised by Sean Ellis in his book “Hacking Growth”, digging a little deeper uncovers examples of rapid growth at low to no budgets. Which is good. Bootstrapped and early-stage companies definitely need this approach. And larger companies, especially those that are budget-constrained would benefit from it.
Marketing: creativity vs. data
Creativity in marketing is not new. What has changed is that technology as an enabler has changed the playing field. And the creativity has shifted into a data-driven dimension.
As a marketing professional working with companies of different sizes, I am amazed at the expectations in the room when one mentions growth hacking. In my own experience, it takes an analytical mindset and a data-driven approach to identify, experiment, optimize, and scale marketing programs effectively for growth.
As I continue to define programs for growth with a combination of startups and larger organizations I work with, the basics have remained the same.
“…marketing is about the art of informing and persuading. It’s about creating conversations. It’s about maximizing the effectiveness and the efficiency of achieving sales.”
- Richard Hall
And all of the other things we do as part of a “growth-focused” role is to take an analytical and data-driven approach, leveraging technology and tools to research the customer and their interaction points, map their possible journey — which is no longer linear and controlled by the seller — and deliver compelling experiences that establish and build trust and credibility, with the ultimate intent of conversion to a sale.
Marketing on-the-ground
This plays out differently in the B2B and B2C contexts, given the nature of decision making and the price involved. Higher value transactions with the complexity of team-led decision making will require more tangible proof points or credentials. Selling to a consumer involves persuasion at an individual level. Ergo, B2B marketing tends to be less visibly emotional in its content.
Also, the technology stack used for each is vastly different.
Going through a bunch of content from CXL as part of their courses on growth marketing, I’m spending time going back and forth over everything I’ve learned and done in my (over two-decade-long) career in marketing.
The big changes
The first big change to note is the number of channels to market the marketer has access to today. Whether for paid advertising or organic reach, the number of channels and the tools available, whether to support production or managing or to collate data for insights and to analyze performance are exploding. I must admit that I can barely keep up with the number of tools available!
(NOTE: please do comment here with any tools you think I should try.)
Personalization
Several of these digital channels and technology tools collate granular data about the customer and their experience of your brand of product. The ability to use this data effectively to influence their eventual decision about your product and to persuade them to take the next step immediately is what I’d define as a growth mindset.
To do this, one needs
- an understanding of the target audience
- clarity on the brand value that you are trying to communicate (both for trust and for credibility)
- a mindset that is attuned to evaluating and analyzing the data (to understand the impact your experiment has had to either redefine or scale the experiment)
- a strong understanding of regulatory or legal implications across the geographies that you will be targeting
The second big change is in the (unprecedented) degree of personalization in delivering your message and segmenting your customers that digital channels offer.
Let’s look at the complexity involved here: take the case of Netflix.
The layers of personalization that go into the recommendation and placement of a specific title, description, and image on your screen are phenomenal.
And their marketing machine is aligned with this. Delivery of advertisements is personalized based on several algorithms that are built on their product recommendation engine.
While not all marketing engagements will be as complex or challenging (or exciting!), the opportunities for targeted marketing are endless.
The magic wand (or not)
And, as John McBride puts it, growth hacking, contrary to what several reports on the internet suggest, is less about cheat sheets, and more about deriving insights on an ongoing basis from fail-fast experiments to drive customer awareness and adoption.
Brilliant marketing is about the impact it creates, the interest or awareness, and the adoption it generates.
In the data-rich digital marketing world, this translates to understanding your user and the value proposition that fits their need and then using available data to define your overall strategy.
Starting with the basics
What are you trying to do? And why?
Identify where your growth opportunities are. Here’s a simplified model to think through potential avenues for growth.
I try to start with the “why” question. Why are we doing this?
Next, define your funnel and experiments.
I start with the “what” and “how” question here. What could help me achieve that overall goal? And separating my customers into segments based on either their awareness or the outcomes they are targeting. This helps keep the big picture in view. And simplifies the approach. Also, I try and add in referral loops at every relevant point. The more advocates you have, the less effort you need to put into hard selling.
Customer centricity
I try and ensure that I keep the customer at the center of it all.
The question at each stage should be — does this add value to the customer? Is this a must-have? Does this add value or address a burning need/ pain-point? Will they pay for it?
Nothing can replace the actual voice of the customer as you do this. Understanding and addressing customer fears, uncertainties, and doubts at each stage can reduce friction along the funnel.
The focus should be on reducing the cognitive load on the customer at each stage of their journey. Rigor in setting the right expectations across your customer touchpoints and following through with any required explanations, supporting data, or credentials make things a lot simpler. Don’t make the user think! The more they have to think about anything they see, the less likely they are to commit to that next step.
Prioritize & Plan
I use a top tasks model to ensure I prioritize addressing the key objections and try to include FAQs where possible for more detailed explanations.
Once I have a list of the key value-propositions mapped to my target customers and aligned to the outcomes they seek, I’ll start on the rest of the process. What is my overall objective here? How do I break this down into tasks? What channels should I use? What questions should I answer?
As long as the objective and goals are clearly defined at the outset and you define and test your hypothesis each step of the way, you’re on the path to winning. Either with a conversion or with some very useful learning on what doesn’t work. :-)
Remember that consumer decision making is no longer a linear process. You could visualize this in a sort of spiral — separating the business-driven and consumer-driven touchpoints and then look at ways to influence each.
You can choose between several channels for outreach. I’m going to tackle those in a different post.
To acquire, activate, and retain a customer, you need to establish value at every point of the user journey. (You get this. Presumably, you wouldn’t propose marriage to someone on a first date. So, if you “click” on that first date, follow up with more.)
So outline that journey. Identify potential touchpoints. Plan each step and create what you need to address questions/ information requests that the customer might have at each stage of the journey.
A basic content strategy map
If I were defining a content program, I’d start with my target segments and the outcome they seek Then map it to their level of awareness, and align the right content across relevant touchpoints and channels to engage the customer.
This can get overwhelming without planning. Here’s a basic sample of a content map I use for B2B clients. Easy to ramp up your content production if you use something like this as a starting point to organize your thinking as you customize your user journey and touchpoints and identify and address gaps.
Again, prioritize. Several team members will have a set of requests that need to either get added to your calendar or retired.
I use the jobs to be done framework for ensuring alignment with the desired customer outcomes. (A ton of information and editable versions available online)
And that’s it. Program plan complete. Let’s get this on the road now. :-)
Instrumenting at each stage is critical to growth. You need to understand what’s working and what’s not. A quick view of your dashboard every day is highly recommended. This is what facilitates rapid growth. When you find something that’s working, scale. And when you find something that’s not, on to the next hypothesis to test.
Getting a granular view of your customers’ interaction points and behavior has never been easier. If you have the right tools for the job. Again, more about measurement in a later post. I try and keep it simple. I must admit that I have in the past tried to over-engineer things in pursuit of what I need rather than just starting over. And that can have disastrously funny repercussions. Not recommended.
So if you’re targeting growth, stop looking for hacks. And start thinking. Why. What. How. And then build that out and test it. Fail fast. Recover and move on to the next test. Build out a list of tests that you can try. Involve the larger team in this effort. And always, prioritize for impact. That’s data no one can argue with.
If you need editable versions of any of my frameworks, comment below and I am happy to share.
