GROWTH MARKETING FOUNDATIONS

To start with, we need to learn the difference between Growth Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing.

Traditional Marketing efforts aim to tap into the top of the funnel, Growth Marketing caters to the full marketing funnel and uses experimentation as its prime tool. Growth Marketing builds upon the Lean Startup Methodology which was introduced by Eric Reis in his revolutionary book called “The Lean Startup”.

It relies on shortening the learning curve of companies by rapid prototyping and experimentation and then using these learnings to scale what works and discard what doesn’t work.

Whereas Traditional Marketing or Brand Marketing comes up with a single campaign to reach a goal, growth marketing provides multiple routes to reach success while reducing the chance of failure. Every growth marketing experiment adds to the company’s knowledge base overtime and allows it to run leaner and work faster.

According to the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Mini degree program,

Growth marketing is different from traditional marketing as experimentation is the defining trait of growth.

Decide a goal -> define a few experiments to test which is the best growth strategy.

3 layers of experimentation:

• which strategy works best
• What is the best possible way of doing this strategy
• What is the best possible way of doing this strategy for every individual customer (personalisation, segmentation is the most powerful layer)

Half of the money will get wasted in running ads, but experimentation lets you learn which part and now you can fix and get better

A successful growth marketer has the following:

• Channel level expertise
• Analytics expertise
• Strategic thinking & project management

How to become a growth marketer (initiation)?

• Learn SQL
• Learn basic channels like email marketing, automation
• Understanding of growth models & frameworks best companies have used. (growthhackers.com)

Personal traits when interviewing growth marketer: Personal growth & constantly improving. Hungry to try new things, learn and get better

How to grow your career in growth marketing:

• Double down on one of the three skill sets and create expertise in that
• Figure out that one things in the startup which most people are not focussed at and start working on that

Growth Marketing in Action

To give you a specific example of what growth marketing really is, consider the following example given in the CXL course called Growth Marketing foundations: suppose an e-commerce website wants to improve its Month-on-Month (MoM) retention rate. In the traditional marketing world, we will just think about running an email campaign and hope that we get that lift in retention which we are hoping for. What you’re not learning, or measuring is what is the best message or communication to be sent over this email.

Consequently, growth marketers will add three layers of depth to this experiment of increasing MoM retention rate.

1. First, they will figure out if sending email is the best way to improve this metric or are there other ways

2. Then if they conclude that email is indeed the best way to improve it then what does that email need to contain, what is that right offer, right message or right information that will ensure maximum success?

3. Finally, a growth marketer will assess what works for customer A vs customer B and how are they different.

How to build a growth process in your team or company?

GROWTH PROCESS

High- Level Growth Process:

• Defining your growth model -> mapping customer journey -> identifying all growth channels
• Analyze data -> build experiments -> automate & scale

Most common growth framework: Dave Mc Clure’s Pirate Metrics for Startups:

AARRR: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referrals

The worst way to come up with experiments is to focus on your growth metrics themselves, rather than solving customer pain points that then lead to increased performance.

So if you want to increase activation rate, or first-time purchases on your website, think about how you can reduce barriers for the customer and make their experience better so that in the end they make that purchase.

GOLDEN PATH: Ideal path of customer journey

Defining Growth Model

-> To define your growth model at the highest level, is to define all the metrics from the above stages of your funnel required for your growth objective / business goal.

Think about all use cases, different user touch points in user journey based on:

• User Persona
• How much awareness user has
• How much they have engaged with the brand
• What actions they have taken up in the past

Quarterly Growth Planning: analyse data & set OKR, Objectives & Key Results (O: increase monthly active users, KR: achieve 500k monthly active users from 400k)

Key engagement metric: Sign up to activation rate

Identifying quarterly goals:

set up 2–3 pods or growth teams focussed on different objectives like

• acquisition: SEO, SEM, Paid;
• activation & retention: push, email, in-app
• conversion

Sequence of growth planning:

• Choose one metric and focus on it for a short period of time
• see inputs which affect the metric
• Decide on growth channels
• Roadmap (optimise existing process / product feature / experience or look for totally new growth unlock)