Past few months I have been having conversations with marketers how to grow their base quickly and ROI in short term - basically all around helping them to focus on growth. Majority of these marketers are from Traditional Marketing town. And I have noticed traditional marketers we are using same approach but expecting to achieve something more and something better. So I thought I would share what I have learned, where we are having misunderstanding of Growth marketing vs. Traditional marketing.
Let's start with what is Growth marketing? It is one of the marketing methodology that allows markets to run systematic process of experiment with different channels and strategies to validate potential ideas, and based on their result optimize their strategies over the time. Growth marketing often uses a number of digital marketing techniques, and primary goal is to deliver measurable growth.
To summarise what is about Growth marketing:
Making data-driven marketing decision
Using experimentation and testing to optimise your business growth
Finding right marketing tactics that boost revenue and overall company growth
Unlike Traditional Marketing relies on the same approach and strategies for reaching customers - we make strategy and start to execute it according to what we planned until we look at the numbers. The result might work today but over the time it will likely to diminish because today's customer behaviour changing rapidly but your strategy is not.
So how do we start with growth marketing? Here is 2 questions to you:
Which funnel to focus acquisition to retention and reactivation?
What is the success metrics in order to measure progress against your goal?
Awesome! Now you know what do you want and how do you want to measure it. One thing to remember in growth marketing, analysis and reading the report is most crucial part. As we are running the campaigns and executing tactics, we keep validating the performance and optimise it as we go. Something is working today might not work tomorrow which brings to my next point of experimenting with A/B Testing.
The core mentality of growth marketing is experimenting and running test. Growth marketers often set multiple small but potent experiments (also called hypothesis).
These are can be one week to a month, and runs to measure the results. The purpose is to understand which experiments bring the most conversions to the table.
Let's say your Landing Page is visited by thousands of people, wow that's cool!
But did they purchase your product or sign up for the service? No. Then it’s not cool because your growth metric is not visits but purchases. That this experiment didn't reach to the right customers, or your activation strategy wasn't strong enough. So the experiment has failed.
Many website and books mentioned about Pirate Funnel in Growth marketing. I personally think this is just same like any other marketing approach. Instead I like to use Customer Lifecycle Journey rather than Funnel. Prate Funnel has started with:
Awareness: make sure people know you exist. Acquisition: make leads leave their details. Activation: give users a first great user experience. Wow them! Retention: bring customers back with new features, strategies and keep them delighted. Revenue: find the right business model for selling, upselling, cross-selling and so on. Referral: encourage your loyal customers to share your services with others.
The reason I prefer Customer Journey over Funnel approach, today's competitive world customers have more choose and more power. Many product and services are popping up like mushrooms after a rain right now, and it gives alternative options to customers. But experience is unique thing and as a customer I never stopped looking for an Experience - experience to dine in new environment, experience to make my first purchase and experience to return as customer. And experience is all related to journey, where customer started to search and where customer engage with you through online or offline and when customer return to get service or product. Because experience was consistence and unique continuously.
So as a journey, I keep it as simple under 4 stages:
Acquisition
Conversion
Retention
Reactivation
Within this journey growth marketing allows growth marketers to discover which methods work the best and which one doesn't work. Willingness to experiment and incremental improvement over the period during experiment can be big result. Not stopping on testing AB it can goes contunuesly testing and even testing out micro testings like changing font, colour etc. The way of implementing and best practice is to identify the preparation, execution, analysis and revision / optimisation repeat it again.
To summarise it, growth marketing is practice of optimising and focusing on strategies that effectively increase your customer's lifetime value and boost your overall business growth. Stay tuned on more learning and tips. :)
Happy Marketing!