The 1 thing you need to master if you want to start growing

The missing link in your growth strategy could be simpler than you think.

Back in 2021, my team and I created The Growth Loop, it was developed to help companies, startups, and founders understand how to grow their businesses.?

It’s a framework that consists of six parts: Plan, Setup, Launch, Analysis, Reporting, and Optimize. At Admiral Media, we use this framework daily to boost the growth of apps to millions of users across the globe.?

In this piece, I’ll be diving deeper into the ‘Planning’ phase with insights from another industry great as well (see who it is, later on).?

The various stages of the Growth Loop

The first half of the Growth Loop is all about strategic decision-making and planning for success: how to approach performance marketing, the tools, your team, and what you should look out for when launching your first campaigns.

The second half is about execution: how to improve your performance with creative optimization, how to find out what works and ultimately scale volume and expand across channels.?

Let’s zoom in on planning.

Kickstarting your growth: The first steps to success

Managing the growth of your business requires a lot of thought, experience, effort, and planning?

It's not just what you will do to acquire more users, but it's also about how sustainable that growth will be. We all know downloads are great - but if the monetary values are not following, what’s the long-term plan? Something that my team shared great insights about, on the latest edition of Let’s Talk Apps (episode 4).

Now, you might not be able to predict and plan for all the changes that will happen over time or what growth layer you should focus on at any given point.?

Every stage of your business is unique and requires a different approach to reach the mid-term or short-term goals.

How can you plan for growth?

Identifying business needs is one of the major parts of planning for growth. It's as simple as understanding your business, where you want it to be, and defining your vision.

If someone asked you what your business needs today to be successful tomorrow, how would you answer them??

As strange as it may sound, part of the growth loop is to identify your growth needs which align with your startup or business stage.

It’s an important part because it will shape the whole plan. An early-stage business is most likely interested in acquiring users to validate and develop their product, while a startup with a mature product will be more interested in reserving a market share or generating more demand

So, you need to understand your company’s needs to run a more successful and growing business but most importantly, to shape your growth plan. The trouble, though, is that sometimes those needs aren’t as obvious as they should be.

KPIs: Less is more.

The single greatest challenge marketers face is the right way to allocate money for maximum efficiency and to reach their KPIs.

The secret to getting more bang for your buck — and getting more out of every dollar — is budgeting. By allocating your money to where it produces the most revenue and cutting away from where it doesn't, you can maximize the potential return and reach or even exceed your KPIs.

Marketers have traditionally focused on optimizing their plans around annual or quarterly goals. But performance marketing is much faster. Analyzing your marketing performance from multiple channels over a shorter time period - 7 days or 14 days - allows you to better understand how efficient your allocation is.

Here you mainly look at the following metrics (mobile-focused):

●? Cost of a sale or acquisition

●? Conversion ratio

●? Cost per trial

●? Cost per subscription

●? Install to trial

●? Trial to subscribe

●? Cancellation rates

Especially in the beginning, it’s hard to know what a good KPI should look like, for instance, ‘What is a good cost per trial for my product and demographic’? The first place to look for answers in existing data for your product is from different countries or regions. Always keep seasonality, product changes, channels (organic vs paid), and other factors in mind that may influence the results.?

If there is not enough data around, there are benchmarks from ad networks and analytics companies for different market categories that can provide orientation until you find and refine your individual KPIs. We rely on internal benchmarks alongside industry benchmarks from partners such as Adjust, AppsFlyer, RevenueCat and SensorTower

Direct Insights from Thomas Petit

If you are active in the mobile community, you most likely have read a tweet or LinkedIn post from Thomas Petit ( aka. Thomas BCN). He’s a growth Advisor and one of the industry’s smartest minds. Here are some of his ideas when it comes to sharing best practices on KPIs:

“Different companies have varying business goals, which leads to seeing a variety of KPIs used. A few inputs I would give are:

-? Don't have too many KPIs: if you have more than 2-3, they're just intermediary metrics, not KPIs. Look for literature on “North Star Metric” and look at which is best for your company.

-? Ideally, different departments have different KPIs - for example, the Product team optimizing for month 2 retention, the Acquisition team optimizing for 6 months ROAS, the CRM team optimizing for re-engagement & incremental customers, Customer support on time to problem-solved or NPS, but eventually, thinking how those align towards the overall company KPI is critical.

-? On the acquisition side, the most common is to look primarily at media spending return on investment. For practical reasons, it's common to see UA teams use an “early proximity metric” (ex: CPA after 7 days) that correlates with a long-time goal (ex: LTV, CAC) to get an early feedback loop for campaign decisions. I would encourage UA teams to add a non-financial metric to their dashboard (such as retention/churn, NPS, etc.) and not only look at revenue metrics in isolation but layer it up with some usage/satisfaction criteria. “

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail

While making sure your team is moving fast to keep up with the pace of the industry i.e. AI stepping in, privacy changes and continuous innovation from competitors - having a plan and clear objective is the very first step you should take before you launch any further activities or hire new people to the team.