4 Counter Intuitive Tasks for Growth Marketers That Will Scare the Crap Out of Your Competitors and Drive Massive Growth

Let’s face it, in the world of digital marketing there are tools that promise to help you with every little problem you could think of. Some deliver on their promise straight out of the box. But like most things in life, it all comes down to the application of the tool and how well versed the user is. Bringing me to the next point. In the world of Digital, if you are worried about what the competition is doing and using a spy tool… you most likely looking in the wrong direction. The caveat here is unless you can undeniably confirm their growth team or department is in existence, you probably do not have anything to worry about.

This week in the CXL Insititues Growth Marketing Minidegree is about channels and growth experiments. The real eye opener here is that most growth strategies will look very similar within a lot of organization's. The battle for attention continues though, through the channels being used to drive traffic, and are one of the bigger areas of growth. Next to the channel and heaps of competition that are fighting for a slice of the customers attention. You need to focus on your growth experiments – how and what kind of research needs to be done, how to run A/B tests, and how to interpret the results. What to do if you’re a low traffic site and want to run tests… The strategy behind this module is simple…stop wasting time and money, focus on 6 key areas instead to hardcode experimentation into your growth process while increasing your skill sets as you go.

My biggest golden nugget of this week came from Peep Laja’s growth marketing workshop on research and testing where is explains where the best place to start is. It went like this. A man comes to a hospital. “I’m sick,” he says. “We’ll fix you right up”, says the Doctor – and leads him to an operating room where he performs immediate surgery. The man is cured! Now that never happens. You need to diagnose the patient before you know how to treat him or her. Sounds plain obvious, doesn’t it? Not so in the conversion world! Experts applying the band aid to bullet wound without removing the bullet, how well is that really going to work? Laja goes on to add insights on the do’s and don’ts of testing and stresses the that 4 counter intuitive tasks that will help you achieve massive growth are:

• Don’t test anything and everything, for the sake of testing. Work out how to prioritise.
• Don’t bother with all of the ‘advice’ and checklists you find online — “the bulk of this stuff is written by bloggers and SEOs for the sake of traffic. Do your own research to find problems, then develop your hypothesis”.
• Don’t expect that copying the big guns like Amazon will generate instant, amazing results – “Again, focus on developing a systematic approach to testing”. Using a tool to ‘spy’ on the competition, may give you insight, but is more of a trap than anything else.. 
• Don’t copy your competitors — “they don’t know what they’re doing either. Prioritise instant fixes, in areas where you know the site is leaking money.” Understand that what they are doing, and what you are doing in terms of messaging, approach, and channels being used will vary and not really worth the time and effort.

Laja introduces you to the ResearchXL framework, which involves performing a technical analysis to find what’s broken, performing a heuristic analysis to look for relevancy and friction, checking digital analytics, measuring everything, setting up mouse tracking and form analytics, and then using qualitative surveys. It’s so obvious and so simple, but so effective, that you’ll wish you thought of it yourself.

Conversion research

Laja then builds on the ResearchXL framework, and much like the surgeon example he supplied, the framework is a diagnosis with a 6-step analysis for the kind of data that is needed. 

Step 1 is the Heuristic Analysis and a page-by-page walkthrough of the site for desktop and smart devices. 

Here you are looking at clarity of the message, what is causing friction with the buyer or creating anxiety and finally are there any distractions stopping the buyer from making the commitment.

Step 2 is Technical Analysis

Ensuring the Cross browser and devices are in order. Laja also indicates that your speed analysis should be checked out, as they have an impact, but not as much as what most blog posts tend to make out though.

Step 3 is Digital Analytics

With “90% of analytics configurations being broken” Laja walks you through drop off points, data correlations and the need to fix measurements and verify the data.

Step 4 is Qualitative research

The only 2 Surveys recommend here are on-site polls and follow-up surveys. Once the data is received plan, hypothesize, prioritize, and ultimately test.

Step 5 is a walk through on User Testing.

What is key here is if cannot recruit your ideal target audience…use anybody! Anyone is absolutely better than no one.

The final step is Mouse Tracking.

Peep carries out an excellent explanation as to why mouse tracking and not heat maps or other tools that tend to supply you with a static view.

Once you have carried out the analysis

You now have a list if issues and you need to work out which is a priority. Using a 5x5 category ranking system you are able to prioritize which is most crucial and needs to be executed as fast as possible and basing your decisions for these on 2 criteria only. The prioritization and how Laja has framed this adds massive clarity.

Finally, the only three metrics you should be paying attention to in order to measure the effectiveness of a testing program.

Your testing velocity – after all the faster you test, the more you learn and the faster you grow.

The percentage of tests that provide a win and of course impact per successful experiment.