Agile Growth Marketing The way to get your business through 2020s goals

First weeks of 2020 are over, new years resolutions start to kick in, and, with these, yearly goals, both personal and professional.

If, at the beginning of the new year, you’re still asking yourself about how to deliver towards business goals, AGM methodology might be your answer.

What is Agile Growth Marketing?

AGM is a methodology based on agile execution of marketing experiments, focused on validating specific business drivers aligned towards a single goal. In AGM it’s essential to specify goals as close as possible to key growth metrics, directly related to what brings business to your company. 

So, you start with a goal. The goals are tangible, numerical results directly related to business growth to be achieved within a certain time frame. They should be specific, measurable, realistic and limited in time. It is essential for a goal to be oriented on what makes your business a success.

If you are an e-commerce, your goal is transactions coming from product purchase. If you sell sales SaaS, your goal is to both to retain and up-sell to existing clients as well as gain new ones… you get the idea. A goal should always be oriented to actual business value, which does not necessarily need to be an economic one (however, in my experience, the main one usually should be). No vanity metrics, no traffic, likes or follower count, unless it’s a proven key to your business’ growth (if that’s your example, be very careful and try implement some quality analysis of your metrics or implement additional, conditional ones, that translate to conversions).

You can set an unlimited amount of goals, however, you should always be focused on the main one, the key to business growth. Facebook started to hit it hard when they focused solely on DAUs (Daily Active Users) above all other metrics. Why? Because the frequency of use is one of the cores to generate habit, and it played a big role in making the platform addictive, therefore generating more users through referrals, more ad revenue and exponential growth. Once you have it clear what’s the key to make growth happen, you focus solely and exclusively on improving this metrics, which Sean Ellis, who coined the term “Growth Hacking”, called “North Star Metric”. 

But.. can we really close it all in one metric? We could try, the simpler, the better, however, it’s not always possible to capture the whole picture in a single KPI, especially if we don’t fully understand the problems that block our funnel. Is it the beginning of customer journey? Are we attracting wrong type of target? Or maybe we know how to generate interest, but fail completely on a conversion part, because even though we do generate interest, we lack to transmit the sensation of urgency? Experiment through different goals along your funnel, and you will find the answer.

So, how do I set up goals?

Depends on your business. For example, for a marketing SaaS, I set up three goals: contracts closed (divided into startup and enterprise), leads generated and partners acquired. All three are directly related to growth, however, the main focus is on contracts generated.

After setting up a goal, the team adds drivers, which are hypothetical ways to achieve the goal, that should be tested through experiments. Think of drivers like hypothesis for what will bring the most results to your business: will it be Facebook Ads? Maybe influencer marketing? Will events be the key to your success? Or are you going to go for unconventional PR, guerrilla tactics? It could be, that approaching specific target within your persona with certain messaging provides you expected results. The sky's the limit here, you will be testing each and every one of them through set of experiments till you reach conclusions. 

Experiment, experiment, experiment

Experiments are the secret sauce of AGM. They should be goal-oriented, restrained in terms of time spent on each and, above all, executed in the least possible time to gain as many learnings as possible. An experiment can be a Facebook ad focused on specific buyer persona with a clearly defined message, a Meetup talk, leaving flyers in conference parking lot… any growth-oriented action from which a specific result is expected. There is direct correlation between different experiments executed that focus on improving core growth metrics and the growth speed: the more we experiment, the better.

Sprint-based methodology

Agile Growth Marketing is a methodology based on sprints: specific, time-constrained periods in which the team needs to learn through experiments setup and execution. Sprint usually lasts from 1 to 3 weeks and each team member has from 1 to 5 experiments to design, execute and analyse, each experiment being a part of specific driver validation that brings us closer towards the goal to achieve. Again, the more experiments the team is able to execute, the faster the results. It is ideal to have between 1 and 4 experiments executed per week, and it is essential to apply learnings from each and every one of them.

The more we learn, the faster we’ll grow.

*****

I’ve been working with AGM methodology for many years now, and as long as it’s taken seriously, it works extremely well. For that to happen, it’s crucial to align all company, from top executives, through middle management, to the rest of the team that makes growth possible. Now, at Kudzu, we designed an Agile Growth Marketing tool made specifically to track Growth Hacking activities throughout the team, along with a training program to make it easier to adopt its methodology. If you’re interested in knowing more, PM me or get in touch through [email protected]