CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review | Week 1 |

GROWTH VERSUS TRADITIONAL MARKETING AND A BIT OF USER-CENTRIC MARKETING

Knowledge is an unending routine and for the next 12 weeks I shall be sharing my journey with you learning about growth marketing in CXL Institute. For every business valuable retention is key, understanding and mapping a customer's journey is key, growing a customer base by experimenting is key, understanding collated data about customers by analyzing and interpreting is key and most importantly a customer's journey does not stop at acquisition and retention is not permanent.

your job as a growth marketer is to focus on the entire business funnel while traditional marketing first instinct is acquisition. A growth marketer is already thinking multiple experimentation, optimization, and retention.

For a growth marketer, is it funny to say continuous growth is all they focus on while experimenting with different programs, campaigns etc that will increase conversion and retention? and also generate data that can be used to retarget and remarket.

Looking at new product development and the stages involved from idea generation down to market analysis and commercialization, is it right to assume we already know what these consumers needs? are their wants ever satisfied and if yes how do we continuously satisfy those wants and retain them.

How do you know what is working when you are given a target for retention? do you analyze results from experiments? are you innovative with the experiments you are running? does each experiment target a certain segment of audience or it targets all audiences? One thing you would notice in this article is how I continuously repeat experimentation is the guiding principle of growth marketing, as a growth marketer it is our core and is instrumental in achieving results.

How do you measure success when you have been giving a target for conversion, do you just kick off with one idea and hope it works or several ideas and figure out which of these ideas worked and at what point did it work and what segment of your audience were receptive.

Testing multiple strategies innovatively and creatively gives you an insight into how a customer journey is started and retained and as a growth marketer we are all about the whole journey.

When people hear about growth hacking, they think it’s one permanent solution that is going to catapult their business from point A to point T well that is not the case, we can all agree that the word "Growth" itself is a process and you do not need just one hack to succeed you need multiple hacks. This means you are forever learning how to better grow and understand your business, make those conversions, and retain customers.

If you were to rank yourself over 10, what would you say your level of expertise is in data analysis, strategic management, or analytics. It is a blessing to be able to rate yourself in all these and yet it is not a curse to be very good in one of these, as a growth marketer you need to be able to churn out ideas that will lead to experimentation and collation of data from those experiments and then analyze that data hence you need to be a team player, know where your strengths lie and delegate to the team where their strengths lie.

How good are you at selling? do you have any background in sales? have you ever sold anything and succeeded at it, for me this is one of the steps in becoming a growth marketer. Understanding the mindset and behavior of customers is one of the greatest sales hacks. I mentioned what it takes to be a successful growth marketer, the necessary professional skills needed but this will only get you so far. How hungry are you when it comes to achieving quality results, if you applied for a growth marketing job today and you were called for the interview are you going to rely on past experiences or are you going to unlearn to relearn? these are some of the things that make you successful as a growth marketer.

Do not be ashamed to ask for help or advice in areas you lack a certain level of expertise, networking is very important and constant learning either online or online {theory and practical} is key to attaining growth in your career as a growth marketer.

Be smart in productivity, strive to achieve results, valuable results that will make you stand out in your organization. Ask for past data to learn from ask colleagues their opinions and do not forget everyone's input is important.

First step in the experimentation process is designing your experiment, you start with your objectives, so what is your goal? if your objective is getting lead generation for a particular set of audience, your experiment should be what channels do you want to reach customers on, how receptive were they on the different channels used to reach them for their information, then you also want to experiment on the context of the message sent alongside the request for leads, you want to experiment on the creative and find out which did they engage more with. These are important data collection which will help in deciding how where and when to get customers to submit the information needed.

There is this saying that whatever works for Mr. A might not work for Mr. B, let us emphasize on the "Might" the reason we read books and copy codes is to learn from what others have done and sometimes copy it exactly the way it was done, other times we become innovative and decide to tweak the process and discover something entire new and sometimes better.

Building a growth process has to do with understanding your long-term goals and mapping out your customer journey, repeatedly I have mentioned growth marketing is about experimenting with multiple ideas and collating data from those ideas. Building a growth model has to do with what you're trying to achieve at the end of the day, revenue or user growth, the most common framework for a growth model is generally Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics for startups, which is the AARRR framework. So, you have got acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referrals.

At the start of each year companies sit down to discuss yearly goals and how they can be achieved quarterly, from experiments we get projections which allows us to see far enough into the future. This might not be the case for startups where most of their goals are about generating revenues, I once worked at a firm where their goals changed every week even the marketing team could not keep up with the change because it did not align with the objectives that have been set in motion and it really messed with the experiments being carried out for customer acquisition.

A lot of people want results immediately they try the first experiment, if you are looking at long time results getting it right with the first experiment will fizzle out over time but having a truckload of useful valuable data accumulated over time will help in setting goals into motion and achieving those objectives. Having Identified what your quarterly goals are, how are you splitting it between the team? what channels are they using to achieve those goals are required resources and tools available.

Is there an effective way to brainstorm? when two or more people are gathered in a room churning out ideas would you say that is an effective way to brainstorm? do you brainstorm on one topic for a couple of minutes and then move onto the next one? If you have 5 things to brainstorm on, you do not have to finish all on the same day, take them one after the other and effectively dissect that one topic until you have exhausted all your ideas on it before moving on to another.

Brainstorming does not have to be original ideas, you can take a cue from what other companies are doing and apply it to yours, studying a competitor is one way to brainstorm for ideas, bring in professionals from other teams or companies as well to lend their expertise these might be people who you admire their works.

For prioritization essentially what you want to do here is come up with some sort of concept on your predicted return on investment, which of the experiments you are about to run is more important to you, are you concerned about audience size or audience commitment. Do you want to adapt what other companies are doing, if it has been carefully observed to be giving them success by all means please prioritize this experiment and achieve results. Prioritize your efforts in a way where you can time your return on investments {ROI}

There are four steps in the In-quarter execution process. The first is designing your experiment, then you ship your experiment, you analyze the results and then if it works, you automate it and you scale it and If it does not work, you take those learnings to inform your next task. This is like an open book on what growth marketing is about, there needs to be a process, a model, a plan, and an execution. Kindly note that having all the aforementioned does not guarantee success at the first try it basically means you are building your hypothesis and experimenting on it.

Meeting physically or in this case virtually with the users of your product is very important, if we are in the service business, I cannot emphasize how much important it is and if you are a small-scale retail business customer feedback is key and meeting with them gives them a sense of importance. Data about these people is different, meeting them in person is very different, data will give you insights on behavior, meeting them in person gives you an understanding of their behavior.

During elections politicians go about trying to meet people, this always has an impact on the election versus if this politician does not even come at all, meeting your customers does not have to be every time it can be done quarterly to physically gauge their satisfaction and here their input.