Growth Marketing Foundations: Review

For those of you that don't know, I recently received a scholarship to CXL Institute as a student in their growth marketing mini-degree program.

As someone who's job is focused around, growth, growth marketing, customer acquisition and demand generation, this is such an amazing opportunity

Over the next 12 weeks I will dive into exactly what we learned in each course and give you guys a high level overview of each class.

I hope you get some value out of my musings and if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to DM me here.

So in this week's set of classes we focused on some major key topics in Growth Marketing and what the main focus of the course will be moving forward.

We spoke specifically to:

1. Growth vs. Traditional Marketing
2. User Centric Marketing
3. Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels

One of the major keys around growth is the focus on your customer, their journey and how you can enhance the experience around that.

The way that you are able to do that is through constant experimentation, analysis and testing.

So let's dissect shall we?

Class #1. Growth vs. Traditional Marketing

This class started out by defining the difference between the mindset of a brand marketer and a growth marketer.

Our professor said that the major difference here is quite simply that growth is based around experimentation.

Brand marketing traditionally is focused on top of the funnel, so awareness and acquisition. They focus a lot of their energy on getting leads to sales, so that sales can close them and customer success can take it from there and retain them.

Growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel, so your job as a growth marketer is to drive growth across the business in any way that you can. 

So you focus on the top of funnel metrics, but you also help sales take the ball into the endzone and your focus is also on the retention of your customers as well.

While focus area is definitely important and is definitely a defining trait of growth marketing as a function, the process of growth is driven by experimentation and that is the main difference between brand marketing and growth marketing.

The way that you drive growth across all areas of the funnel is to constantly experiment with different programs, campaigns, product features, etc that increase conversion, create better customer experiences and generate data that you can then use to learn and improve so that you can continually optimize your funnel and grow the business regardless of kind of what your focus is.

The experimentation process focuses around choosing a goal, and then defining a series of experiments that you can use to achieve that goal and gather learnings along the way. 

In class we spoke directly to Instacart looking to increase retention rates on the app.

Traditional brand marketing would run an email campaign, not necessarily set up A/B testing and see if after the campaign more people stayed on the app. A single campaign for a single metric.

Growth marketers would come up with a series of five experiments that they want to run that would increase retention rates.

The way you do that is you come up with a hypothesis. So something like, "If people get reminded that Instacart is convenient they will use it more"

The email could look something like this: "Save yourself an hour this week. Use Instacart instead of going to the grocery store."

Set it up as an A/B test.

See if the people that receive the email actually buy more groceries or come back to the site more often than people that don't see the email. Then you learn does the email itself actually increase retention rate or purchase rate of customers versus not getting the email at all.

Then if you learn that sending emails is a good idea, and actually increases purchases, you can then move on to the next hypothesis, which could be what is the right message to send people? 

Growth marketing quite simply is creating experiments that allow you to pull certain levers in the business to allow the outcomes to drive your decisions across all stages of your business.

User Centric Marketing

In my next course, User Centric Marketing we spoke specifically to what user-centric marketing is all about and why we actually need it.

A main focus around this course was discussing how digital has changed the consumer relationship with businesses and the impact that has on the sales and marketing funnel.

We talked about why the current approach to running marketing campaigns is often ineffective in the light of the capability that digital tools now offer us.

And finally why a more user-centric approach to marketing has the potential to improve conversion and create happy customers who will recommend you to others

In 2020 your customers have the power, whether you know it or not.

Up to 70% of their buying process is finished by the time they even talk to one of your sales people so it's important that you understand them and drive your marketing to their needs, their goals and their aspirations.

The way you can do this is pretty simplistic, but a lot of hard work. Work that a lot of people aren't willing to do.

But what I can tell you is that if you simply do the work up front and continue to optimize, you will see a major increase in your sales, and customer satisfaction.

The first is truly understanding your clientele.

This can be done through surveying your current clients, talking to your sales team, or your customer success team.

The professor even went into putting surveys on your site and directly surveying people that are showing exit intent or have been on a check out page for a certain amount of time.

The key to user centric marketing is simple, meet your customers where they are, learn about their intricacies and speak to them at every step of the funnel.

Moving on from the Growth vs. Traditional marketing, this is done through A/B tests, constant evaluation and experimentation.

Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels

The final course of the week spoke specifically to which channels help you grow most.

This is obviously one of the most important pieces of the puzzle as you can have the best content, the greatest website and an amazing product, but unless you know how to distribute it, and distribute it on the right platforms, it won't matter.

In business, you can’t really rely on the luck of the draw. You have to have your finger on the pulse of your customers and what they're looking for and where they're looking for it.

The best way to do this is through utilizing the right channels, the most important of which are SEM, SEO, social and display ads, email marketing, and content marketing. A lot of these channels use popular platforms Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc.

It is rare for a company in an early stage to be great at all of these channels and it is also rare for a large company at a late stage or an enterprise software company to be doing growth marketing with all of the channels at top peak performance.

The key is not to spread yourself too thin, so figure out what works for you and double down.

In order to be successful, you have to understand where your customers are and what they're doing.

You don't want to waste time with a channel your customers don't use. For instance, my company, HALOS isn't going to be using TikTok to market to the CEO of a major health plan.

For us, we'll start with SEO and then move into a more LinkedIn focused approach and maybe some super directed Facebook paid ads.

The key though is to test the different channels and see which ones are working, and testing some things that you think might potentially work, so like testing a Facebook or IG ad.

The biggest thing to do when finding the channels and then doubling down on them is to look at your data and run focused experiments.

Just because everyone's advertising on Facebook, doesn't mean that that is the channel that's right for you and that you should be wasting your resources on that channel.

It's important though to give it time for a channel to succeed.

It may take a couple of months, even up to a year for that channel to fully develop. Channels must be given the opportunity to scale before you can say whether or not it can.

In class we used Facebook as an example. With Facebook, are the people that are visiting your site or coming to your page and downloading something and interacting the ones you're getting the ones that are most likely to buy? Are they the ones that are purchasing?

If you test for a few months and you are losing money or just breaking even, and the people clicking and interacting are not the people you're trying to reach, you may want to move on.

You've got to be an agile growth marketer and take a look at the data and make data driven decisions.

Conclusion

So first off, the first week was amazing! We focused on bring a growth mindset to your company. A mindset of experimentation, focus on the customer and figuring out what works for you.

If you haven't already and are someone focused on Revenue, Demand Generation, or Marketing at your company you need to look up CXL Institute and get into one of their courses or degree programs.

Next week we'll be talking specifically about Analytics, testing and experimenting on your site, your business and your processes.

Looking forward to sharing here!

Until next time

Ned