Growth startup (2/12): building a customer-centric growth process review

• If you’re following this series of growth marketing (Post #1 here), based on my learnings from CXL’s Growth Marketing minidegree, maybe you’re feeling just like me:

what’s next?!

Well, here we go. ;)

Getting ready to build a growth process

There is no secret here: growth isn’t magic. That’s why you’ll need to:

• build your foundation (pick your team, map out your customer journey, identify your channels etc.),
• Define your quarterly cycles (draw your road map, explore data, follow quarterly goals, compare results etc.).

Once you have your foundation, it’s time to put growth marketing into practice based on a model. And keep focused on two important things:

• Put yourself in your customer's shoes (*VERY IMPORTANT*).
• Walk through the customer journey.
• Think: what do they experience from top to the bottle?
• Thnk again: how the channels you have help them (and you, by the metrics they deliver) to move forward on the funnel?

Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics for startups is considered the most common framework for a growth model. It is based on:

A_cquisition

A_ctivation

R_etention

R_evenue

R_eferrals

Having your foundation and an AARRR model defined (or something similar) lead you to the next step: the ongoing (your quarterly cycles ;) ) with (A LOT OF) experimentation and learning.

"The worst way to come up with experiments are to focus on your growth metrics themselves, rather than solving customer pain points that then lead to increased performance."

John McBride, Senior Manager, B2B Growth at Calm

From brainstorm to the experimentation process

Ok, try to remember how many brainstorming meetings you had last quarter... ... ... A lot right? I risk saying that most of them weren’t brainstorming sessions at all. Instead, they were only wannabees, right? ;)

For growth marketing, a better approach would be:

• Think of concepts (optimize LPs., get better results from nurture flows, improve CTR results etc.).
• Divide them into small and specific hypotheses (try new colors for LPs, for example).
• Define the experimentation process for each one.
• Define the way to analyze data.
• Find out how to record learnings and implement changes. 
• Set up a timeframe to jump into the next hypothesis (change copies of LPs, for example).

This would be a brainstorming (and tactical) meeting more useful and better structured.

But how to prioritize? Good question…

If you have no idea, one alternative is to take advantage of the ICE (Impact, Confidence, and Ease of implementation) framework that helps prioritize using data:

• Impact: if this works, how big is the impact?
• Confidence: how likely is this to succeed?
• Ease of implementation: how many resources will this take?

A high number is good, and a low number, bad.

Deploying your quarterly cycles

All the actions from foundation to prioritization are necessary to construct an ideal framework for the quarterly cycles of your strategy. But they’re different from yearly cycles, mostly related to company-level objectives.

Quarterly cycles are meant to:

• Design experiments.
• Put them in practice.
• Analyze the results.
• Go as fast as possible.

Since you’ll begin to experiment, you better understand what this is all about:

• Define your goal and hypothesis (considering its parts: the independent and dependent variables and your assumptions).
• Implement it as fast as possible.
• Analyze.
• Bet on automation (not only email automation but also analytics automation, for example.

People first (and why to experiment)

It’s clear growth marketing depends on experimentation.

And there is no better reason than this: we can not assume what people want - as traditional marketing always did.

Today, digital empowers people by search and immediate results not only about one product, service or brand, but also about all the products, services and brands.

That’s why is so important for digital marketing strategists to understand the role of user-centric marketing. 

“Traditional marketing still is about broadcasting a message. But digital allows us as well to listen and respond to users and questions. We can adapt based on what we see them doing.”

Paul Boag, user Experience Consultant

User-centric marketing starts by understanding your audience. There’s no other way. But having personas is just the beginning and you’re probably a master on that. ;)

Have you ever added an empathy map to your research? It’s not about who your consumers are, but what are their questions, pains, goals etc.).

The real challenge is to keep yourself (and your strategy) up-to-date with your customers’ expectations, needs and objectives. And understand their journey to encourage them to take action.

And don’t start complaining that research and information costs a lot of money or time (ask your sellers about your consumers, try the support team, team up with your social media colleagues, try to understand what people are doing, seeing and consuming on your site or blog, find similar audiences and look what they do on social media etc.).

You can also run surveys, top task analysis or meet with your audience.

Find your best solutions, learn from them and use everything you have to draw good customer journey maps. Because all the research must be your oxygen, the vital element for you (and your strategies) to survive.

"Customer journey mapping is a great tool for visualizing what we know about our audience, and how they interact with your organization. It also helps to frame your campaigns, enabling you to see how they fit into the broader picture and support the journey."

Paul Boag, user Experience Consultant

Customers are changing as fast as digital marketing. And changing again. And again. The only way not to be left behind is to research and experiment.

Don't be a bad strategist

You know... As marketers, we have the terrible habit of moving from one campaign to the next without reflecting on the performance. Let's stop doing that. Let's try to learn more, to understand and to improve.

The recipe is simple:

• Use analytics tools.
• Try to use screen records or heat maps.
• Make A/B tests.
• Use your imagination. ;)

“So launching a campaign should really be seen as the midpoint of your project, not the end. Once a campaign is live, you will begin to gain valuable insights into how users behave in the real world.”

Paul Boag, user Experience Consultant

See you next Sunday. ;)

EXTRA MILE

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