Optimizing your business growth process - Review

As a digital growth marketer, with considerable experience of growing a digital agency, from a one-manned desk into a 20-something staffed operation, the subject matter covered in this article is one I can identify amongst several.

The beginning of every business, whether an agency on a B2B/B2C company requires a dedicated effort at building progress that are geared towards growing the businesses to a higher level.

For most of today's businesses, that mantle falls on the shoulders of the growth team, that comes between the product and marketing teams. Normally, this will involve the efforts of a single person, most notably, the founder or one of co-founders.

In this review of my scholarship pursuits at CXL Institute, my focus will be on sharing my knowledge and understanding of the growth process and how to fine-tune it to achieve incremental business KPI growth.

So, whether as a one-man team or a team of several, it is imperative that a growth process, at least, on a certain scale, begins.

Tuning your growth machine

Once one has established their growth process and in execution mode, the next steps is in tuning your growth machine, aimed at getting better at cycling through the growth process. In this regard, there are two (2) main ways of going about it, thus:

1. Choosing improved user experiences to generate more growth, through continuous experimentation.
2. Increasing the pace of the experimentation, thereby shortening the time between ideation, execution and analysis.

With one (1) above, it is about what one has learned from engaging with users, and the thing about experiments is that one learns even in failure. Therefore the trick is to focus on being better at shipping off the right experiments, to be able to derive the maximum benefits from these experiments.

Just because speed in experimentation has been identified as key to achieving exponential growth, doesn't mean that one has to engage in scatter-gun experimentation.

To be able to achieve efficiency with two (2), also above, one needs to front-load the experimentation campaign to be able to achieve the speed required for growth. What that means is that, everything needed to embark on experimentation have to be made ready; ideally a quarterly experimentation calendar that holds all the elements requires to roll out quick experimentation.

So, for instance, one can have a calendar that stipulates 5 times a month experiments. That is a best practice for improving the process.

To be able to run this process successfully and to achieve optimum results, one needs to build the growth process on three (3) major pillars: PEOPLE, TRAINING and TOOLING.

People

Let's take people, first. This involves streamlining team cohesion, which is very important, in ensuring that whatever calendar has been developed with be driven by the right permutation of skillset, to achieve growth. It also helps to bring the relevant team members on to the same page. Typically, a growth marketer may require a copywriter or a designer to help with developing anything from a landing page, to a piece of widget.

In the case where these required team members are not on the same page with the growth marketer, but are required to come on board, as and when a projects needs to be deployed, it could cause friction and retard the process to successfully pivot conversion rates. It is best practice for all relevant units of the growth process to be ready and understanding of what's required of them.

Training

Acquiring the right skills to bring on board, is imperative for every member of the growth team. The success or otherwise of elements of the growth process hinge greatly on the collective sum or the synergy of team members' skill set.

Whether in HTML coding for email marketing or the ability to set up automated processes, a growth team with strong skills in the required areas to achieve the objective set, is imperative to successful projects.

To be successful, as growth practitioner, one has to get team members up to speed on the latest trends and technologies, and that requires the right training programmes to empower them. As the leader of them team, it is one's responsibility to look out for these opportunities and prod team members to sign up for such career enhancing endeavours. Of course, this also requires that leadership is prepared to allot time for training, so that the right learning environment is created for impactful learning.

Tooling

To be able to realize growth opportunities, the growth team has to be equipped with the right tools that ensures speed to deployment. From experience, there are so many tools out there, that are not necessarily a good fit for one's team either due to inadequate skill set amongst team members, or non-relevance to the project or campaign objective.

For a tool to bring value, the team should be able to harness its power to achieve set objectives, otherwise growth leaders are advised not to invest in them, because not only do they cause financial loss, but also it affects the morale of the team.

So no matter the level or quality of training given to the team, if the right tools are not chosen, it leads to inefficiency.

Analyzing experiments to scale

A key skill required to achieve exponential growth is how to analyze. It is time-consuming, especially when one wants to dig deeper to bring out insightful nuggets from the data that has been mined. This requires customer analysis and normally a great skill like data science is a great addition to the team's skill set.

A great way to be able to use analytics to impact the growth efforts of the team is to use tools that enable one's team to create a dashboard, based on the automation of the analysis process. Therefore, investing in automating tools allows for faster experimentation process, for instance. This allows for even non-tech team members to be able to access insights to help them make decisions within their remits. Automated analysis therefore helps to achieve cross-functional synergy seamlessly.

Cross-functionality

Growth teams are in a great position to lead the charge, when it comes to analytical and data-driven pursuits. They are in the best position to create opportunities that leverage these efforts and make them accessible to teams members across the various verticals. As a growth marketer, one is responsible for pushing the envelope, but the ability to bring members from other units on board, to appreciate data and insights, helps to increase synergy.

The more team members acquire the growth mindset, the more leverage one gets, to champion growth activities that deliver on key metrics.

Acquiring and engaging customers

Typically, growth teams don't start as growth teams, if you get my drift. You will find a common thread running through most growth team developments, where it starts with one generalist, who starts by focusing on acquiring as many users or customers as possible, while also trying to hack increased engagement levels. This will normally be a general manager, who has cross-functional expertise to be able to wear many hats, but note that, this will suffice at the start-up phase.

Ideally, one will need to eventually add a full-stack growth marketer, with skills and experience across all the digital marketing disciplines, in the shortest possible time to help pivot the company's growth.

Then, as time goes on, the team will need to grow into bringing on board, specialized team skills like SEO, CRO and other acquisition talent that will focus on acquiring customers and expanding the base.

The skills needed to drive engagement will be needed, at this stage, because it is when one needs to invest in the relevant channels, depending of one's business needs. This could mean getting someone with skills in pay-per-click (PPC), for a platform like Google Adwords, programmatic networks like WebEngage, Eskimi or even Facebook's business manager.

At this point, one is looking at a rapidly scaling operation requiring a larger, and more diverse team.

Managing growth teams as your business scales

I'm truly thankful for this opportunity at CXL Institute, that has enabled me to put my experience in this area of managing a growing company into a clearer perspective.

Having said that, what I will conclude with, touches on the things to be mindful of, is when the business scales beyond the capability of the generalist, who started, and the acquisition and engagement practitioners who have joined subsequently.

As the business evolves into a bigger organization, growth teams tend to butt heads with marketing and product teams, as they are cross-functional, and are normally caught in the middle of these two (2) teams.

To avoid friction that slows efficiency, one needs to ensure clear ownership, and allow each team to focus on delivering on their remit, leveraging their respective competitive edge along these lines:

• Growth - which moves quickly, running constant experiments to find growth opportunities rapidly. Here, the focus should be on key growth metrics
• Marketing - focuses on awareness creation, through branding, messaging, PR and all the activities that helps the business to increase visibility.
• Product - this team is primarily responsible for fine-tuning the product, by iterating it to make it better for consumers

Ultimately, it's imperative that alignment is achieved at the executive level, so that these three arms of the growth team can leverage their respective strengths to create the right level of synergy to pivot growth for the business.