Skills for 2020: Growth Marketing
Kudakwashe Mazhetese
On a mission to ignite the next movement of people across the continent for personal and economic growth. Imagine 1.5 Billion people traveling for Trade or to reconnect with the continent & even relocate.
Growth is a system, not a bag of tricks
Definitely, if you are trying to grow a business you have seen the term ‘Growth Hacking’ in your results.
Don’t worry! This is not actual hacking, but rather using a data-driven marketing method to optimize demand generation which we call Growth marketing.
So what is Growth Marketing?
New Breed defines Growth Marketing to be the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that.
But then Growth Marketing is not a bag of tricks. Its involves the scientific method to design and carry out these experiments. According to Andrew Chen, it is a full model and system with linked parts and loops that align with your business.
Unlike traditional marketing that focuses on the top of the funnel often with activities that drive short-term wins, Growth Marketing is a full-funnel process not about just building something cool, but actually thinking how one batch of users end up inviting the next batch of users and optimizing that entire loop with tactics. That is where the ‘Hacking’ occurs:
- Determining areas to test and improve upon
- Developing and designing experiments to optimize the identified processes
- Conducting experiments to test hypothesized improvements
- Analyzing results and conducting further experimentation as needed
Growth Marketers put in the hard work to build a framework that is situationally right for your product. One of the best methods I have seen is the Pirate Funnel, which is a framework to cut a company in pieces and show you where to focus your attention. The funnel is developed by Dave McClure and called the Pirate Funnel because the first letters spell out AAARRR for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue.
If you read the book Lean Analytics by Alistar Croll you will understand the best metrics to measure with each step of the funnel in whichever business model you are working on. It guides you to see what Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue means with different business models from E-commerce to SAAS, Free Mobile Apps, Media Site, User Generated Content, and Two-Sided Marketplaces.
To be a great Growth Marketer there are certain truths you have to accept prescribed by CoversionXL:
- Your opinion doesn’t matter. You are not your customer, and you have lots of different kinds of customers. So let the data talk for itself, let the highest-ranked idea be tested, let everyone’s idea be tested.
- You don’t know what will work. If we did, we’d all be billionaires. Unfortunately, magic crystal balls don’t exist. That’s why testing and experimentation is a big part of growth marketing.
- There are no magic templates for higher conversions. There’s no universally best product page layout, no “best home page design” layout. There are no things that always work. Stop thinking in tactics, and start thinking in processes. As the saying goes, if you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
So Growth Marketers turn those unsupported and baseless opinions into data-informed, educated hypotheses.
To learn the best practices and process we have tested and implemented follow the link below to our list of resources or book for a Helplink Africa Growth Marketing Training this year-end!