Bringing A Growth Marketing Mindset To Your Business

You’ve probably heard of the term growth hacking – it’s one of the most overused and misused buzzwords in the marketing industry today. So, I believe it’s about time to define what does growth hacking actually means, and what practices marketing experts employ for rapidly scaling our clients’ businesses. 

First, let’s clarify what growth marketing isn’t – it isn’t a trick or silver bullet, and the listicles that you find online with ‘hacks to try’ aren’t inspired. Instead growth hacking is a strategic, data-driven process, similar to bootstrapping, which refers to using existing resources to get out of a difficult situation. Both terms come from the start-up world, due to the lack of resources that other companies have which forces them to be more creative in what they do. Out of this creativity comes growth hacking. 

Growth hacking is the term given to a fast-paced experimentation process intended to result in huge growth. Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and many other household name start-ups have used this rapid iteration process to drive huge growth in a short time. It isn’t just startups that can benefit from this process – almost any business that acquires customers through digital marketing efforts can benefit. 

Traditional Marketers vs Growth Marketers: What’s the Difference?

Traditional marketers have a wide focus that includes budget, conversions and more. Digital marketers tend to focus on name recognition and driving traffic to their website. Growth marketing, on the other hand, centers around the entire sales funnel, integrating marketing, sales, customer success, and support for a holistic approach to business growth. It’s a data-driven method optimizing various aspects through continuous testing across marketing channels, embodying what we call a “growth mindset.”

As a growth marketer my goal is to help you identify new opportunities that will help build and engage your organization’s audience. This process involves finding innovative ways to communicate, whether through exploring new marketing channels or testing different content strategies. If you’re at the point where scaling your company is your main goal or you’re seeing high growth and need to tweak your marketing efforts to get more ROI, consider implementing some growth marketing experiments to improve your funnel metrics.

Implementing A Growth Marketing Process

Successful growth marketers possess the “spirit of self-improvement” around the tools and tactics that drive their strategy, with a positive attitude and relentless commitment to driving better performance.

With that mindset, they can be focused on creating and refining a systematic, scalable, repeatable growth process. Growth marketers typically focus their efforts on the six “pirate” metric areas: 

• awareness, 
• acquisition, 
• activation, 
• revenue,
• retention, and 
• referral 

(AAARRR!) 

So, what exactly goes into each step of the growth hacking process? 

The growth hacking process can be condensed into six steps: 

1. capturing baseline metrics
2. identifying weak areas 
3. designing and implementing experiments
4. collecting data
5. analyzing results
6. sharing insights

Let’s dive into it below:

Step 1: Capture Baseline KPIs

Before diving into growth marketing experiments, it’s essential to have a reporting system that tracks the impact of changes. A solid analytics setup is crucial, and collecting baseline data takes time. Once you have this data, you can pinpoint areas of strength and areas that need improvement.

Utilize tracking tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, or Hotjar for in-depth data capture. Nowadays it is possible to measure everything we want to know within a website or app: scroll depth, mouse movements, time on a website, click-through-rates, etc. A growth hacker continuously monitors the ROI of their experiments and channels. That way you can always see your biggest opportunities and dangers, and you know where you can get the most profit.

Step 2: Identify Optimization Areas

How does your pirate funnel (AAARRR!) currently perform? Focus on the entire funnel across the customer journey in order to attract high-quality customers. Without a proper focus on engagement, you are unlikely to reap the rewards of profitable customer lifetime value (LTV).

Product and system level growth opportunities have historically been off limits to marketers, but are now big growth levers thanks to the rise of faster feedback loops, large online audiences and platforms, and new cross-functional teams that include marketing, engineering and product working together to unlock new ways for products to grow. The product experience often holds the biggest opportunities for growth such as customer retention, referrals, and user experience.

Step 3: Design an Experiment

Once you’ve identified your key metrics that need improvement, you need to come up with ways to make that improvement. This could be a small change such as rewriting a headline, or a major change such as re-writing the entire landing page.  

Use the SMART goal framework for a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely hypothesis to test.

Additionally, try to test one thing at a time. The more variables you add, the more difficult it is to conclusively identify the reason for the results you’re seeing. If you’re already running one experiment in an area, wait until it’s over before starting additional tests.

Design experiments that influence your hypothesis and include a baseline for comparison. For example, if you’re optimizing an existing element or page, you can A/B test the new version against the old version to see which performs better. 

One of the most important wisdoms that a growth hacker must have is the realization that nobody knows what will work and what will fail. This applies to startup ideas, channels and conversion optimization. That’s why you’ll have to experiment. By trying a channel / tactic in a small experiment, you can avoid losing a lot of time or money. If during an experiment it appears that it doesn’t work, then you do not have to invest in it. If it does, you can continue exploring. In this way, a growth hacker ensures a higher ROI (“Return on Investment”) by spending time on the most effective channels. 

Step 4: Collect Data

Run your experiment for a designated timeframe or until your results have statistical significance. The result of an experiment is said to have statistical significance if it can be mathematically proven that a certain statistic is reliable and likely not caused by chance.

Part of proving statistical significance is ensuring that you have enough data to make a real comparison between the baseline and the experiment data. Be patient and wait for the data to collect.

Step 5: Analyze Your Results

When your experiment is over, compare your results to your initial hypothesis. You can also ask:

• Did your experiments perform the way you expected? How did they impact your key metrics?
• Was the experiment’s execution flawless? Where did you fall short? Where did you excel? How can you do better next time?
• If your experiment validated your hypothesis, how can you use your findings to improve your company’s processes even further?

An issue to note – make you compare your experiment’s data to a reasonable and equivalent baseline timeframe. For example, don’t compare January ecommerce data to December ecommerce data. The cultural shopping trends associated with the end of the year vs the beginning of the year likely has a larger effect on your data than any experiment. Instead, in this example it is recommended to compare the year-over-year January ecommerce data. 

On top of that, you should look at trends in the industry during the duration of your experiment. If everyone in your field saw the same change, those results were probably caused by other factors and not your experiment. 

Step 6: Share What You Learned and Iterate For Your Next Test 

Don’t keep your results siloed across different business departments! Instead, creativity and growth requires an open mindset. Understanding how to be creative and have an eye for seeking out new opportunities is what will set you apart from your competitors. 

If the experiment improves performance, restart the process from step 1 for the next improvement area. If not, revisit step 2 and explore different ways to impact key performance indicators (KPIs) or other metrics for overall improvement. 

Key Principles of Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is like a strategic, data-driven toolbox for making a specific part of your business perform better. Some people call it “growth hacking,” and it’s trendy because it has helped lots of companies fine-tune their strategies.  

This involves trying out new ideas, collecting data, making improvements, and yes – even sometimes failing to move the needle. But if you’re afraid of trying new things and avoiding failure, you won’t discover anything new or experience significant growth.

When you’re keen on growing your company, focus on the initiatives that you believe will make the biggest impact, even though you can’t be certain what will resonate the most. Also, what works today might not work the same way tomorrow, so it’s crucial to challenge the usual way of doing things.

Growth marketing comes into play after you’re already following good practices, and it helps you push those efforts a step further. There is no limit to how much companies can grow if they follow some basic principles relating to growth marketing. If you want a hand with implementing this protocol at your organization, get in touch with me to see if my growth marketing services are right for you.