Growth marketing the foundations — Review (#1)

The Growth Mindset

Before we dive into the subject, we’re going to start to bring you as a reader into the right mindset, the so-called “Growth Mindset”. This topic was taught and introduced during my first week at the CXL Institute for the Growth Marketing Course. The course begins with the foundations of Growth Marketing taught by John McBridge, Senior Manager at Calm and Lyft. The essence is to differentiate a growth -or also called “growth hacker” and traditional marketeer. First I will mention the most important skill-sets to be acquired to be a successful growth marketeer. The second part will give the guidelines for the three phases of building a growth process.

Growth VS Traditional marketeer.

The traditional marketeer focusses on the top of the marketing funnel, TOFU (Top of the Funnel). Traditionally it is simply by breaking down the customer’s journey from the “awareness” to the “acquisition” stage.

The Growth-Marketeer embodies the experimental mindset that encourages improvement through the process for growth and scalability. In other words, the “try-and-error” relies on the principles of the “Lean Start-up Methodology”. An interesting reference and must-read is the book by Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, which relies on the same foundations of continuous innovation to create radical success. I’ve read this book before starting this course which gives a good introduction to start-up terminology and solutions.

The Growth marketeer focusses has a more holistic approach by focussing on the entire funnel. The starting point is to define a goal which defines a hypothesis what the consumers need. Here below you can find a step-by-step plan overview of the concept of growth hacking.

Overview of the concept of Growth Hacking:

1. Define long-term goal based on the hypothesis of your customer.
2. Design and bring relation to your target market (customers, users).
3. Find the most efficient and effective way to test this hypothesis.
   How to test? Simply by doing mini-experiments.
4. What is the result? The experiments will generate data about your hypothesis. Based on the data available you should validate or invalidate it’s a success.
5. Extract information (data) to learn (analyse) from it and move forward by redefining the hypothesis.
6. Implement continuity and implementation by performing an experiment based on the results extracted from the data and analysis.

Experimentation — the basis for Growth Hacking
Growth hacking starts with choosing a goal and defining a series of experiments that can be useful to achieve that goal. Through the process, on the way, data will be gathered and will introduce a learning curve alongside the way.

Case example
Simple layers through the process of messages

• Evaluate the effect on conversion during the experiment.
• Go deeper once evaluated with success.
• Tailor the message to individual customer — make it resonate to the right customer.

Note:
You can get 10 -20% improvement just by testing different messages or different campaigns against each other at the macro level of your experimentation process.

Understand which experimentation to focus on

The ICE framework is a useful framework to prioritize which experiments to focus on based on three levels impact, confidence, and Ease of Implementation.

• Impact of the experiment:
  Estimation of the optimization of the effort
  (example: how big is your audience)
• Confidence in the results of the project:
  How convinced are you going to see the projected impact based on the hypothesis that you are expecting to see?
  (this by referencing to past experience by questioning if they work)
• Ease of Implementation (the effort):
  How many resources (time, money, etc..) will be needed?

Note of advice

Grade on a scale of 1–10 and the characteristics evaluated by multiplying each lever’s score

ICE Score = (impact + confidence + Ease) / 3

The AAARR framework allows you to understand the impact of how the user/customer moves across the funnel which includes Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referrals. By going through the AAARR stages a maximizing of ROI can be converted from the users/customers.

I refer to the blog from Nimay Parekh for a full explanatory about the ICE Framework.

Skill-sets for a successful Growth Marketeer

If you consider becoming a Growth-Marketeer there are three basic skill-sets to be acquired as follow:

1. Channel level expertise:
   Understand how channels work such as e-mail, SEO, Social Media channels, etc
2. Analytical Capability:
   Excel is the basis, SQL skills are for being more advanced.
3. Key components of leadership:
   Strategic thinking, Project management and leadership (be cross-functional by working with other skilled people).

In general, Creativity is key to think outside the box to define opportunities.

The fundamentals of building a Growth process

Summary of the 3 phases of growth management

1. High-level strategy.
2. Quarterly planning.
3. In-quarterly planning.

Phase 1 — The foundation of a High-Level Strategy

1. Identify + Define your growth model:
   In reference to the section dedicated to understanding the experimentation to focus on.
2. Mapping the Customer Journey:
   Step one — start with their persona and map their ideal journey through the lens of the customer. Step two — dive deeper by mapping out in types; organic customer, referral customer, Acquisition customer.
3. Identify your Channels:
   Following the perception from the customer, try to map out which path they can be reached or informed about your campaign.

Phase 2 — Quarterly planning

1. Exploring data:
   Referring to the customer journey, data will bill be generated throughout the funnel. Explore this date from an analytic point of view which will highlight stages to be optimised.
2. Identify your quarterly goals:
   This based on objectives and key results that ware generated (OKR). The methodology allows businesses to align goals that really matter.
3. Build a road map to execute:
   Milestones should be defined and can be facilitated to individual stakeholders.

Note:

Though the experimentation process, it is important for not focussing on growth metrics themselves but rather focus on solving customer pain points which automatically leads to an increase of performance. Simply, explore the data through the lens of your customer.

Phase 3 — In-Quarterly Execution

The build-measure-learn cycle is a continuity based on the Lean Start-up Methodology.

1. Design your experiments:
   Start developing a hypothesis based on the 3 elements:
   - An independent variable
   - A dependent Variable
   - Assumptions
2. Ship your experiments:
   Start experimenting the hypothesis by testifying the prototype it’s usability toward the target audience (customers, users).
3. Analysis result:
   If it works? Automate it, and scale it. In other words, once a hypothesis is successful, start to implement it in an automatization. The automatization allows you to move on to another experiment and expand your learning curve.

Conclusion

My first experience with following the course at CXL is strongly recommended. The simple reason is how the educative framework is designed as a guideline to the subject. As part of my writing, I dived into other sources to in-depth my knowledge which is part of this review. The difference between a growth marketeer and a traditional marketeer gave me a clear idea about to differentiate these two practices. In general, writing a blog allows me to dive more in-depth the theory and revise more concise on the theory.

Louis Buysse