Growing into Growth Marketing — Kick-Off Review
This is part 1/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree.
Learning new things, trying out different approaches, and looking continuously for possibilities to get better — these principles describe a growth mindset. Taking part in the Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL, I will have the chance to apply the growth mindset to marketing. I will document my journey with weekly posts that summarize what I have learned and show what I think of the courses and lessons.
I do not start from scratch. Working for an edtech company, I have the privilege of gathering firsthand knowledge of a company that embraces a growth mindset and practices excellent growth marketing. Being amazed by my introduction to SEO, Paid, and Email-Marketing, I was eager to strengthen my understanding of this marketing approach: reading “The Lean Startup,” “Inspired,” and “Hacking Growth,” I was intrigued by the evidence-based principles and the apparent humbleness. In growth marketing, you do not expect to know what the customer wants; you try to get better at knowing what it is by utilizing continuous experimentation and validated learning.
Growth vs. Traditional Marketing
The beginning of the growth marketing minidegree and its lessons is marked by a distinction: growth vs. traditional marketing. Whereas brand marketing starts to develop the single best campaign to think of, growth marketing starts to become better through iteration. Growth marketing is inductive: learnings are developed from the bottom up. In contrast to that, brand marketing is characterized by a deductive approach: you derive your answers from existing market research or the knowledge of agencies that already worked on similar campaigns. One of the biggest disadvantages of designing and executing big campaigns is to evaluate them afterward.
The Practice of Growth Marketing
Practicing a growth marketing approach, you start with a hypothesis regarding two variables’ relationship. You try to find the answer with the help of experiments (e.g., an a-b-test). By analyzing your results, you develop new ideas or ways to improve further on the channel at hand. The growth generated by small adjustments and improvements compounds over time. So just having enough small wins can lead to significant growth. You try to come up with experiments along the line of all the touchpoints your customer has with you. Moreover, it would help if you tried to segment them to tailor your communication. The goal should be to figure out how to place the right offer at the right time on the right spot — to communicate the company’s value proposition as best as possible.
Becoming a (better) Growth Marketer
After the intro to growth marketing in the first course by differentiating it from brand marketing and getting to know experimentation as the defining trait of growth marketing, we are introduced to a career-centric angle on growth marketing and questions on how to strengthen the foundation for one’s growth career as well as how to develop one’s growth skills in the second course.
Three traits make a growth marketer successful: channel level expertise (SEO, push notifications, mail, etc.), analytical capabilities (e.g., excel, sequel.) as well as strategic capabilities. You should acquire all of the skills to a certain extent, and they should go along with expertise in one of those areas — the skillset of a growth marketer is T-shaped.
Becoming a growth marketer is basically working with those 3 capabilities and using them to your advantage. Performing well in an interview for such a role means coming to the table with some suggestions and showing hunger and eagerness to learn. Growing your career in this field is leveraging your strengths by finding out what you like. It is about working on your weaknesses and spotting changes in your company by improving your forecasting skills; you do that by looking for topics from strategic importance. Finally, it is about having a growth mindset and obsessing over one’s own productivity and routines to become better every day.
There is no ‘hack’ — Building a growth process
John McBride, who teaches the first and second course of the “growth marketing” minidegree, shows that growth marketing is not to be on the look-out for the silver bullet, leading to explosive growth. Rather it is continuously trying to get better and produce validated learning. This lean marketing approach is defined by the circular fashion of building, shipping, and measuring experiments to gather knowledge that you can apply again. Practicing a scientific approach to marketing is hard work, and you best start by defining your growth process. The growth process is developed in 3 steps:
- Coming up with a growth model
- Mapping out the customer journey
- Mapping out all the growth channels.
After developing this process, it is possible to execute the strategic goals broken down into quarterly initiatives.
Coming Up with a Growth Model
Concerning the growth model, McBride stresses the importance of a framework that allows for looking out for the right growth metrics and finding the right growth opportunities. He proposes to go with David McClure’s AARRR Framework. The Framework covers Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. This growth model allows for setting growth metrics along the user’s lifecycle stages. You see, whom you are targeting and how to reach them with what kind of offer. John McBride argues that growth models are similar through different businesses; differences occur in the channels.
Mapping the Customer Journey
For the second step, the definition of the customer journey, it is proposed to map out the ‘golden path,’ which is the ideal journey a customer can take. This practice, which you and your team should do regularly, allows looking through the customer’s eyes. It, therefore, enables us to come up with initiatives that secure a cohesive user experience. After having one customer journey for one ideal customer, you should follow up on that journey by segmenting your customers. For example, along the lines of organic, paid, referral, and writing down their customer journeys.
Defining Goals for the Growth Channels
After the growth model is chosen and the first insights are generated through user journeys, you should map out all growth channels. Those channels are optimized by starting with quarterly planning. By looking for possible lift zones and opportunities within the funnel, one can prioritize the most important growth areas. If not enough quantitative data is already at hand, you can generate qualitative data through user surveys, interviews, and focus groups. After analyzing and identifying growth opportunities, the goals can be written down as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). OKRs allow for measurable goals, but they also coordinate efforts and strengthen transparency.
Brainstorming and Evaluating Ideas
After having defined quarterly goals based on the metrics defined in the growth model and data generated by analyzing your customer journey for different user groups, marketers should brainstorm (together with their colleagues) to develop growth initiatives. The cross-functional teams can start by looking at the customer journey results or other companies’ initiatives to set the brainstorming stage. The brainstorming question should be as specific as possible, whereas the ideas generated should not be bounded by concerns regarding usability or feasibility. To have ideas that can be evaluated and compared, they should be formulated as a hypothesis: we believe that solution A will improve X because we know Z and Y.
You can evaluate the generated ideas with the ICE-Framework. ICE stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort. ‘Impact’ describes your idea’s effect, ‘Confidence’, the level to which you are certain the effect will occur, and ‘Effort’, the work you have to put into the idea to make it work. You score each idea on a scale, so it is possible in the end to compare the average score of each idea.
Pace as a Factor for Success
After having a set of prioritized ideas that potentially allow for fulfilling your quarterly goals rooted in your growth framework and user data, growth marketers should try to run respective experiments as fast as possible: build experiments, measure the results and learn from them. If they worked, automate and scale them. Going through that circle as quickly as possible will define your success level. With this in quarter execution as an experimentation process, it is possible to gather first growth marketing experience — as I will do in my next quarter, taking part in 33 courses of the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree.
