What is growth marketing and what’s it not? (Spoiler alert: it’s not just growth hacking)
I have always been fascinated by how companies can grow at a steady (sometimes rapid) pace. My current “obsession” is the Morning Brew. Just two or three years ago many people would shake their heads at the thought of growing a business through one medium — newsletter. Now with over 2.6 million subscribers, Morning Brew has proven many people wrong.
How are they able to grow their subscription to millions? How can they make emails and tweets so interesting that it feels you’re actually talking business with a close friend? How do the Morning Brew’s, Instacart’s, and Airbnb’s of the world do it?
My fascination for growth marketing just continues to grow. And that’s why I recently enrolled in an online course for growth marketing with CXL Institute. Based on my research, it’s one of the best online learning platforms for marketing (so many recommendations and rave reviews in online forums). A few courses in and I’ve already learned so much, even more than what I’ve learned from piecemeal YouTube videos and occasional Udemy ones before!
Growth leader John McBride who’s currently in charge of B2B growth for the Calm app (also formerly with Lyft and the Obama campaign) explains the foundations of growth marketing so well. You could tell he’s been on the ground with his deep familiarity of how growth marketing is done in Silicon Valley. Along with frameworks and processes most tech companies are using today, he gives real-life examples of how these are applied in popular apps, i.e. Instacart, Uber Eats.
Here are some of my key takeaways:
Growth vs. traditional marketing
What sets growth marketing apart from traditional marketing is the mindset. The former is driven by experimentation and the constant push for improvement. Growth marketing starts with admitting you do NOT really know what your customers want until you have the data to support your hypotheses about them. Needless to say, growth marketing is a more scientific approach compared to traditional marketing’s more right-brain, creative flair.
The difference between the current marketing landscape and the time I was still working in a Public Relations agency almost a decade ago is glaring. I remember leading a brainstorming session and starting with the brand’s goals, followed by who the target audience is, their needs, wants, demographic and psychographic profile — the persona. We would then go for “The Big Idea,” then the campaign, and finally the execution — usually a massive one-off event (sometimes year-long) with all the bells and whistles.
In traditional marketing, we were brainstorming for a single campaign idea.
Growth marketing is an ongoing process of experimentation and testing hypotheses. It finds out the following layers in your marketing strategies:
- Are current initiatives getting you the results you want? Are people reading and clicking the links in your emails? Are they adding to cart but not proceeding with the transaction? Are they clicking towards your landing page but not pushing your Call-to-Action button?
- How do you make your marketing initiatives better? What can you do to have the right message? Right call to action? Right offer? Right tonality? Right cadence?
- How can you tailor your efforts to individual customers? How can you personalize the experience of each and every one of your customers?
It’s okay to fail, fast.
Growth marketing is a continuous process of doing a series of experiments… and at a rapid pace. “Fail fast” is the rule of thumb. It’s all about testing hypothesis after hypothesis. It’s making agile adjustments to make the results better and obtaining results as quickly as possible.
If the hypothesis fails, then it becomes a learning that feeds into the next experiment. Each learning is one added data point that can be used for the next hypothesis test.
Failure in an experiment means a better understanding of how your customer uses your products/services. It’s all about constant learning and getting better.
Each failure is another step towards growth and success.
Growth hacking: what’s the diff?
You may have heard about growth hacking before. It’s such a sexy word in the marketing world because it sounds like you have that one key that could unlock results by 10x.
While growth hacking could be part of growth marketing, it is not entirely the same.
Growth hacking is based on the Lean Startup methodology and the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by Eric Ries. Okay I’m throwing marketing buzzwords all around now but in everyday language, MVP is that minimum version of the product that you can use to collect the most data and validation about how your customers would use it. This means that MVP is not the perfect version of an app, for instance, but something that is workable enough to launch among a few customers. All with the view of getting more data, finding out if it works, and how it could be improved.
In a similar vein, growth hacking is not the perfect solution, but something that can be done quickly that may potentially produce ridiculously good results.
A famous example of successful growth hacking is AirBnB. In the early days when they didn’t have a massive user base, founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia did some research. They found that people searching for alternate accommodations (read: not hotels) were going to Craigslist. So they added a feature for hosts to cross-list and copy their listing to Craigslist in just one click. Fast forward to December 2020, AirBnB went public with a stock valuation of $75 billion. That’s not a typo — it’s billion with a ‘b’.
I find a “one-off” vibe to growth hacking because sometimes marketers do this with the view of achieving short-term goals. To me, it sounds like trying to get immediate and massive results.
This is what sets it apart from growth marketing, which is a continuous process of improvement and the obsession to getting data points that will feed the next experiments.
Incorporating growth into your marketing
If your company has always been growth-oriented and been rolling out marketing initiatives that are data-driven, then good for you!
If you’re still in the process of converting your entire organization for a growth mindset and a more scientific approach to marketing, then keep reading.
Building a growth process starts with:
- defining your growth model
- profiling your customer and mapping out their journey, and then
- identifying growth opportunities and channels.
Here are a few tips for incorporating growth into your marketing:
- Define the goals and metrics that your organization wants to focus on. What kind of results do you want to see in x months? Align your business objectives with key results. Is it to get more customers? Increase usage of your app or time on your website? Making them use your product repeatedly and become a loyal customer? Bring in more $$%? Increase the number of people recommending your product to their friends and family?
- Obsess on who your customers are, what they want, and their pain points. Invest your energy into bridging the gap and solving their pain with your product. Walk through their shoes and what they will do from the first instance they encounter your brand, all the way to them deciding to keep using your offering. Be user-centric throughout the entire process and make decisions based on nothing but what your customers would do.
- Understand the channels that you currently have at your disposal and those that you need to start using based on your deep understanding of your customers. Should you improve your website? Focus on emails? Pour your attention to improving the UX of your app and in-app advertisements?
- Be data-driven. I feel like this term has been used and abused a lot but I can’t emphasize enough the importance of looking into data *regularly*. How does this one tiny improvement in the tone of an email change click-through rates? How many people ordered a second box of Hello Fresh after using a coupon code, vs. those who didn’t get a discount in their first purchase? These data will feed into which part of your efforts are giving you more results.
- Adopt a growth mindset at all times. It’s all about the passion for learning. Treat each effort — successful or not — as an opportunity to learn and get more data.
If you’d like to know more about growth marketing and what I’ve learned, including specific frameworks and the how-to’s, please feel free to get in touch through my website www.tinasendin.com .
