Growth Marketing Foundations
Pillars, mindset, process, skills, tactics, and more...
What is Growth Marketing and Why it Matters
Marketing has been around for a long time, and there are various schools of thought in regards to what marketing should and shouldn’t be doing. However, in the digital era we live in, our customers expect clear, relevant, problem solving, qualitative products, not just a great story. Growth marketing is the process of creating and accelerating growth in a company by looking at the entire customer journey. In this article you will explore what defines “growth marketing”, how it stands apart from conventional marketing, what the discipline aims to accomplish, and how to get started.
Growth vs traditional marketing
There are many differences between traditional marketing and growth marketing.The most important difference is the focus. Traditionally, brand marketing is focused on the top of the funnel: awareness and acquisition. Growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel. As a growth marketer you want to drive growth across the business in any way possible. Growth comes from rapid testing and cross-skilled teams that are focussed on the right metrics to generate growth for the business.
The 4 foundation pillars of Growth Marketing
The foundation of Growth Marketing is based on 4 pillars.
- Growth Mindset – You don’t know everything, you want to experiment & learn continuously
- Growth Process – Driven by experimentation
- Growth People – T-shaped people with different specializations
- Growth Tactics – Smartly use tools and best practices
What is a Growth Mindset?
The base of growth marketing or growth hacking starts with your mindset. I have created 4 pillars for a growth mindset.
- Dare to be creative, everything is possible until proven otherwise.
- But don’t guess. Dare to admit that you don’t actually know what your customers want. The funny thing is, they most of the time don’t know it themselves. Always test and validate your ideas.
- Do this efficiently. So stay laser focussed and trust the process. The process of growth is key to accomplish continuous growth.
- Be smart to keep on speed. Use existing skills and tools that can help you out.
Opportunities or new ideas mostly are based on a combination of data and intuition. When applying growth marketing, you are constantly developing your intuition. The co-founder & CEO of the photo-sharing startup, Unsplash, Mikael Cho, said once in a the Lean Startup Co. podcast: your intuition is a whole bunch of data. It’s a very complex algorithm that is running in your head. I believe that’s true, dare to continuously learn and trust your intuition.
Growth process, driven by experimentation
The growth marketing methodology is driven by experimentation and is in the core based on philosophies of the Lean Startup methodology. The Lean Startup Methodology is all about defining hypotheses about what a customer wants. Finding the fastest and most efficient way to test these hypotheses by designing an experiment. And lastly validating if your hypothesis is correct and gathering learnings out of the data generated by the experiment. This same approach can be applied to growth marketing.
It’s ok if you’re wrong, because your goal is not to be right but to learn more about your customers behavior and goals in a fast way so you can improve over time. Rather than investing everything in one idea, you run multiple experiments as quickly as possible and combine all learnings to constantly improve the end product or next campaign. In this way you develop the foundation of learning and continuously improve.
T-shaped or M-shaped people
A dedicated growth team with different skills should be working together to be able to rapidly design, develop and test experiments. That means that each person in the team should have multiple skills. We call this T-shaped or M-shaped. A broad variety of basic skills and knowledge and an in depth expertise in 2 or more topics. A growth team should have at least marketing, design, data analysis and development skills.
Growth tactics to accelerate growth
A few tactics are important to accelerate the process of growth marketing. You should have a clear view on your funnel and a clear focus on the metric that matters the most to your business growth. Make sure you focus on 1 metric at the time.
Outline your data-driven experiments with hypothesis & clear metrics. Include a null metric and a KPI. Make sure you document the whole process, from hypothesis to experiment to learning.
Work in a sprint of 2 weeks where you test +- 6 experiments per sprint. Make sure that every experiment only validates 1 assumption.
