Changing Our Mind-Set and the Growth Shift
By Rebecca Moore
We didn’t wake up like this
In our markets, and in our business in general, we are constantly striving to achieve Growth. We believe that Growth doesn’t come solely from our marketing efforts, commercial improvements or product engineering. It comes from blending these specialisms together in a cohesive way. Our Growth Tribe model was designed to achieve this.
The Growth Flywheel is a crucial mechanism that we base our work on. If we have more users then we’ll attract more partners and if we attract more partners then we will have more users and so on. The theory is that as this cycle continues, our momentum will pick up and our growth will begin to burgeon and gather speed. There are several factors that contribute to our Growth Flywheel in our markets and one of these, is the importance of product market fit.
Product Market Fit
Many things influence our product market fit. In order to consider the influencing factors, it is important to ask a series of key questions each time that we produce something.
- Is the market ready for our product?: Do our users have access to affordable internet and is our product usable on their devices?; do they have the inclination and funds to travel?; are they confident and do they have the means to book online?; is there sufficient competition and fragmentation of online travel providers for us to provide value to the user?
- Is our product right for the market?: Is it localised to language and user preferences; is it solving local market problems?; are local differentiators catered for?; do we have all of the right partners available locally and internationally?; are our prices accurate and competitive?; do our partners provide a good experience downstream?; do our users know what meta is?
Until we have a market that is ready for our product and a product that is right for a market, we cannot justify spending money to grow that market, as we will not see a return.
One of our big mind-set shifts is that we are not just here to blindly market a product. When ‘owning’ a market, we truly own all aspects of performance in that market, and we may need to make the difficult decision to stop throwing money at it whilst we address the underlying friction on the flywheel.
Korean Growth Case-Study
In some markets, we have focused our efforts on adapting our products to better fit that market. Without this fit, no amount of marketing activity will result in sustained growth. This is our number one priority for any market.
Here is an example of the impact we saw in conversions in APAC last year, driven by a number of factors, including extensive usability testing and bug fixing by our growth teams, to make sure the products were properly localised for language and user preferences. It has become our best converting product globally for Skyscanner.
When we reach a point where we have good product fit and the coverage in our market is adequate, then user experience will be positive. This is when we should be ramping up our marketing activity to drive awareness of users and subsequent transitions through varying levels of what we call the State Machine (Activation, Retention, Referrals and other states). The focus is then on driving the Growth Flywheel, using very data driven scientific techniques to fail forwards and scale quickly.
Case study: Korean Blog Success on Minimum Budget
In November last year, we had a success story that demonstrates how this mind-set shift has ensured meaningful results.
“Our APAC Skyscanner branch worked with a well-known Korean blogger and she published this quirky video.” Explained Simpson Sim, one of Skyscanner’s APAC team.
“We saw a notable growth in our brand keyword search from Google compared to the previous period before the video published. As a result we saw peaks of growth from Google and organic sessions and the percentage of new sessions jumped 10% in contrast to the other organic channels which stayed the same. There was close to 50% more sessions from Google paid search mostly from brand keywords.The percentage of new sessions jumped another few percent.
YouTube users are more likely to use Google over local search engines and they are also used across devices. In Korea, usually video consumption happens on mobile but the upturns in Google happened on PC. From a marketing standpoint the key to success for the Korean market in 2016 was cross-device and mobile (and of course retention).”
Acquisition marketing — our guiding principles
When it comes to acquisition channels, we have a few guiding principles that we can attribute to our success so far and how we plan for the future.
- Optimisation to drive up our owned and earned channel performance is the primary focus of the regional growth tribe
- When at scale, paid channel performance can be globally optimised to a significantly more efficient spend and ROI than can be achieved at a local level
- The task of a Growth Tribe is to analyse markets according to this philosophy and apply an appropriate blend of the above disciplines to meet the needs of those markets
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About the Author
Hi, my name is Rebecca, and thanks for reading my post. I work in our Business Operations and Strategy Team, having just returned from implementing and running our Growth Tribe in Asia-Pacific for the last 10 months. Before that I led the program to re-organise into our current Growth Model. I’ve had a fantastic journey with Skyscanner over the last 18 months working with our very talented Growth team. Seeing the impact that our Growth transformation has had on the Growth of our APAC people and business has been particularly rewarding.
