This is part 2 of the “Marketing Diagrams that Make it All Make Sense” series. Read Part 1: Available Marketing Channels.
I can’t think of a marketing organization within large company that doesn’t need Growth Hacking…
…as long as everyone involved understands what Growth Hacking.
Growth Hacking is the process of identifying the Critical Path to growth through marketing.
At Transform, we spend a lot of time thinking about the marketing process used by most large businesses.
Often, the advertising side establishes campaigns on a semi-annual or annual basis. They plan media budgets for a couple months and then launch — like throwing spaghetti on a wall and praying it sticks. More and more organizations are investing in in-flight optimization tactics for marketing campaigns, but there are problems with these as well.
The organic marketing side — focused on content, email, SEO, social and other more ethereal-but-measurable practices — also operates in cycles. But these cycles may feel less like cycles to the business. They tend to reflect “evergreen” strategies, and optimization happens irregularly but more frequently than in advertising.
Whatever the division, marketing tends to follow a uniform process: Plan, Execute / Track, Measure.
The problem with these picture, is that it’s missing two hurdles:
- Often, measurement is lacking.
- “Execute” means big dollars and big timelines, which means big difficulties measuring the impact of the work.
What if you could know before you launch?
This is Growth Hacking for the Enterprise: the only way to test-and-prove the various messages (content, creative, copy, content — whatever you want to call it) and audiences (targets, customers, profiles, etc.) you’re going to target in a large-scale campaign.
During the planning phase (or even before), Growth Hacking is the perfect initiative to prove which go-to-market strategies are effective, test assumptions about audience response rates (in general and per message), and prove new channels and tactics in robust experimentation frameworks.
But keep in mind these critical truths about Growth Hacking:
- Growth Hacking is inherently agile. It responds readily to the needs of the business, to plan/launch/produce insight in 4–8 week pilots — then turn around and do it again. Slower approaches are not Growth Hacking — they’re just campaigns. If you want insight at the speed of business, agility is a necessity.
- Growth Hacking must be repeatable. It must be a good experiment. This means no muddy data, no leaky funnels, no uncontrolled variables. If you are testing messages, make sure you control the audience segment(s) targeted within the microcampaign/pilot.
- Growth Hacking must be transparent. We give our customers every single data point — including raw data files. But it’s all boiled down into clear, concise thinking and methodology. They can see the whole thought process behind the Growth Hacking campaign.
- Growth Hacking should give you actionable findings. You should be able to turn around and use the learnings the very next day. Of course, if the other principles — transparency and measurability and repeatability — are adopted, then any insights produced can be acted upon in the same manner they were developed in the first place. For example, if the outcome is “Use Message A with Audience Segment 3” then the architecture of the project will give a clear picture of how exactly this is done.
- Growth Hacking must be quick. Agile is one thing — speed is still another. Agility means frequency of change, but speed means completion within short time-frames. After all, if Growth Hacking is a matter of Critical Paths in marketing: the Critical Path is the sequence of stages that determine the minimum time needed for an operation. Minimums.
In these ways, Growth Hacking is actually a hybridization of Lean Methodology (product incubation and Minimum Viable Products) and digital marketing. Tech-enabled agility.
For more information on Growth Hacking, follow me.
I’ll be putting out further posts on Growth Hacking, including case studies and what my mother — the biology teacher — taught me about Growth Hacking.
This is part 2 of the “Marketing Diagrams that Make it All Make Sense” series. Read Part 1: Available Marketing Channels.
