GROWTH MARKETING REVIEW WEEK 1:

In our world today with millions of entrepreneurs, companies et al with the sole motive of making profit, Businesses today are fraught with the daily task of increasing their revenue and developing new channels of revenue from both returning and new customers. Growth is the sum of small tactical activities that are user focused, experimental and constantly evolving. The key advantages of growth to marketing I believe are speed to market(sell, creation of awareness etcetera) and a greater return in investment. These can only and easily be achieved when one tends to learn, study and understand the elements of marketing dynamics which I believe the CXL scholarship on Growth Marketing minidegree program offered me on a platter of gold as this is where opportunity meets passion. Growth marketing is the scientific process that is driven by experimentation, it is about constant learning, iteration, and getting better. Developing a growth mindset is a step towards creating an environment for ideation, growth experimentation should be without fear of failure because failure is part of the process and an avenue to gather more data about the process to further increase revenue within the business. Having a growth mindset should be an enterprise-wide one, from the top echelon down to the various units of the organization as no one should stifle the process hence impede the growth process. It’s all about developing, advancing, expanding, and seeing the opportunity and potential in every moment, individual, failure, and success. A growth mindset will move the business forward and position the business, its brand, and its people for growth, profit, and success in the future.
Experimentation is the defining trait of growth. The experimentation process is around choosing that goal and then define a series of experiments that you can use to achieve that goal and gather learnings along the way. In other words, a growth experiment is more like a systematic method for testing a strategy to scale your business. Let’s say you want to conduct a marketing campaign, or you want to transition your business from freemium to pay-per-use. These decisions are costly — and they are often leaps of faith. But growth experiments allow you to test these strategies before fully committing, saving you precious time and money. Understanding why experimentation is important in the growth process is key, I would say conducting a Growth Experiment will help give you an edge over the competition. Instead of leaping faith in marketing or product decisions, you can test your strategies before rolling them out to your entire customer base. Growth experiments offer a systematic, reliable method for informing your planning sessions and scaling your company. Also, in the age of startups and even enterprise companies, all businesses must deal with uncertainty. But growth experiments take some of the uncertainty out of your high-stakes business decisions. Rather than investing time and resources in an unproven strategy, growth experiments allow you to test hypotheses and grow your business with minimal risk. Note that growth is a combination of clean data infrastructure, excellent customer experiences, and rapid experimentation. Achieving sustainable growth, therefore, requires an understanding of all stages of the customer journey and how to leverage them. There are best-practice approaches that are applicable across businesses.
There are 3 layers of depth that one can go to with an experiment. Firstly, marketing campaign, just learning whether or not doing an email campaign or a push notification or a landing page at all has some sort of effect on conversion. Marketing campaigns can be designed with different goals in mind, including building a brand image, introducing a new product, increasing sales of a product already on the market, or even reducing the impact of negative news. Defining a campaign’s goal usually dictates how much marketing is needed and what media are most effective for reaching a specific segment of the population. So, the goal is understanding which marketing campaign types work well, for instance, Lay’s launched its first “Do Us a Flavour” campaign in 2012, asking customers to suggest new potato-chip flavors through texts and social media. The company’s sales increased 12%, and its volume of social media followers tripled. The second layer is figuring the best marketing campaign to use either email marketing or landing page, then, figuring how to create the best campaign. The third layer is creating a personal touch for the customer considering that not all customers are the same just as Lays’s growth experiment showed in 2012 which created growth by 12%. An example of a business creating a personalized campaign for its customer whilst building the brand, in 2016, Heineken launched the first “Go Places” campaign 2016 intending to highlight the company’s unique personality and company culture to prospective employees.
The first campaign allowed individuals to partake in an interactive interview … a sort of “choose your own adventure” combined with a strength’s finder outcome. Following the interactive questionnaire, individuals are given their results and encouraged to apply for a position with their LinkedIn profile. The result is a 12% in brand growth and a new line of employees whilst creating a global story about their business.
Understanding what growth hacking entails especially to the lean startup methodology and not just the tech context is key. Growth hacking in the marketing sense involves building a viable product, a minimum version of some sort, especially with little resources. It’s about building something quickly, it doesn’t have to be perfect at the first instance but iteration and simulations can help improve it further. This can be applied to the marketing campaign, building little, testing, and iteration. There is no one hack fit but a series of hacks that build up to a larger goal. Constant experimenting and learning so that you can accelerate learning fast and get to the end goal faster.

A key aspect of growth marketing is building a strong growth team. There are 3 main components according to John McBride, channel level expertise, analytical capabilities, and cross-functional strategic thinking. These are the terms people get evaluated in terms of their growth marketing skillsets, having a team with these skills can help an organization build a strong growth culture. Channel-level expertise involves knowledge in SEO, SEM, Email marketing, ads, Push et al whilst the analytics level involves having someone with a strong background in data analytics preferably SQL, and finally a strategic thinker who could be a product manager or growth or project manager but has the leadership capabilities to come up with good ideas, figure out the right experiments, prioritize the strategic growth roadmap, plan the customer journey whilst identifying opportunities and pain-points just to mention but a few. It is important to have a baseline in either component, either analytics or channel-level expertise or cross-functional strategic level.
As a recipient of The CXL Institute Scholarship Program, I find myself constantly submerged and in awe of the number of the top contents on growth marketing, marketing analytics, Digital analytics just to mention but a few. These programs and mini-degrees are taught by experts and thought leaders in the industry ranging from Microsoft to Google to Tettra and much more. It’s a great opportunity and I plan to take full advantage of it whilst building my career as a Growth Marketer.