Growth Marketing = Leverage

Many people associate Growth Marketing with experiments. In my mind, I associate it with leverage.

If you’re a traditional marketer, your work is 1:1 with your output. You launch a campaign, and you’ve launched 1 campaign.

However when using engineering, you’re able to do things that scale really quickly. To use the Airbnb example from Andrew Chen, when that Craigslist feature went live, millions of people were able to harness it, and Airbnb reaped the benefits.

That is a product feature that drove Growth, but I feel that the largest opportunity from engineering is helping Growth Marketers find leverage with tools. For example:

• Having an engineer setup a Customer Data Platform (like Segment) means that suddenly you can transport your customer data to dozens of other tools, with no additional engineering work required.
• Setting up a marketing automation platform (like Customer.IO) means that a marketer can go in and create dozens or hundreds of specifically triggered lifecycle emails, with no additional engineering work required.
• Finding a personalisation tool (like Appcues) means that a Product Marketer can change the application experience for dozens of segments of users, with no additional engineering work required.

And so the list continues…

And in fact, as the Growth Marketing tool envirionment explodes with innovation, it’s becoming more and more impressive what marketers can achieve without engineering, and tools like Zapier are becoming the defacto Operating System for Growth:

Real World Example

One of my favourite examples of this leverage, is when AdRoll created a “Monthly Metrics Email” that showed all of a customers metrics for their advertising in their inbox — with zero engineering work.

Of course, engineering could have created the email. But by using tools, it was not only ‘free’ from an engineering point of view, but also going forwards, future experimentation is also in the hands of the marketer: not blocked by engineering resources.

A simplistic example of this: Lets say that you wanted to send a renewal reminder of when your SaaS monthly billing is happening. Instead of creating a transactional email that triggers a week before that billing date, send the “billing date” to your Customer Data Platform.

Product Management:

• Have SendGrid trigger an email 7 days before billing date.

Growth Management:

• Send Billing Date to Segment.com
• Billing Date will appear in Marketing Automation
• Allow you to experiment with emails customised around that date (14/7/1 days before, 1/7/14 days after date)
• This date will also appear in other connected tools, allowing you to alter website, trigger direct mail, and have all data appear in SQL.

… It’s literally less engineering work, but provides 10x more leverage to Marketing to execute.

The benefit of this is that you change the game in terms of experiment execution. You’re no longer constrained by engineering time, but by generating the ideas, since almost any vaguely technical marketer can go in and create the experiments within the tools.

The trick to this work, is having the domain and context knowledge to be able to deploy engineering to think ‘meta’ about what engineering works on. Don’t think about individual experiments, but think about how best to group experiments together in such a way that marketers can be supported, not replaced!

(Want your organisation to be leverage and Growth focussed? FoxGrowth can help.)