Notes on Growth Marketing | #1

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sharing my notes on the topic of growth marketing as I go through CXL Institute’s minidegree.

The notes will be a summary of my learning and perspective on the following topics:

1. Growth Marketing Foundations
2. Running Growth Experiments
3. Data and Analytics
4. Conversion
5. Channel-specific Growth
6. Growth Program Strategy and Management

Why this program?

Primarily, the overall structure of the curriculum and how well it’s designed to cover all aspects of brand and growth marketing to suit modern day marketers.

In addition, the individuals whom I look up to in my network spoke very highly of the quality of CXL’s content.

I also like that the organization is solely dedicated to levelling up marketers and the marketing field. They’re doing one thing, and doing it really well.

Now on to this week’s learnings.

1. Growth Marketing Foundations

1.1. Growth mindset

1.1.1. How growth marketing is different from traditional marketing

• Growth marketing is rapid and experimental in nature. It leverages various programs, campaigns, product features etc. to increase conversions and create better customer experiences. The benefit of this this rapid experimental process is the ability to collect data to inform future programs, initiatives and decisions.
• While traditional marketing primarily focuses on top of the funnel to drive awareness and acquisition, growth marketing aims to optimize the entire funnel from acquisition, to activation, retention, referral and revenue.

1.1.2. Experimentation as the defining trait of growth

• Growth marketing is about rapidly testing multiple hypotheses to learn what doesn’t work (to discard), and what shows promising signs (to build on) going forward.
• The experimentation process revolves around setting an objective, then designing a series of hypotheses and corresponding experiments to achieve that objective, all the while collecting data and insights.

For example, the objective can be driving more feature adoption for every new release. One hypothesis to support this objective is that running an email campaign to inform customers will increase adoption by 20% because the customers will be more educated about the existence and application of this new feature release.

• There are different layers to this experimentation process. If in the example above we find that the email campaign does indeed increase feature adoption, the next layer can be testing messaging and see which variation performs better. Or even segment our audience and serve each with different messaging.
• Important to remember: Growth is not about finding a “hack”. It’s a process of accelerating learning through rapid experimentation that can help get to the end result faster.

1.1.3. What makes a successful growth marketer

There are four major skill attributes that will differentiate top growth marketers from the rest:

• Channel-level expertise, e.g. email marketing, paid media, push, SEO
• Data-driven and analytics, e.g. Excel and SQL
• Strategic thinking
• Project management

1.2. Building a growth process

1.2.1. High level strategy

• At this stage, the goal is to define growth models by understanding what inputs we have at our disposal in order to achieve the company’s top-level growth goals.
• This process involves mapping the entire customer journey, assigning metrics and targets to the AARRR funnel, and then defining which growth channels to leverage to hit those targets.
• Going through the exercise of mapping the customer journey and doing it from the customer’s perspective is extremely valuable, In other words, asking “how can we increase the value we’re delivering to our customers” through our growth models, rather than “how can we benefit our business”. This will put us in the right situation to come up with the right hypotheses to test and the right experiments to run to improve conversions that will ultimately drive a better customer experience.
• A useful way to go through this exercise is using sticky notes to map each customer persona’s journey and its corresponding channels, e.g. Draw the “golden path” for a customer that’s landed on your product organically, and then do it separately for a referred customer.

1.2.2. Quarterly planning

• For this phase, start by exploring the data through the lens of the customer journey. Think about all the actions your customer personas take from becoming a lead all the way to turning into an active, loyal customer. Then, analyze the entire funnel and explore areas for growth opportunity. Set quarterly goals based on the areas that show potential for growth.
• To help with this process, use effective brainstorming to land on themes and categories that you can then go deeper on, e.g. improve referrals, increase activation etc.
• Formulate your ideas in the form of hypothesis. This will ensure that you’re creating logical experiments that are testable, and have assumptions that are rooted in data.

For example, by taking our users through a 5-step onboarding flow around our rights management feature, we can improve engagement by 10%, because the users will be more informed about the existence of this product capability.

• Build your quarterly roadmap by using prioritization frameworks such as ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) to rank what initiatives matter most. Impact defined what percentage of your audience this experiment will influence. Confidence is how likely it is to hit the desired outcome based on past experiments, or industry benchmarks. Effort details how resources heavy it would be to implement this initiative.
• I’ll be diving deeper into the topic of customer journey mapping in next week’s post.

1.2.3. In-quarter execution

• The execution process within each sprint (say, quarterly) involves high-tempo experiments and very much resembles the lean startup methodology:

Build > Measure > Learn

• The goal here is to define an objective and complement it with a set of hypotheses and related experiments, actively learn from the results of those experiments through data, and finally use those learnings to either discard what was initially assumed or automate and scale what’s showing promising signs.

Next week, I’ll cover user-centric marketing and why understanding our customers and their journeys contributes to the overall success of our growth models. I’ll also touch on a high-level overview of the most common growth marketing channels.