5 Growth Concepts from Adam Nash and Elliot Shmukler

Adam and Elliot have been a force to be reckoned with in the growth marketing community. They teamed up at LinkedIn to grow a user base 10x from 20 million to 200 million; and again at WealthFront, a personal investing service, to see a 98% increase in conversions, doubling growth in 2013. They’ve effectively created a growth marketing rocket ship.

Here are some key learnings from their approach to growth.

1. Align the goal of the growth machine as close to a single number as possible

When a company is growing they need to find strategies and mechanisms that will sustain growth and enable more of it. The growth process can be a monitored, systematic, and repeatable experience, achieved by creating what can be thought of as a lean, mean ‘growth machine’.

A well built growth machine will need to measure goals in appropriately allotted time ranges. But, most important is that your growth machine is focused on a single metric. In doing this, all members of your team are focusing their activities and energy in one direction and not chaotically trying to worry about 20 different metrics at the same time.

2. Psychological behaviors are key when optimizing

Applying several psychological basics is crucial to structuring the optimization of growth drivers. Elliot has mentioned reducing friction, increasing incentive, and increasing exposure as key ways to optimize. While these may have extensive thought that behind them and calculated processes, the concepts are pretty simple to consider. People don’t want a difficult journey to complete actions, they’re attracted to better reasons for doing something, and the more frequently you remind someone of something the more likely they are to complete an action.

3. Deliberate initial user experience can be a difference maker

This first touch experience that users have with a product or service can create a lasting effect, or more importantly, can determine the potential a customer or user has for accelerating growth. Not only is this the company’s chance to truly impress and engage with a new customer, but this moment is where one really crafts the kind of relationship they’ll have with customers. Will they come back to use, play, learn today or tomorrow or next week? Will they bring others with them? This is all largely determined in this packed first experience.

4. Add value to “behavioral finance” when altering your product

We are all somewhat expected to act in ways that are groundless and the importance of that notion is bringing us away from old hat practices of just quantifying the utility of products. Instead, factoring in human emotion, when building products and services, can be a far more advantageous approach. We want to evoke emotion — not solely positive or negative, but the whole gamut of reactions that drive engaging behaviors. This can even mobilize many like-minded people en masse.

Adam talks about the potential value in a frame of thought that calls for “heat” when designing products for top notch engagement. This has to do with truly touching users in a powerful ways with the product or service and can really get teams thinking creatively with the options they can work with.

5. Close attention to your metrics will allow you to have an open mind while testing

The more prepared teams are and more aware they are of their numbers the more companies will be ready when unexpected things happen. With an open mind and willingness to accept the end result from tests / experiments, teams can optimize for improved health of a company’s growth state. If we’re able to take our ego out of the process of running tests we can avoid becoming victim to a version of cognitive dissonance.

Additionally, when watching numbers carefully, and seeing an experiment doing well, one can jump on top of a channel and add energy / resources to what is working. As Elliot has stated, “It’s easier to build on a strength than to improve on a weakness.” This attention to detail, when monitoring metrics, will allow teams or individuals to be shepherds to a consistently guided growth.

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Although Adam and Elliot have many insights worth exploring, one of the most powerful takeaways from their journey: you can still apply many of the core principles of growth marketing to a broad spectrum of products and services.

Originally posted at Impresario Marketing