Building A Growth (Marketing)Process.
CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini Degree Review 2.0
In this second installment of my growth marketing diary, I’ll be focusing on the Growth marketing Process.
To recap, growth marketing is the primary focus on growing or scaling a business via customer data-driven tactics and strategies. To achieve business growth/scale, growth marketers rely heavily on experiments at every stage of the consumer funnel. To read last week’s growth marketing introduction, click on the link below.
BUILDING A GROWTH PROCESS
There are three stages involved in the building of a growth process:
- Defining a growth model,
- Creating a consumer journey map,
- Identifying a business’ relevant growth channels.
Let’s take a deep dive into each stage or level of the growth process:
Defining A Growth Model
To define a growth model, growth marketers have to list all the inputs or variables required to achieve a company’s top growth goals.
Pirate Metrics: A Growth Model Framework
Dave McClure introduced the AARRR (you’ll sound like a pirate when you say it aloud) and it has become the most common framework for growth models. AARRR stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
Acquisition: This is the first contact with customers.
Activation: After signing up, this is the first experience a customer has of the business. Activation could involve user registration, lead sign-up etc.
Retention: Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. If a business’ retention numbers are low, it’s very likely they’re not marketing the right product to the right people.
Revenue: At this stage registered users choose to become paying customers — the business begins to generate revenue.
Referrals — it’s a cheap and effective way to acquire new customers. Getting referred by current customers is every business owners dream.
Using The Pirate Metrics:
The AARRR framework is a guideline meant to help business owners and marketers to find the most important metrics for them. Growth marketers working in large teams can choose to focus on the entire framework, with 2–3 teammates working on each block.
Smaller teams can choose to work on a block at a time. Focusing on acquisition only would mean getting as many people as possible to visit your SaaS business website. Next would be to encourage activation by sending out emails or remarketing to them a month after getting them to visit your website.
To get the most value from your growth model, ask questions like “How I can increase the value we are delivering to our customers?”, instead of “How can I increase value to my business?”.
Something else that’s worth avoiding is focusing on the metrics themselves as opposed to the customer pain point, which when addressed can lead to increased performance. As an example, to increase service activation rate -
Don’t Say: “I want to convince this customer to buy this bundle.”
Do Say: “How can I make it easier for this person to buy this bundle?”
Thinking this way (the Do Say) puts you in a better position to come up with hypotheses to test and the right experiments to run for improved conversion.
Creating A Customer Journey Map
From the consumer perspective — what does it look or feel like to go through the AARRR funnel. The best way to visualize how a customer interacts with a business is by mapping it.
By understanding this relationship, you can understand how to structure touch points related to each framework block to create the most effective and efficient process for your customers. A customer journey map maps out the current process, from the first to final touch point, to see if your customers are currently reaching their goals. It’s important to map out a consumer journey at least twice a year and work to understand the best possible consumers will find their way to your business.
Working with buyer personas during this process can help you better understand customers, their needs, behaviors and concerns. Further buyer persona segmentation, gives every customer type a chance to be represented and employees the opportunity to understand and internalize customer segments relevant to the business.
Identifying Growth Channels
What possible channels can consumers find out about your business or product?
Mapping out channels where consumers will very likely come in contact with your business is important to the growth marketing process and meet them there. Channels might differ across segments and the consumer life cycle stage your desired customer is on.
Growth marketers need to set goals through the context of where the customer is during the life cycle. This helps growth marketers design programs, campaigns and experiments — based on the customer segment or who the customer is.
Growth models used could differ across industries or businesses with the most variation in channel choice (for B2B or B2C businesses), tactics and strategies.
After completing the growth model creation, consumer mapping and channel listing stages, growth teams:
should analyze the funnel and explore relevant data in a bid to identify the biggest areas of opportunity.
Examples of these areas of opportunities include:
- cart abandonment issues
- high bounce rates (percentage relative to your industry)
- low email open rates etc.
The above can be discussed during brainstorm sessions involving departments outside of marketing.
Prioritize the most impactful things and find the most impactful ways to grow the business. The ICE framework is a good way to prioritize, giving teams a weighted view of laid out activities so they can quickly decide which areas to focus on. To use ICE, assign a score of 1–10 or 1–5 to each block and then calculate the total score that best describes the project at hand.
Identify consumer pain points and how you can help make things easier for them.
Set goals using OKRs. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and it is built on the idea that goals are best met by building measurable actions, defining desired outcomes, and carefully monitoring progress along the way.
Conclusion
Growth marketing can have a powerful influence on the success of your business and a solid growth process will ultimately set companies up to win.
