Growth Hacking or Growth Marketing?! None. Aim for a Growth System.
Much being said about all these terms I decided to do a simple clarification and explain why you should you focus on a Growth System.
- Growth Marketing
In simple terms, growth marketing is “the process of testing marketing strategies aligned with KPIs and measure the performance of it.”
More so than traditional marketing, growth marketing focuses on maximizing the lifetime value of a customer, while minimizing the cost and time it takes to do it.
2. Growth Hacking
Growth marketing is often referred to as “growth hacking.” The idea behind growth hacking is that you find some little tactic or some little way to grow a list or grow a campaign, or get exposure, that was maybe a little bit under the table or a little bit different than what other people are doing.
3. None of the above
Instead of keep searching for a little tatic, that will create a growth. Or even a strategy, why not consider the idea of a systematic, repeatable, consistent system in a way that allows them to clearly serve your objectives for the business in a long term?
Meaning, to identify potential opportunities or hacks or tactics, whatever we want to call them, but put them in an order and put them in a priority, and analyze and measure them, not around just growth for growth’s sake, but growth to drive objectives.
4. Growth System
The idea here is first understand why you want growth. And often defining why you want to growth results in prioritazing your objectives.
Once you define your main objective, which may be; profit, net sales, increase database, find influencers, increase mentions and so on… You will have to first analyze your channels and see how they are performing related to this objective.
It’s important that you focus on one so that you can make decisions about everything that comes in building your growth system.
A great deal of this relies on mining the channels that are going to give you the greatest opportunity for a return on investment.
Remember: you can’t growth what you can’t measure
A growth system is a hypothesis testing cycle. You will find a hypothesis, tested and review it. And here are some simple steps to develop it:
1st step is to look at your business today and identify clearly where your business comes from.
- What channel today increase my business? Is it word of mouth, referrals, paid ads?
- Is it search engine optimization, keyword planning?
- If you look at the way that you convert clients today, where is that coming from?
- Where do your leads come from?
Start really analysing those channels a little deeper and you can discover a confluence of channels.
2nd step — The idea behind confluence it’s to discover if you have two channel that combined together will change the dynamics of your business.
For example, if referrals is how you get most of your business, maybe you can create ways to develop a community and improve the creatiaon of interactive content making your channel greater. But we also start looking for ways that you can use a another new channel that’s going to enhance our referral channel.
3rd step — Now that you have identified your core channels and started looking at ways that you can combine core channels, you will start to develop a list of projects, or experiments, that you can measure on how your core channels can achieve your objective.
4th step — Measure it. Identify the metrics and KPIs is part of the testing. How these core channels combined or by itselfs are performing to you get to your objective?
5th step — Make the changes and re-do hypothesis
After testing your channels and measuring the first results, maybe you will want to continue to increase this objective, or maybe you want to test another.
From my point of view it’s better to insist in the same objective, until you had the change to make all the channels combinations as possible. Once you have exhausted all the alternatives, move to the next objective in the customer journey.
What to avoid?
- Changing hypothesis every month. If you get off plan, you probably won’t be serving your objectives.
- Overthinking this - develop a project,develop a plan, and a tactic, and launch. Launch quickly, get it out there.
- Beware of false metrics. Things like traffic may look really good. You’ve run a campaign and all of a sudden traffic spikes. But did it lead to the real objective? So don’t lean on false metrics.
- Accomodation — once you adopt this mindset, you’re never done. You should never think about a growth system as being done because you’re constantly reiterating, amplifying, improving, documenting, and then you go out there and you try it again.
more info on: John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing
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