What I learned about digital marketing during my first weeks at Growth Channel

Note: You can read the original version of this article on my LinkedIn profile.

I have just recently embarked upon a new career track as a Marketing Trainee for an exciting project, Growth Channel.

Take a second and imagine a person who is completely new to Growth Marketing (GM), as if they have arrived in an unknown country and need help with navigation. Eventually through asking questions, reading books about local culture and by talking to community members that person is able to better understand what that country is about. This is what happened to me when I started learning about Growth Marketing.

What is Conversion funnel?

If any of the readers of this content are new to marketing, then I will take this opportunity to tell you what components of marketing intrigued me the most. While reading about its distinct features, what I found really cool was the understanding that growth marketing spreads itself throughout the entire conversion funnel, whereas, digital marketers typically cover only Awareness, Acquisition, Activation elements of conversion funnel.

Think of yourself as somebody who has a website. Obviously, you are interested in drawing as many users as possible to your website. The first step you take is raise awareness about the product or services you are offering on your website. Users visit your website, because they are interested in the product you are offering. But you would agree with me that just attracting visitors is not enough. You also want the visitors to stay on your website and take meaningful action. For example, you want the visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. In the marketing world this meaningful action is called “Acquisition”.

In addition to subscribing to your newsletter, you also can’t wait to see what kind of experience the users have had with your product. Did they like it? If you were able to get your users to say “wow!” after experiencing your product, then it means that you have activated these users. This is called “Activation”.

However, activating the users is not enough. Imagine you are in love and eventually your partner tells you that they love you. You would still be concerned and bother yourself with the thought that what if my partner of the sudden realizes that they don’t like me anymore and decide to leave. What is unique about GM is that you keep thinking about different ways of keeping the users of your website happy, so they would continue using your product. In the GM world this meaningful process is called “Retention”.

Last but not the least, I am sure you realize that getting more visitors to your website as you work on keeping the existing users must still be your priority. Therefore, you are taking actions so the visitors you have been retaining on your website bring in more visitors by telling other people how great your product is. This process is called “Referral”.

Micro-segmentation

After learning about conversion funnel, any thoughtful growth marketer would wonder over the question, how do we ensure that users stay on our website and keep using our product? How do we target them? The answer to these questions lies in the questions themselves.

Growth marketer targets these users by dividing them into different micro-segments. Micro segmentation allows you to categorize your users based on their geographic and demographic traits, and what kind of behavioral and lifestyles patterns users demonstrate.

You can more effectively target your users and tailor personalized messages/content to your users once you are sure that you have enough information about the geographic and demographic traits, and behavioral and lifestyle patterns of your users. For example, you may determine that some of your users are frequent browsers, whereas some are first time visitors. Understanding these different behavior patterns about your users may present you with an opportunity to get these users to use your products by designing different personalized messages and content tailored to a specific micro-segment.

Artificial Intelligence

Another cool element of GM is that everything I talked about earlier — conversion funnel, micro-segmentation, targeted and personalized messages is supported by increasingly more accessible and easier to use technological infrastructure — Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI provides growth marketers with the necessary technological support to improve the customer journey. For example, one of my favorite products of AI are the chatbots. Wait a second? Chat? Bot? They sound familiar, don’t they? At the same time, it can be confusing, at least for me. Chatbot is a very cool tool that has replaced human labor with artificial intelligence empowered customer support experience.

I found out that “people” we have been lately chatting with on service company websites are actually bots. The most intriguing feature of chatbots is that AI gives you an opportunity to collect data about customers’ interests and preferences. Later you can use this data for designing your future growth marketing steps and target the customers through personalized messages and content.

To wrap this up

Growth marketing supported by sophisticated AI infrastructure has elevated user vs content and product provider experience to a totally different level. Companies can now better target micro-segmented customers through personalized messages with the vision of improving the lives of their customers and accordingly, increase their revenue. Customers in return can get the best content or product experience from providers and gain substantial value by getting access to the best products that fit their interests and preferences. GM is a never-ending experience that requires consistency, ongoing commitment and openness to emotionally and financially costly failure with a promise of meaningful reward.

In this post, I tried to paint a picture of a person that is excited about acquiring new GM skills and knowledge. However, anybody that has embarked upon a new career track understands that new beginnings present new challenges. I would be very interested in listening to your experience, if any of you took a similar path. What was the main challenge that you encountered when changing your career path and learning something completely new?