Unicorn’s secret weapon
If you don’t have a growth master in your team yet, go capture one.
Traditional marketing tactics or online channels that have a very short life shelf aren’t enough to grow or scale a business anymore. However, there is a greater opportunity to gather data and learn from customer value exchange in key pivotal moments in their user journey, unlocking sustainable growth.
Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing, product, sales, and other areas of the business to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.
The fundamental difference from traditional marketing is the understanding of the customer funnel. While in traditional marketing they were linear and delivered campaign activations focused on the higher funnel (awareness) or lower funnel (conversion), growth hackers understand customers are always on and therefore growth comes from unlocking the most customer value exchange in key pivotal moments throughout all their journey.
But — what are the ingredients that make this practice successful? All practitioners agree on process, data, and team.
1. Process: Rapid experimentation
Rapid experimentation is an ongoing and data-informed process focused on producing a large number of tests towards a business goal.
So, whether we’re testing to discover (product-market fit, ideal pricing, etc) or testing to optimize (A/B testing of marketing messages, product variations, etc) the value of this process is velocity.
Remember: the best way to develop a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
There are many examples of processes out there. My suggestion to you would be: come up with your own. No one knows your business better than you. You own your business model, proposition and target audience segmentation.
However, make sure you include the basics (and- yes, I’ve included “set goals in the process”!)
1. Analyze
Collecting and analyzing your data to gain customer insight. For this, you can prepare a series of questions, such as, “How do our customers typically behave?”, “What are the characteristics of our best customers?” “What drivers/barriers lead customers to start/stop using our product?”
Apart from surveys and interviews, there are many (free) ways to understand who is our target customer or most valuable user, and why.
2. Set goals
This stage is normally not included in other frameworks until the “prioritizing / ranking” ideas stage. However, I believe it is important to produce ideas towards a business goal to keep focus.
3. Ideate
Get all team members to submit as many ideas as they can think up. All proposals should go through the idea pipeline, which works by offering a structured format to log, track and evaluate all the incoming ideas.
“The Growth Lead has to set up a project management system to coordinate easily the submission and management of ideas, as well as the tracking and reporting of results. The more ideas that go into your pipeline, the better your chances of finding winners that spur growth.” — Sean Ellis, Hacking Growth
There are many project management systems (CRO tools) you can use the Sean Ellis tool, Effective Experiments, or even some Airtable Free Templates. The important thing here focusing on the idea format so they can be tracked easily.
4. Prioritize
There are many scoring systems out there to compare and prioritize ideas. From the ICE model (Sean Ellis approach) to BRASS or PIES model (Growth Tribe). Again, your call.
For ICE scoring:
- Impact — the potential for improvement of your One Metric That Matters and Pirate Metrics?
- Confidence — how confident are you that you’ll get the positive impact you’re looking for?
- Ease — how much time and money will have to be invested to get the result?
and… don’t overthink the scoring. Velocity, remember?
5. Test
Bring ideas before customers and determine which ones deserve to be fully implemented.
At this stage, it’s recommended that you work with a data analyst to come up with strict guidelines so that you produce a reliable set of results.
For example, always use a statistical-confidence interval of 99 percent that indicates a 1 percent margin for error in the results. That way you can be sure that your tests are providing accurate insights.
Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. Being wrong might hurt you a bit. But being slow will kill you. — Jeff Bezos.
2. Insights: Data collection and analysis
Audience segments, most valuable users, customer funnel, conversion rates towards goals, influential channels, drivers and barriers, triggers and rewards, engagement loops…
There are so many things you can measure that it’s sometimes hard to focus. Which is the goal’s One Metric That Matters (OMTM)?
Your North Star Metric is a simple matric that everyone understands and recalls. This is how you quantify the expansion of the value that customers get from your product. Sean Ellis has shared on many occasions Facebook’s NSM is daily active users.
3. People: Cross-functional team
The old pyramid structure falls short in today’s ever-changing world, it’s slow and clunky. The growth mindset, by contrast, is based on sense-and-respond thinking.
While marketing teams are campaign-focused, growth teams are experiment focused. And while marketing teams are made up of marketers, growth teams are made of self-reliant cross-skilled teams.
What does a Growth Master do?
The Growth Manager function typically lives at the intersection of marketing and product development, setting all of the disparate parts of the company working effectively together to drive and accelerate growth measured by a North Star Metric (NSM).
A Growth Master
- has a growth mindset, a task that goes beyond job descriptions
- is obsessed with providing customer insight into user needs, habits, and perceptions
- makes sure the right data infrastructure is in place
- prioritizes growth initiatives and product changes throughout iterations
- is fluent in the full spectrum of acquisition channels at their disposal (paid, owned, earned or shared)
These rare species of professionals remain poorly understood, especially outside Silicon Valley or the startup world as hiring managers or decision-makers often struggle to “fit” them in a job description. This means many still dismiss a T-shaped player is a company’s secret weapon.
There are three levels of growth hacking skills according to Van Gasteren:
- Fundamental skills for Growth Hackers: These skills are about understanding work forms, models and mindset. For example, controlling the Growth Hacking process, the Pirate Funneland the Growth Hacking Mindset.
- Generalistic growth hacking skills: These are skills you’ll need in every task you’re going to do and are therefore necessary skills for all generalists, such as copywriting, behavioral psychology or visual design.
- Specialist growth hacking skills: These are skills are not necessary for every growth hacker, but you will need it when the time comes or the skill is needed for the company you work for. (These are skills you usually develop ‘on the job’ when you’re specializing.)
See the example below from Growth Tribe:
So, whether you’re a challenger or established business in need to grow or scale, and still don’t have a growth hacker in the team go hire one! There are very few of these unicorns, so if you find one make sure to capture it safely.
