5 burning questions about Growth Marketing and their answers
By: Pranav Vashishth Thapak
Tags: Digital Marketing, Growth Hacking, Growth Mindset, Growth

[People who know me Understand my interest in the field of Digital Marketing. I was recently exposed to a new way of marketing that is called “Growth Marketing”. In the pursuit of knowledge in the area, I came across an organization called CXL Institute that has expertise in Training in Digital Marketing. I was drawn towards this specific collection of courses called Growth marketing Minidegree. This promises the learner “Advanced Level Skills” in Growth marketing.

This minidegree course is very appropriately named. Since it encompasses a total of 7 Tracks and 33 courses. Every course has its Examination which has a 90% lower limit of qualification. The last leg of the program is the ‘Final Growth Marketing Exam’ which again has the minimum qualification lower limit of 90%.

An interesting thing about the CXL is that it gives a unique guarantee to its learners. It is “Guaranteed return on time spent or your money back”. It is a bold statement and shows confidence in the value proposition of the “time Spent”.]

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a current buzzword in the tech space, especially in B2C or C2C segment. It is often misunderstood as just a series of ‘out of the book’ steps that could help a business grow, rather it is a mindset. To understand the growth marketing mindset. It is essential to understand the difference in the ideology of growth marketing and traditional marketing.

What is the difference between Growth marketing and Traditional marketing

The First difference between the two is the focus of the marketer practicing the phenomena. The traditional marketers focus on the top of the funnel. It focuses on awareness and acquisition. On the other hand, Growth marketers focus on the entire funnel. One can state that growth marketing is a more holistic way of marketing. Moreover, A growth marketer’s job is to drive growth across the business in any way he can.

The second difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing is the process followed. Growth marketing depends heavily on rapid experimentation. This is how growth marketers drive growth all across the funnel. They experiment with different programs, campaigns, product features, etc. They may increase conversion, create better customer experiences, or generate data that can be used to learn and improve the overall business process. The experiment helps to continuously optimize the funnel focusing on different aspects of the business at a time. This is also the fundamental behind the lean startup strategy. A growth marketer starts by admitting that he does not know what the customer wants and is looking forward to finding ways to get that information.

On the other hand, traditional marketers invest heavily in building the product for the customer base on a hypothesis. This can be risky because of the huge downside. If the hypothesis turns out to be wrong the investment in terms of money, resources, and time is wasted. This can be nobody’s ideal scenario but this is still highly plausible.

What is Growth Marketing Strategy?

The growth marketing strategy is to define a hypothesis upfront and find the quickest and most efficient way of testing the hypothesis, i.e. to implement an experiment. It will be fine if the hypothesis turns out to be incorrect because even the incorrect hypothesis will lead to learnings about what the customer doesn’t want or does not care about. This learning can be used to formulate the next hypothesis.

A typical argument for the hypothesis will be “I think our customers like X, I’m going to run an experiment to see if that’s true though a messaging campaign. If it turns out to be true we can start a video ad campaign about X and see the response to a wider customer base”

A growth marketer will continuously test out the best way to drive growth through quick and low investment experiments.

Whereas, a traditional marketer will come up with the best single campaign that is supposed to take the company’s growth forward single-handedly. This as mentioned above can give huge returns and massive losses in terms of time and resources.

The reality is that most of the time the marketers are not right or are not right to the extent they assume. It is only smart to run a lot of individual campaigns with minimal requirement of resources before the set deadline of the achievement of the goal.

As repeated feedback on the campaign ideas increases the probability of the subsequent campaigns being successful. The repeated feedbacks will not only help to achieve the current objective but will also help to achieve the following goals.

All the learning will get compiled into a database of the customers and their likes and dislikes, what channels work for which customer, what messaging impacts the customer the most.

What are the growth experiments? How one can implement them?

Growth marketing is the process of constant learning and improving as a business by constant learning. The learning process starts with experimentations. The importance of the experiments in the growth process of the business is appropriately understood from the above paragraphs.

The step by step process of experimentation:

Setting up a Goal Defining the process to be followed in the experiments Gather learning Repeat from 1.

While analyzing the result of the experiment, It is essential to take other factors into the consideration. The metric that is monitored is rarely independent factors. This means that the metric can vary because of other factors than the experiment.

For example, an E-commerce website that sells groceries online. The sale of the merchandise may increase during an experiment. This should ideally confirm the hypothesis but the sales may increase because maybe it rained last week and users prohibited themselves to go outside hence ordered online.

So instead of one long-running experiment, it is advisable to run a series of five to ten smaller experiments rather than one 3 week-long experiments. Or use of A/B testing is also advisable to test an experiment. This will tune out all the extraneous factors that may affect the metric.

Upon the completion of the experiment that would follow either rejection or confirmation of the hypothesis would always gather learning about the customer. And further experiments can be defined for further optimization of the processes.

How to get the real result out of the experiments?

Further delving deep into the learnings one can see that the same messaging or user Interface element will affect different users differently. The importance of certain factors will vary from user to user.

The real power of rapid experimentation can be seen when the business will understand the ideal positioning, pricing, offers, message, experience, for each customer individually. Imagine the power of tailoring a custom message to an individual customer that resonates with him/her completely. It will give immense pleasure to the customer and will add a loyal user to the business.

Following the one size fits all strategy is not going to help the business to grow at least not to a great extent. This is where a business can differentiate itself from the competition. This is the holy grail of growth. If the business satiates its users’ requirements to this extent. The company will not only see significant growth in business performance but will also experience brand loyalty from its users.

Why Growth hacking is Important?

The incremental growth acquired through the experiment will be perpetual and will have a compounding effect on the top line. As the growth that has been achieved is not because of some independent event that the business can not control. The growth has been achieved because the users have found the solution by the business worthwhile.

Understanding users’ likes and dislikes, things they care about, things they would like to use the business’s services or product is essential in the current competitive paradigm. If a marketer is not learning about his users, 50% of the marketing efforts made by him will go to waste. He will be stuck sending emails, creating landing pages, wasting efforts.

It is now essential that businesses should try to reduce the wastage of marketing efforts. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” a quote by John Wanamaker gets the essence of why Growth marketing is so important in contemporary times because Growth marketing is the continuous process of finding an answer to the question the quote raises.

Why Growth hacking is the Start-Up Sutra?

Growth Hacking emerged as a term for multiple reasons. One can easily see the similarity between growth hacking and the Lean Start-Up methodology. The reason is that the lean start-up method is the founding principle that gave birth to Growth or Growth Hacking.

Growth Marketing is the way to hack together a minimum viable product. The simplest version of the intended tech product and see if it works and delivers on the intended value proposition. That is why hackathons are called hackathons, a team of engineers spends just a weekend to come with a solution to a problem. They do not intend to make the most elegant or perfect application. Just a minimal version of the problem-solving bunch of code and a series of tests to check whether it serves the purpose or not.

The same methodology applies to growth hacking, building the minimum viable marketing campaign that you can run and test them to learn whether or not it’s effective or not. Hacking similar to the mindset of someone who wants to work quickly without finding the perfect solution to find the fastest, best solution. Growth hacking is not a buzzword or a panacea or a series of generic steps that a company would take and turn their growth trajectory upwards that would make them grow 10x or 5x. There is no “one hack” that would grow your business. Growth is about a process. There isn’t one hack, it’s a series of hacks that fold into a broader process about constantly experimenting and learning so that you can accelerate learning and get to the result and the end goal faster.