Developing Growth Mindset For Successful Marketeering

Launching a marketing campaign — whether it’s a new product launch, reaching out to old/inactive subscribers, or an attempt at driving engagement or buzz on social media, has always — to a large extent, been a hit-or-miss proposition.

According to the decades-old formula, you write a marketing plan, pitch it to your boss, numbers look good, funds are disbursed, assemble your team of Adops and creatives, introduce the campaign, and hit the launch button, the campaign is live, you are tracking results and somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you, the result is going south.

What do you do? Come back to the drawing board, but because you are unsure of what exactly could be wrong, you tweak as many things as you can — one variable at a time — which can be daunting, to be honest, then you hit publish again, and watch and pray that this time it actually works.

This is the traditional marketing circle most marketers rigmarole daily, but it’s time to embrace a more strategic approach to marketing — where you can take some time to test and know what will work for your campaign, it’s called Growth marketing.

After over 5 years of practicing holistic digital marketing, ideating and implementing successful marketing campaigns in PPC, SEO, social media, and Email marketing, it’s time to make a shift from the traditional approach to marketing and embrace growth marketing.

More on growth marketing and why it is really important for me — and to anyone looking to drive tangible business bottom-line growth with digital marketing below. But first, housekeeping.

What is Growth Marketing?

To fully grasp the concept of growth marketing, we will compare it with traditional marketing which most marketers are already familiar with. When executing traditional marketing campaigns, the focus is usually on the top-of-the-funnel goals — like awareness and acquisition, however, when approaching marketing with a growth concept, we are looking at driving growth across all levels of the funnel.

With Growth marketing, the goal is not to use all marketing channels and tactics at your disposal, but to use the single most effective marketing element in your marketing stack to reach your audience at every stage of the funnel.

This single most effective approach is not identified by assumption, but by a well-thought-out and executed experimentation process. Running growth campaigns always starts with experimenting, which begins with a hypothesis.

Think of Growth marketing as a scientific approach to marketing at a highly accurate and predictable level.

Growth marketing is flying on the lean startup methodology concept;

• Define a hypothesis — a statement that needs to be proven right or wrong by the experiment
• Find the fastest way to test and get an answer to this hypothesis — usually with a sample
• Design an experiment that can validate or invalidate your hypothesis

With growth marketing, you run experiments to get data that you will learn from to improve your campaign as you grow. By doing this, you are reducing any chances of making big mistakes that you may only come to know of at the end of the campaign.

Experimentation As The Defining Trait of Growth

As we have established that experimentation is the bedrock of running growth campaigns, start by choosing a goal, then find the fastest most effective way to reach that goal via an experiment.

3 Layers to a simple experiment

• Which channel is best for this customer? Email? SMS? Social media? Ads?
• What is the right message/offer that will attract this customer?
• Which campaign, message, and CTA from our tests is most loved by this customer?

The objective here is to know precisely what each customer loves and optimize their unique experience.

You don’t need to think of an experiment as a waste of time and/or money, if it is truly an experiment, then even if it fails, you learned something.

Growth Is A Process, Not A Hack.

Growth is a process, of constantly learning. There is no single hack to growth. So while some people may consider a growth hack as one button that you pull and everything starts working, growth marketing is the direct opposite, a series of experiments that reveals the best-suited approach to the desired result.

What Makes A Successful Growth Marketing

According to John McBride of CXL institute, there are three main components that people get evaluated on as growth marketers;

1. Channel expertise: As a growth marketer, you need to have a bird’s eye view of how digital marketing channels work. Email, social media, SEO, Facebook ads, Google ads, etc, generally you need to understand how they work so that you can use them both in experimentation and in optimization steps to get the desired result. An experience or mastery in any one of them is also a huge plus.
2. Analytics capability: Growth marketing is all about experiments. Your understanding of Analytics will be useful in analyzing the results of the experiments you have performed and making meaningful decisions from the interpretation of data. Excel skills, SQL, and Tableau are very valuable here.
3. Strategic thinking: This is like the umbrella skill you need to have, experimentation begins with asking the right questions and looking out for the right indicators. If you are running the wrong test, you will get the wrong result and the entire campaign will be a disaster. The ability to analyze and make good decisions on what to test is paramount as a growth marketer. The person with this skill will typically lead the other growth marketers members through the experimentation process.

Tips on Becoming a Growth-minded Marketer

• Start with the area of marketing that you are good at
• Gain channel expertise and work your way to the other two areas mentioned above
• Learn Analytics — there are several courses out there on analytics, I recommend this one on CXL that will teach you from beginner to advanced analytics skills needed to become a growth marketer.
• Read growth hack case studies, understand growth models
• Have the hunger for growth — growth marketing is a mindset
• Get as many hands-on skills as you can
• Know that you don’t know — people who claim to know usually don’t know much
• Try out your hands with real proposals for the businesses you will like to work with.