If people are striving hard to drive growth for their business, then they might have come across a word known as “growth hacking”. However, there is no “hacking” involved in the term of growth hacking; it is simply the data-driven marketing being used as a technique to optimize the generation of demands, which is why growth marketing would be a better name for such cases.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is named to the procedure of designing and carrying out experiments to optimize and improve the result of a target area. If the advertisers have certain metrics which they want to increase, then growth marketing could possibly be their savior.
Growth marketing teams are responsible for
Determining areas to test and advance upon
Developing and designing experiments to optimize the identified processes
Carrying out experiments to test hypothesized improvements
Analyzing results and conducting further experimentation as needed
Growth marketers use the scientific method to design and carry out these experiments.
Within an organization, growth marketing is an analytically minded function that focuses more on the data side of marketing than the creative aspects.
While experiments are aimed to improve processes for growth and scalability, growth marketers are required to be comfortable with failure and plan for it too. If advertisers create an experiment and it doesn’t produce the results that they wanted or expected, they need to have the next option lined up. Growth marketers should have solutions ready to address an experiment from all angles, so if one fails, the next step is ready. Meaning that plan B should always be on the cards to run out.
Implementation of Growth Marketing
Growth marketing could be applied to many areas within the business, and all of it is contained in the acronym AAARRR sometimes referred to as pirate metrics which stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention and Referral.
Breaking down of AAARRR
Awareness
Awareness is the brand-building efforts that educate prospects about your brand and solution.
This is encompasses tactics like social media outreach, SEO-optimized content and TOFU (Top of the Funnel) offers.
To address this, marketers might experiment on social media strategies and draw out the trending searches regarding their products and then do the needful. They might test what frequency of posts is most effective for driving blog traffic or what kind of content gets the most engagement.
Acquisition
Acquisition is the process around generating leads and acquiring net new customers, whether that’s through gated content, chat-bots, a free sign-up or something else which works out to acquire the potential customers.
For example, on their homepage, Slack acquires users through an email collection form.
A growth marketer might try and increase the amount of form submissions by experimenting on the messaging, the button orientation and color or the page orientation. Or, might even get the audience to fill short surveys regarding their products or the needs of the customers.
Activation
Activation is getting people to use the product or service they purchase as much or as quickly as possible. Taking the customers onboard with the product sales is part of this process.
For example, Facebook found out that if users added seven friends within their first ten days on the platform, they were extremely likely to return and keep engaging with the platform.
Growth marketers might look at such ways or other ways possible to ensure, what happens by experimenting on how the audience find and add friends, what are the criteria they are keeping in mind, what they are looking for.
Revenue
Revenue involves all the actions that brings money to the organization, like customers paying for a product, signing a contract for the offered services or upgrading their existing product or services.
Growth marketers could address the revenue-related metrics by experimenting on pricing strategies or how the prices are displayed on prices page. They could also examine up-selling tactics, like sending messages when a user is close to their plan’s limit.
A growth marketer might like at a pricing page and conduct experiments around the way the tiers are displayed over there and take suitable references too if needed.
Retention
Retention is keeping customers delighted.
To improve retention, growth marketers should look at how to offer personalized support for customers or how to improve the value of the product that the users gain.
For example, Slack noticed that some people use “command + K” shortcut instead of the “jump to” search bar and gave them the option to hide the search bar instinctively. They tracked the usage of the customer and provided them with enhanced values to deliver better user interactivity.
That personalization helps users discover more value from the product.
Referral
Ideally people are so happy with the product or services they would just refer new businesses, but marketers could also create referral programs to get money out of this.
Tesla offers free supercharger miles in exchange for referrals. A growth marketer could experiment with different incentives or promotional methods around the referral program to increase results and connectivity of the audiences.
Growth marketing can be as minute as changing a button color to as complex as redoing an ongoing process.
Growth marketing isn’t the right marketing method for every company. It requires a solid foundation to grow from, so if the company is still in the startup phase, people should establish themselves before devoting too many resources to growth marketing.
However, if people are at the point where scaling their company is their main goal or they are seeing high growth and need to tweak their marketing efforts to get more ROI, then, they could consider implementing some growth marketing experiments to improve the pirate metrics.