Hey All, I have recently been honored by the CXL Institute and have joined their Growth Marketing Mini Degree Program. So I will be publishing a few posts reviewing their amazing course and giving a rundown of everything I learn.
Ok so Growth Marketing. What is Growth Marketing? Growth Marketing is designing and conducting experiments to improve your metrics. Growth Marketing like Performance Marketing have become buzzwords with hardly anyone understanding what they mean.
What do you need to be a Growth Marketer according to John McBride?
- Growth Mindset
- Experimentation as a defining trait
- Looking at failures as learning opportunities
- Analytical Skills
- Strategic Thinking
- Channel Expertise
Growth Mindset
What makes a growth marketer stand out from amongst the crowd is their hunger, curiosity and ability to learn. Obviously these three things cant be taught, but everyone has passion for something, so if your passion is growth then you are good.
Experimentation as a defining trait
Experimentation is choosing a goal and then designing a series experiment to achieve that goal and learn more about your customer. What that means is essentially if you want to grow you need to understand customer psych and use that to your advantage. What experimentation does is in short it allows you to test out a variety of solutions before you commit to one. So step one you build a hypothesis, for example with groceries you know that customers who order once are likely to order again, so what you want to do is bring them onboard as subscribers for a year so you can retain customers.
Your hypothesis is an educated guess about the process, now you need to build on that by brainstorming growth ideas. Build a strategy for growth using the best ideas you have. Now you need to research, best way is to do competition research see who is doing something similar what potential pitfalls they have. See if your strategy makes sense. If it doesn’t time to abandon it and make a new strategy. Next design the experiment, write down your hypothesis and strategy. Written down makes it easier to focus. Run the experiment and perform a data analysis. Experiments take time so let it run for a while.
Analytics Skills
Speaking of Analytical Skills, Analytical Skills covers a wide variety of tools but you don’t need to learn everything, pick one tool for example SQL or Excel or Tableau. The purpose behind analytical skills is to make sure you understand the data that’s coming your way. You run an experiment but you cant read the data you got, that makes your experiment completely useless to you. The most important tool in your bag is your ability to see patterns, trends and make inferences from that. As long as you are making meaningful conclusions it doesn’t matter if your hypothesis is right or wrong.
Looking at failures as learning opportunities
As the saying goes You can learn how to learn a bike if you are scared to fall. There is no such thing as failure, there is an opportunity to learn more and improve. If you are scared to experiment and do new things, growth Marketing is probably not for you. Even in failures you have the opportunity to learn more about your customers and their thought process. Failures can lead you to more hypothesizes and more experiments. All ways grow upwards.
Strategic Thinking
Strategic Thinking is setting goals and objectives and working towards them. Personally I apply Lean Startup Methodology to my strategies because I am eager to learn if my process is working or not. All good leaders and managers must learn strategic thinking if they want to be good at managing their teams and making sure human capital is not wasted.
Can you learn strategic thinking? Yes, without knowing it, you are probably already applying strategic thinking. For instance, your mother has a birthday coming up and you want to bake her a cake. You print out a list of ingredients, go shopping, preheat the oven, following the recipe and viola you have a cake. The above is an example of strategic thinking. You set a goal, you made a plan and you got the result you wanted.
You can develop Strategic skills by asking strategic questions, observing and reflecting and considering opposing ideas. You know you are a strategic thinker when you are always learning, you seek advice when you don’t know the answer, mindless repetition bores and frustrates you, you are decisive when needed.
You can move from tactical to strategic thinking by delegating the small stuff and empowering your team. Strategy Leadership is very important for an organization focused on growth.
Channel Expertise
What marketing channels are you good at/ have experience in. Marketing Channels are many and far between. Channels include SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing, Paid Acquisition. If you have experience in Marketing Channels your path to growth marketing becomes easier. If you don’t have experience you need to get some, for example for social media you can start your own page, work on personal branding. That has two advantages: you get your name out and you learn more in the process.
Similarly for email marketing, you can learn how to automate Mailchimp, they have a free tier where you can send up-to 1000 emails. There is only so much courses and tutorials can teach you, you have to get your hands dirty. Experience is what matters and experience is what you need to build on. No one is asking you to be a full stack Marketer but having an understanding of the basics means you are already one step ahead.
For experimentation and learning you can spend money learning if you want to learn paid acquistion, but the rest of the channels are mostly free if you want to play around with them. It’s important to understand most channels since as a growth marketer this is what you will be building on.
If you are looking to break into Growth Marketing, remember while analytical skills, strategic thinking and channel expertise are important what is most important is your drive to learn and improve.