Growth mindset: growth vs traditional marketing

This is a short summary of my Growth Marketing Minidegree on CXL Institute.

There are too many differences between traditional brand marketing and growth marketing.

The first is around what do you focus on as a marketer. So, brand marketing traditionally is focused on top of the funnel, so awareness and acquisition.

Growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel, so your job as a growth marketer is to drive growth across the business in any way that you can. While focus area is definitely important and is definitely a defining trait of growth marketing as a function. Even more importantly I think the second characteristic is that the process of growth is driven by experimentation and that is like the main difference between brand marketing and growth marketing.

The best way to drive growth across all areas of the funnel is to constantly experiment with different programs, campaigns, product features, et cetera, that increase conversion, create better customer experiences, generate data that you can then use to learn and improve so that you can continually optimize your funnel, grow the business regardless of kind of what your focus is.

And so running experiments to generate data, learn something about your customers and then constantly improve is how you grow as a business, as an individual and that’s how you constantly improve your process and get you to your goals faster.

The Experimentation Process in Growth Marketing

The experimentation process is around choosing that goal, and then defining a series of experiments that you can use to achieve that goal and gather learnings along the way. Say, for example, you’re a growth marketer at Instacart, and you are responsible for increasing retention rates of existing users at Instacart. You had a quarter to come up with a plan and run a series of experiments in order to move the metric from, say, 50% month-on-month retention to 60% month-on-month retention.

A/B Testing

Traditional brand marketing, A, they probably wouldn’t be focused on this metric. It would probably be a product team or probably just a product team. But the approach would be to run an email campaign to these users reminding them to use Instacart.

Don’t set it up as an A/B test. Just send them an email. If after they get the email, people buy more groceries or come back to the site more often. You can do that a couple times over the course of the quarter and each time you send an email you can see if there is a lift in retention rate, or does it drive traffic to the website.

But what you’re not learning there is whether or not the message that you’re sending or the email you’re sending is the right message or the best message, or exactly how much lift are you getting and retention from sending this email. Maybe it’s actually not being caused by the email. Maybe they’re getting this email, and then there happens to be something else that’s going on that’s causing an overall increase in retention rates. Maybe it rained that week and people are particularly lazy and are ordering more from Instacart. If you don’t run as an experiment, you don’t actually know if the campaign that you ran, is the experiment that you ran that is driving this improved performance of this metric, or is it something else entirely.

So what I would do is I would come up with a series of 5, 10 experiments that I want to run that I think would increase retention rates. The way you do that is you come up with a hypothesis. Say, if people get reminded that Instacart is convenient, they actually use this email, they send it to me and they say, ”Save yourself an hour this week. ”Use Instacart instead of going to the grocery store. ”Set it up as an A/B test. See if the people that receive the email actually buy more groceries or come back to the site more often than people that don’t see the email. Then you learn does the email itself actually increase retention rate or purchase rate of customers versus not getting the email at all.

Messaging

If you learn that sending emails is a good idea, and actually increases purchases, you can then move on to the next hypothesis, which could be: what is the right message to send people? If sending emails is good, how can I send them the best email that’s going to lead to the most purchases and the most retention?

So that’s when you start testing messaging. You say maybe it’s about convenience and saving time. Maybe it’s about pricing. Be like, “You will save 20% by using Instacart”,or some random thing like that. Then you can learn: do customers care more about the convenience factor or do they care more about price?

Then by setting it us as an experiment you know exactly based on purchase rates and retention rate of the convenience test group versus the pricing test group which message is more compelling. Potentially, you can go even a layer deeper and learn which customers exactly care more about pricing or convenience, because realistically, not everybody cares about the same thing.

So at the end of the day, the ideal state of any growth process is to get to the point where you know what is the right message, the right offer, the right customer experience for each individual customer in your business in order to drive the best experience and the best results.

It’s the thing that makes failure into a learning opportunity, which is extremely valuable. Because that means even as you experiment more, as long as you’re getting some things right, even one out of every four, then you’re doing pretty well, and you’re only going to get better, and your success rates only going to increase over time.

What makes a successful growth marketer?

There are three main components to being a successful growth marketer and three things that most people get evaluated on in terms of their growth marketing skill set.

Channel level expertise

Whether it’s email marketing, Push, SEO, Facebook ads, just understanding how the channel works and having at least some experience. So channel level expertise is good. You want some but I would not over-index on expertise.

Analytical capability

I think this is really important, whether it’s just Excel skills or SQL skills is like the next level up. I think being able to extract data to gather insights, to analyse your own experiments, and just use data is like the lifeblood of growth. So being able to get your hands on data and interpret it and use it to make better decisions, super important.

Strategic Thinking and Project Management

This is the key component of becoming a leader in a growth team. This is like a product manager or a growth manager. This is their sweet spot. It’s being able to come up with good ideas, figuring out how you actually pick the right experiments, how do you prioritize your roadmap, how do you actually think about your customers’ experience and the customer journey to identify big opportunities.

And then also work with other stakeholders cause like growth is cross functional and if you are not particularly good at working with creatives or an engineering team or an analytics team, you’re going to have a hard time driving projects end to end. So it’s like that cross functional ability and like strategic thinking that’s the key for getting to the next level in growth I think.

If you’re looking to advance your career in Growth Marketing, I highly recommend the CXL Institute Minidegree.