Growth Hacking 101: How to set up an experiment?
Secret Tip #3 — Make sure it is a user-centric approach
If you want to know more about the basics of Growth Marketing and what the hype is all about (with examples!), click on the link below:
Now that you know the basics, let’s dig deep:
Step 1 — Building a Growth Process
There are primarily 3 phases to any growth model:
- Defining the growth model
- Mapping your customer journey
- Identifying all your growth channels
The most commonly used growth model is Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for startups. This is also known as the AARRR model.
A — Acquisition
A — Activation
R — Retention
R — Revenue
R — Referrals
After you have identified your growth model, it’s important to map your customer journey.
I cannot stress enough on how important it is to view your customer journey from a customer’s lens and not your business’s lens.
This is the difference between — “Which widget can I add to the landing page to get more conversions?” to “What value can I add to the landing page that will be more valuable for the customer?”
After the customer journey is mapped, you need to focus on the various growth channels that are available to you. This can vary from one business to another.
For example, one business might identify its acquisition channels as SEO, SEM, paid ads etc. Primarily, the acquisition channels refer to the platforms where your customers find out about you.
Always remember — for the customer, it is an holistic experience so it’s imperative that you check each step of their journey and make the necessary changes to make it better.
Step 2 — Defining your growth model
Once you have identified your growth model and mapped your customer journey, it is important to define your growth model.
There are infinite metrics in the world of Digital Marketing but identify the ones that are important to your business and give importance to the same.
If you’re able to set up goals based on where the customer is in his/her journey, it will be easier to map metrics and success. Primarily, if you know where your customer is in their journey, you will know what to do next.
The channels and metrics will differ from one business to another.
For example:
- E-commerce Website — channels for retention, revenue, activation, are website optimisation, and probably email marketing.
- Mobile App — mobile app marketing, email marketing, in-app marketing, push marketing, mobile optimisations etc.
Step 3 — Quarterly Growth Planning
Once you have mapped the initial journey of the customer, you can check and recheck it every quarter to see if you are on the right path.
Identify the areas of opportunity. For example:
a) Are you getting only a few visitors each month and is that the problem?
b) Are too many people converting and is that the problem?
If you’re able to identify the opportunity (based on data, not guessing), you’re in a much better position to achieve overall success.
It is also important to set the right OKR (Objective and Key Results). This can be done once every quarter.
In OKR, Objective is basically a high level goal — increase activations, grow monthly active users, etc. and the Key Result is the metric that decides if you have achieved your goal or not.
It is vital to keep only achievable OKRs for your team so that they feel the result is achievable. If the goals are very ambitious or too difficult to achieve, they will get used to not achieving goals and OKR will lose meaning.
Best case scenario — you can have 2 sets of OKRs, one which is achievable (baseline goal) and another which is more difficult to crack (stretch goal).
This way, your team will know your expectations and work towards achieving the same.
Bonus Tip — Brainstorming
I have always believed that an effective brainstorming session with mixed teams is the key to generate extraordinary ideas in an organisation.
Most people are not in favour of brainstorming because they do it wrong — they invite individuals from various teams in a room and ask them for ideas for a particular business objective.
This is simply a waste of time.
The effective way to conduct a brainstorming session is to invite individuals from different rooms and someone from your team (or you) should explain the current customer journey. You need to take them through each step one after the next.
This method has two benefits — for one, you can understand the current journey clearly and for two, ask people specific questions wrt a particular step in the customer journey.
To take it up a notch, you can also look at competitor brands and see what are the steps they’re implementing to ensure a successful customer journey.
To take it up another notch, you can send a cold email from Airbnb’s team and ask why their referral program was successful.
If you don’t set specific goals for your brainstorming, you will leave the room after an hour thinking it was a waste of time.
Also, make sure that your team members are not suggesting random ideas off the top of their heads. It should be data driven such as, if we do x, we can get y results, and it affects our overall metric in z way.
This way, you will get more logical experiments that can be implemented soon to get the required results. Assumptions that are rooted in data can give rise to smarter experiments.
It can be really difficult to get started and run a successful growth marketing experiment. Yes, you need to look at and identify various factors that will affect your overall business.
But, an efficiently executed growth marketing exercise can put your business leaps and bounds ahead of a regular timeline.
These lessons are explained in detail in CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree. The lessons are crafted nicely with tons of additional reading material that enabled me to understand the concepts in depth.
