Growth marketing is a comprehensive funnel approach that helps your brand in acquiring more engaged users. By engaging and nurturing your existing customers, you can retain them and effectively turn them into your brand advocates. This makes it inherently different from traditional marketing and even from its apparently analogous term ‘growth hacking’. It’s spectacular how this holistic marketing approach has helped build billions of dollars of equity for brands like Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Dropbox, Reddit, LinkedIn and more.
The idea seems simple but why is it that most companies struggle to achieve this elusive growth? What do these high-growth companies have that most companies don’t? It is some secret growth hack that skyrocketed these businesses overnight? Well, the truth is, they simply followed a solid growth marketing process. It’s all about having a sound process in place rather than banking heavily on tactics.
The Importance of Growth Process
According to the state of Conversion Optimization Report
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- Just 32% of small companies (with less than 500 employees) follow a structured optimization process.
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- For larger companies, the number increases to only 42%.
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- 26% of all companies optimize team “only when necessary”.
So, a well-structured growth process, though backed by growth experts, is still not the industry norm. It’s important that every company looks ahead and determine it’s growth trajectory. Think about it; on an average you are dealing with an enormous amount of data related to your marketing. Instead of getting caught up in the vanity metrics, you need to focus on what matters – transforming users to long-term brand advocates.
This is only possible with a clear and comprehensive understanding of your ideal customer so that you can use that info to deliver amazing experiences for your users. Without this strong foundation and an adherence to a growth process, there is no case for growth.
Perquisites to implement a growth process
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- First of all, have a business model canvas in place. A business model canvas is a global standard used by millions of companies to describe, design, challenge, and pivot their business model. Make sure you don’t jump into the growth process before you have a business model canvas validated to around 80%.
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- The second step is to create your Value Proposition Canvas. It’s associated with the business model canvas & addresses real pain points and how your business is aligned to provide solutions to those pain points.
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- The last step is to have a clear understanding of your target audience and an ideal buyer persona whom you will be talking to. Define the benefits of your solutions to the target audience.
Implementing the Growth Process
To implement the growth process, firstly you need to map your consumer journey to your business objectives. Use the Pirate funnel – a KPI-based framework which can be used for any business.
Customers go through 6 steps on their journey:
Referring to the funnel above, create two colums. The first colum addresses what these questions mean for your business. The second column, a more data-friven approach, defines each metric for that consumer segmentation, that you can track easily and accurately.
Once you come up with the aforementioned chart then identify the one metric that matters, across the entire growth journey of your business. That’s the metric that demands your enitre attention.
The G.R.O.W.S. Process
Growth processes are designed to make both ideation and execution smarter and more efficient. There are a lot of different processes but here is how most of them work fundamentally.
Ideate. Implement. Analyse. Repeat
This growth process can be adapted for any type of business or any function of marketing as long as it’s done purposefully and diligently.
The last step important – loop the above-mentioned steps. Keep on experimenting the ideas and finding the optimal one that works to grow your business. As a growth marketing agency, we follow this growth process across our teams of dedicated growth marketing experts. As a result, we have helped numerous businesses grow for the past ten years.
Our highly involved strategies cater to the entire funnel; we try newer hypotheses, put them to the test and quickly zero in on what works.
If you are looking to grow your business with us, feel free to get in touch