Growth Marketing & Marketing Throw Experiments

**DISCLAIMER: In the last week, I started to study online Growth Marketing mini degree at CXL as part of my efforts to understand marketing, data, and business better. I’m not a marketing expert (yet), and it’s important to know I haven’t trained practically all that I will introduce you to in this article. I will share some of mine. Insights and thoughts about what I learned in the last week with CXL.**

In this article, I will introduce how I got interested in growth marketing, what growth marketing is, and growth marketing through experiments.

I’ve been interested in marketing for the last 3 years, mostly as a hobby. I see marketing as a box where you have the part of working with data, understanding human behavior, the creative side, some technical work, and strategic thinking.

The combination of all those different worlds attracted me to be interested in marketing in the first place, especially the combination of data, creativity, and understanding of human behavior.

A few months ago, I first heard about the term “Growth Marketing”, I researched a little bit on the internet and got the general concept of what it should mean. However, I found many different answers and terms.

So what is growth marketing?

Your job as a growth marketer is, precisely as it sounds, to drive growth across the business in any way you can.

Your focus as a growth marketer is on all of the funnels and not just on one metric like retention and acquisition (of course that if you have a growth team, someone will focus on retention, someone else on the acquisition, etc…. the point is that when you build a growth process and model you look at the entire funnel and not just on the part of it, more about it later).

The ideal state of the growth process is to get to the point where you know the right message, the right offer, and the customer experience for each customer in your business.

Growth marketing through experimentation

The process of growth is driven by conducting experiments and understanding what’s works and what doesn’t work. For example, if you want to increase your retention rates, run 5–10 experiments that you think can increase your retention rates and see what’s working and what doesn’t.

One of the benefits when you experiment with many different things it’s that if something is working, great, you succeeded. If something doesn’t work, you also learn new things about your customers for future experiments. (Experiments can test different programs, products, copy, platforms, campaigns, etc…).

Think about how you can build the minimum viable marketing campaign that you can run and test to learn whether your experiment is practical and will help you achieve your goal.

It’s kind of the same as the Lean Startup methodology when you think about it:

1. Defining upfront what the customer wants (if you think your people care about. , you test a product to see if it’s actually what they care about)

2. Find the best and fastest way to test if your ideas about what the customer. wants are correct.

3. After you do this experiment, use what you learned to move forward and change your product to achieve a better product-market fit.

For example, in growth, the first step it’s to define your goal, and your goal it’s to increase conversion rates. Step to it’s you make a hypothesis about what the problem is and how you can improve your retention rates (for example, product page optimization, different copy, easier purchase, design, maybe you should try to acquire a different kind of audience, etc…) and you run experiments and understand what’s working and what doesn’t working. It helps you gain a better understanding of the problem.

When you design your experiments after you know your goal, you can start from the most basic level, which can be which platform I should focus on (Email marketing, paid ads, SEO, etc…) then you can go more deeply and test designs, copy, audiences, etc…

There are three levels of depth in your growth process:

• Knowing what platforms you should use (those platforms should have the ability to affect the goal you want to achieve)
• Figuring out what is the right message/ offer/ campaign
• Being able to tailor the massage for individual customers. (Trying to treat all the customers the same is wrong, you should understand which kind of customer responds the best to which kind of offer or massage).
• Once you’re at the third and deepest level, where you know which offer and massage to tailor and introduce for each customer, there are great chances if you do it right that, your results will be extremely powerful, both long and short-term.

As part of your growth process, you” ll probably waste a lot of budget on experiments that didn’t work out. It’s part of the process, and if you do everything right, you shouldn’t be worried about it too much because first, even if your experiment fails, you now understand what doesn’t work. You learn new things about your audience, and it will help you perform better in the future and will avoid future budget waste.

The second reason it’s that once something you try is working well, and you figured out how to achieve your goal, the ROI should be much more significant than the amount of money you wasted on failed experiments.

Summary:

• I started studying growth marketing at CXL institute as part of mine. Curiosity about marketing, business, and data.
• Your job as a growth marketer is precisely as it sounds, to drive growth across the business in any way you can.
• The growth process happens through experimentation, you first should identify areas of opportunities in the funnel, and then you should first know what your goal is and what metric you focus on, and then you run experiments you believe (based on data) will help you achieve those goals.
• The ideal state of the growth process it’s to get to the point where you know what is the right message, the right offer, and the customer experience for each individual customer in your business.