How to Create a Growth Marketing Playbook for Businesses Looking to Scale
Achieving consistent, sustainable growth is likely to be a fundamental goal for your business. Expansion can lead to all sorts of exciting opportunities for your company and new experiences for your employees. But for some organizations, achieving massive revenue growth can prove to be problematic.
As you grow, you could find yourself entering markets and targeting customers that bring you into the orbit of new competitors.
Dealing with competition is a fundamental aspect of the business, of course, but it’s important for your long-term growth plans to include strategies to keep hold of your existing clients and acquire new ones, regardless of what your rivals are doing.
It’s important to always have one eye on your competitors, but equally crucial is the need to maintain focus on what your business does well and how it can continue to satisfy customer expectations.
However, while it is easy to understand some of the issues that come into play for those organizations looking to scale, getting past them can nevertheless be extremely challenging. In this post, we are going to argue that for organizations looking to scale their businesses that creating a growth marketing foundation is paramount. So let's go about creating that growth marketing playbook.
Growth marketing Definition
Before we delve into creating a growth marketing playbook, let us first understand what growth marketing is.
Growth marketing is the practice of combining customer data, market insights, and creativity to better understand your buyers and amplify every step of the customer journey for them.
The key point to understand from growth marketing is that generating massive revenue doesn’t just come from scaling the top of the funnel and acquiring new customers. It’s about acquiring the right customers, getting them to stick around, and using all available insights to drive and keep more engaged customers.
Through testing and incremental improvement, growth marketers not only acquire new customers at an exponential rate, but also drive more cross-selling, upselling, and other revenue expansion opportunities, to both new and existing customers. In short, they use data drawn at all phases of the customer journey to deliver experiences that resonate throughout the entire customer lifecycle, thereby drawing not only additional possible revenue opportunities, but also the insights that can be tested elsewhere, improved on, and revised constantly.
Challenges of Creating A Growth Marketing Culture
Now that we have established just what growth marketing is, and why instilling a growth marketing orientation is key to those organizations looking to scale, it is imperative to understand why a growth marketing culture is hard to instill, as we stated earlier. So with that in mind, here are 4 main obstacles to establishing a growth marketing framework within organizations is difficult.
Finding the Right Talent
It is already challenging to find high-quality marketing talent, so finding talent ready to take on the additional challenges of growth marketing can be exceptionally challenging.
We looked earlier at the common characteristics of successful growth marketers, noting that they must be competent in more areas of marketing than ever before, comfortable with ambiguity, creative, product-focused, and brave. It can be challenging to find someone with those qualifications who also has the ability to understand what makes your business unique in order to instinctively understand what tactics work or don't, or who know what questions to ask.
2. Lack of a Full Funnel Strategy
By definition, an efficient growth marketing strategy focuses on the entire sales funnel, from brand awareness to referrals and back again. While most marketers start out with a clear understanding of this, our own skillsets and biases from previous experiences can easily lead us astray.
Even the best marketing professional who has developed a deep skillset that covers the entire marketing funnel will likely be more proficient with one specific part of the funnel. Someone who spent a long time in traditional marketing may be exceptionally skilled with awareness or acquisition. Someone who spent time in sales may be especially drawn to experimenting with ways to close more deals. Without even noticing, a growth marketing plan could quickly become hyper-focused on one or two areas and miss the opportunities available in other parts of the funnel.
3. Lack of Developed Systems of Growth
Ensuring all the metrics are available, studying the data to find areas of improvement, conducting experiments, and analyzing results can be daunting, especially when trying to put them together.
However, growth marketers need to eventually settle down into some type of systematic or automated routine. Once there is enough data, statistical models can be developed to begin to look for areas for improvement. Processes can be prepared for running experiments that reduce the amount of work required to get one started. Even more important is to ensure that the process of data analysis is shortened in order to quickly evaluate what is not working and create adjustments to the initial experiment.
4. Keeping on Top of the Latest Advances in Marketing
The rate of change in the marketing world is breathtaking. We live in a world where social media platforms appear out of nowhere and disappear or are swallowed by other platforms. Consumer preferences change faster than ever, and new products and services hit the market every day.
You might find the best growth marketer or develop the most exceptional team. However, if they are not learning and growing, before long, their effectiveness will diminish. It is essential to build in time and resources to help them keep up, develop new skills, and adapt to new market challenges and opportunities.
Success factors for growth marketing
Now that we have established some key reasons as to why instilling a growth marketing orientation is hard to achieve in businesses that are looking to scale, it is important to identify success factors that can help to make sure growth marketing becomes a reality in your growing organization.
There are four key success factors for growth marketing:
Marketing + Product Teams Working in Harmony: Rather than have marketing and product teams working in silos, in growth marketing, they need to collaborate interdependently as cross-functional teams.
Rapid Testing: Growth Marketers follow a rigid testing process that assesses user behavior across all the touch-points of the customer journey. What is more is that beyond creating tests, it is important to rapidly analyze in order to quickly understand what is not working and create new tests.
Analytics: Growth Marketers develop, measure, and adhere to metrics. Always aiming for a North Star.
Tenacity: Pursuant from the point on rapid testing, Growth Marketers accept that they will fail, but every failure will lead to an eventual success story if they keep pushing forward, as a team.
What are the key elements involved in creating a Growth Marketing Framework in order to scale your business?
1) Stick to the iterative idea-testing process that can generate the strategies needed to create hypergrowth.
Growth marketers will inevitably discover growth opportunities by:
Building cross-functional growth teams with members from every domain of the business that can create ideas and execute on them
Acting quickly in putting ideas into action
Collecting performance data, bench-marking against objectives, and adjusting accordingly
Identifying North Stars, developing OKRs, and building tracking tools
Discovering bold strategies out of these that could potentially achieve ambitious goals
2. Know and describe your customers
Before creating a growth marketing strategy, outline the type of customers you’ll be targeting by creating descriptive personas. If you’ve got an existing customer base, conduct surveys and mine your data from patterns. If you’re just starting out as a startup, do some market research. What to highlight when creating a customer profile:
Picture at least three different types of customers for your product
Describe each person at a broad level such as age, education, income level, and sex, and gradually become more specific by diving into their careers, professions, lifestyles, degree of tech-savviness, amount of time spent online, level of happiness in life, types of hobbies, etc.
Build rough descriptive biographies for your personas, this will be useful when trying to create marketing content specifically to them. You can tell stories that resonate with them.
Start imagining their day-to-day life, what motivates them, what would get them to use your offering, what their pain points are, how your business can solve them, and how you’ll need to communicate with them to promote yourself.
As you collect data you, fine-tune and align your personas with your findings. Gradually, as the pieces to your puzzle increase, you can build a better product offering and position your service better in the customer’s mind.
i .Product-Market Fits
All growth efforts will be lost if customers do not want your offering, otherwise known as finding product-market fit.
If you are launching a new product you’ll have to trust your market research data but note that what you hear or see from samples, will not correlate to the market at large and you will need to fine-tune your offering after launching the service.
If you already have a product in the market and are expanding, survey your existing customers and keep track of your Net Promoter Score across the customer development milestones to make sure you are delivering a desirable offering.
III. Forming a Strategy
Finding and honing in on the North Star metric
Growth is exciting and dynamic, but this excitement could also lead to distracted focus and diminished productivity. Maintain focus by using your North Star metric, a measurable and meaningful metric that all growth efforts revolve around it.
The North Star is different for every business and can be hard to pick because it needs to correlate with an immediate and apparent set of actionable steps. For example, “make more money” is too vague, you can make more money by reducing costs, increasing prices, growing new business lines and etc. If you want to “make more money,” identify your core strengths and guide your North Star towards those strengths. For example, increasing the SQL to MQL ratio could be the North Star for a software business seeking to scale.
Your North Star metric does not have to be connected to revenue. It’s what the growth team needs to accomplish to get to the next step in growth and it can change over time as business dynamics shift or change. So take time to develop and share your North Star metric. Collect ideas from other individuals at your company, compile ideas, brainstorm collaboratively, and pick the one that resonates with where your business needs.
Harness OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)
When you have your North Star in place, align teams and divisions by monitoring progress by implementing OKRs:
Set qualitative and quarterly objectives (the Os)
Develop quantitative key results (the KRs)
Limit key results to three (the KRs)
Remember to use SMART OKRs to stretch your team’s performance. Commit to your goals, to your team, and to reviewing them weekly. Aim to have short weekly meetings at the beginning of the week, review expectations as a team, and send weekly reports of performance and achievements of OKRs at the end of the week, indicating team achievements or shortcomings. Then, on a quarterly basis, hold long team meetings to evaluate performance by using comprehensive business analytics and plan to solve major remaining lags for the next quarter or move to new OKRs.
Developing OKRs
If you are part of a large organization, getting stakeholder buy-in for your North Star and OKRs is important. So how you go about getting this is paramount.
Meet with people, elaborate on your position, and schedule a meeting with the key functional representatives. Include the CEO and members of the executive team.
Put forward what would you like to see the company set as our objective for next quarter, and get feedback to see if your strategies can be improved, or if there are better objectives.
Once you have established OKRs, assign metrics to objectives as a team, collectively and through voting
For each objective, your goal is to find three Key Results: 1. a usage metric, 2. a revenue metric, and 3. a satisfaction metric
Assign numbers that are stretch goals. A good stretch goal is one that you feel 50% confident that you can achieve. Goals need to be challenging.
Get everyone’s confirmation on the next quarter’s objectives, metrics, and goals, and spread the word
Take a lean approach towards growth marketing efforts
Using a model, such as the Lean Canvas, in order to map out issues with the business, forces you to think about key questions and how to deploy solutions as a growth marketer. Refresh your understanding of the business as it rapidly evolves on this canvas to stay on top of changes, align with team members, and formulate new ideas and strategies. The Lean Canvas is your up-to-date map of where the business is and where it’s aiming to go.
IV. Understanding your Growth Marketing Funnel & its Foundations
What is key is understanding the correlation between growth marketing funnel and the customer journey
Below are what is generally recognized as the essential segments of the Growth Marketing Funnel:
Awareness: of the problem and the solution
Interest: customers begin to explore the offerings available to them
Consideration: prospect wants to make a purchase but it may or may not be with your brand
Action: to purchase (or not)
Loyalty, or advocacy: after sales, repeated purchase, or usage
The marketing funnel represents a customer’s journey as they move towards the purchase of your product or service. A growth marketer’s goal is to funnel prospects into buyers, moving them from the top to the bottom of the funnel. But no customer journey is usually this linear. Just imagine something you bought recently. Each interaction from identifying that you needed to buy something to completing that purchase at the local store had you move through each stage of the funnel, even backward, contemplating and interacting with touch-points on many instances.
Growth marketing aims to identify what touch-points are the most influential in converting customers closer to a purchase and creating loyalty and referrals, in turn pushing more people into the funnel. The more marketers understand the customer journey and how it connects to pushing a consumer down the path to purchase, the more influence they will have on their decisions and growth.
The consumer decision journey
If marketing strategy has one objective, it's to reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions.
A successful growth plan needs to identify all opportunities by considering the customer journey inside and outside the product. The growth marketer needs to map the necessary touchpoints to convert a customer.
Start with the relative path that outlines the most common paths a customer can take through your funnel
From there, layer in more and more information as you optimize each journey. Develop this into a map as you move along
The more detailed your map becomes, the easier it will be to pinpoint problems in conversions across your marketing funnel
Basically, this map can help you “hack” your customer growth by identifying pain points and a wider exploration of potential solutions.
V. Utilizing Growth Marketing Levers and Loops
One of the biggest desires in growth marketing is to use the most optimally small amount of resources to generate the biggest results.
After the North Star, OKRs, and customer journey are mapped, that is when the team moves into experimenting with ideas, pulling onto a different set of levers that can influence customer decisions.
Identifying the proper growth levers
For an effective strategy, use the AARRR customer journey funnel in order to break up your business opportunities into individual building blocks. What this does is make it easier to know where you can stimulate the biggest impact. These categories will serve almost any business. When you know what lever you need to use, you can sort out the ideas that will then trigger that growth lever.
AARRR Framework- Metrics: How to examine in order to identify growth marketing opportunities
Here is how you ought to think about the growth levers:
Acquisition: exclusivity, meeting customers at their exact time of need, promotional time box, discounts, etc.
Activation: increase customer support, improve user interface, e-mail drip campaigns, etc.
Retention: send alerts as reminders, introduce a new feature, loyalty programs, etc.
Revenue: add related products at the bottom of the checkout page, add another product tier, reduce overall overheads and expenses, etc.
Referral: monetary incentives for referring friends, e.g. Uber
Growth Marketing loops
The dream for growth marketers is to create processes that fuel growth through viral loops, self-growing repeatable engines that need little marketing investments. A loop is the steps a user goes through before inviting new users into the process.
To be effective, a growth loop must contain an explicit incentive for a user to pass it on. Dropbox starts you out with a limited amount of free space, but your storage will increase for each user that you invite. As you invite more users, they too get on-boarded on the ramp and receive exposure to this growth loop.
Loops can be direct with an immediate effect such as an invite to join or they can be indirect such as when you incentivize users or customers to leave reviews based on their experience or their purchase process or pay them for a referral.
Creating a Growth Marketing Playbook for High Growth Businesses: It’s About Creating Lasting Growth Cycles
While generating revenue growth can be challenging for any business, it is especially true for those attempting to do so in high-growth industries. However, with this brief playbook, those looking to scale their businesses now know what metrics, and what objectives to focus on. Even more important is understanding the relationship between the growth marketing funnel and the customer journey. While the reality is that the path to scaling is different for every business, understanding these basics can enable you to undertake the steps to start to create that growth marketing playbook for your organization.
If you are looking for help in creating a growth playbook for your business, why not arrange for a session with our growth marketing consultants? There is no obligation, and in return, you get an outside perspective that can potentially benefit your business.