Why growth marketing in the post pandemic era

Before starting to get into detail about why Growth Marketing has become critical for a business to survive and flourish in the post Covid-19 era, it is important to understand that you as a marketer or a business owner, need to see such events as an opportunity and not as a disaster.

Why? Because these events give us the foundation to see things differently and go beyond our comfort of zone. It is very difficult to escape uncertainty by playing it too safe and doing things the way used to be done.

The post pandemic world has given growth marketing the impetus to become a necessity, not only in technology start-ups, but also in more traditional businesses. The reason for this is because it allows you to view marketing from a totally different perspective, especially in the post Covid-19 era, where the only certainty is…uncertainty.

So, what is growth marketing? Traditionally, the goal of marketing was to create awareness about products and services, covering the top of the funnel on a customer’s journey map, that is primarily creating Awareness.

However, things have changed. Growth marketing is expected to add significant value across all stages of a customer’s journey towards completing a goal.

(Chapter Two is all about how to create a plan based on your customer’s journey map.)

Growth marketers must be T-shaped, with a great understanding of many topics, from marketing to sales, analytics, customer engagement, UX, conversion rate optimization but with a very deep understanding and experience in one of these disciplines.

But above all, they need to be great team players, willing to experiment and embrace agility.

Growth marketing can only be successful if the right mindset is in place — a mindset for continuous experimentation and acceptance that failure is part of growing to something bigger. The more we experiment, the more we learn, hence the higher the chances we have to convert visitors into buyers. It is a non-stop loop that allows any business to grow based on tests and experiments.

It requires your business to be customer-centric and use data and analytics to make decisions rather than personal opinions.

A good growth marketer NEVER assumes knows everything, always asks “what if” and believes the only certain thing is change.

Every incremental increase leads to long-term growth. I cannot count how many times I’ve been asked questions such as “what is the one trick to help us increase revenue?”, or “what is that one thing we are missing to drive growth?”.

It’s a long-term process of small gains that compound. If you continuously test, learn and grow, these gains will multiply, but if you stop then you will go all the way back to where you started. Steady growth is boring and not sexy at all, because results will not come overnight.

If you improve just 1% every day in the next 365 days, these gains will compound and will have an outstanding outcome, on the contrary, if you do nothing, a year from now you will technically be behind, because everyone else would have made some kind of progress.

1.01365 = 37.8

1.00365 = 1

Companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, and many more have experienced massive growth due to their focus on an experimentation mindset.

In the below video link, Sean Ellis, the father of growth marketing, provides a fantastic overview and mentions some great stories on how some very famous companies took full advantage of this mindset, and thus grew exponentially.

https://bit.ly/3HEkLuO

There are 3 phases in building a growth process:

1.   Defining the growth model, channels, and customer journey map towards goal completion.

2.   Plan regularly by exploring and analysing data, resetting goals.

3.   Execute and experiment often. The more experiments we do, the more we learn and optimize.

What are the main channels to drive growth? An organization of any size can only drive growth in 3 ways:

1.   Through organic traffic — Traffic you get without having to pay any money, usually from SEO activities. This is the best source of traffic, however, in these era it is quite difficult to scale without other forms of traffic. In most cases, it will take months to years to start seeing significant organic traffic into your website depending on the industry your business operates.

2.   Through referral traffic — Traffic referred by partners or others, usually there is compensation involved in a form of pay for performance. The drawback for this type of traffic is that you really have to compensate lavishly for partners to promote your products or services. In industries such as web hosting it is common for providers to pay up to 100% commission for the first year (yes you read that correctly).

3.   Through paid traffic — Traffic you get from advertisements or other paid activities. You may hate it because it requires investment but you see its results in a very short period of time.

The Growth Mindset

Make no mistake, growth marketing does not start in any business meeting or your boss’s office, it is rather a mindset, a way of living and seeing life from a totally different perspective.

There are four basic and very important pillars to building a growth mindset and eventually succeeding as a growth marketer.

1.   Attitude – Everything in life is about attitude, none cares about your problems or struggles, you got two choices, give up and fail or face it and deal with it. People who grow chose the latter, they do not complain, but rather put their head down and try to find a solution, they see life as it is and not how they wish it was, nothing and none is perfect and will never be, so be optimistic and always believe there is more room to getting better.

Elon Musk famously said once “ No matter how hard you work, someone else is working harder “

2.   Accept constructive feedback – Do you know why only few businesses or people really grow so much? Because very few people in life are open to accepting feedback, most are resentful and believe they are being attacked. Learning to accept feedback no matter how bad, is essential if you want to grow. Actually, be very thankful when someone is spending their precious time to help you get better, there is genuine interest and should be grateful.

3.   Be empathetic – How do you get into someone’s shoes and understand why they behave the way they do. It is much harder than it sounds and it takes a lot of conscious practise.

People or businesses who grow, develop this skillset by first removing their ego and emotions and by asking lot of questions. Again, it is really hard to really get into someone’s position but by observing and trying to see things from their perspective it will help you solve a great number of problems.

4.   Take action – There will NEVER be a perfect time in life to start doing what you always wanted, NEVER, whoever tells you otherwise is just not honest with you. Problems will always arise from somewhere, you are dealing with people so to some extend you will be affected by their own issues.

If I have a bad day and I am late in the project deadline, this will affect my team’s tasks too. What distinguishes these businesses and individuals who grow however, is that regardless of the situation, they take an action. When you take an action and you are open to feedback, there are very high probabilities that you will figure out the solution to ANY problem.

If you see, I use the word Probabilities and not Possibilities, everything in life is possible, can I go to the moon? Yes, it is possible, what you need to ask instead is what are the probabilities for this to happen, close to 0%. This way, you stop wasting your time with what is possible (basically everything that one can think) and focus instead on what task or project has the highest chances/probabilities to materialize and help me or our team succeed.

Whereas, keep thinking and wishing things would be different would help you do one thing very well, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

“Your thought is illusion, your action is the truth.”

Amit Kalantri

The fallacy about using ONLY data to make decisions

Data is essential in a growth marketing environment, because it shows evidence of what works and what does not and it is not based on personal opinions.

One could write an entire book on data, however, all you need to be aware is that your decisions must be based on data, because it just never lies.

If your conversion rates are low, then no matter what you say makes no difference, it is low and must be fixed. If your paid ads do not work, then you need to dig into the details and understand where the leakage is.

However, and this is what you need to keep in mind with data, for it to make sense you need to see things holistically and not in isolation, content is critical.

For instance, our conversion rate is lower compared to same period last year, but jumping immediately into conclusions could be the wrong approach.

What if economic environment is very different from last year? What if we are not spending that much money on ads this year.

You have to see the numbers as an indication of something but go beyond that by understanding the importance of this number in a more holistic view.

Let’s say you recently had a medical check-up and you found that your cholesterol is above the normal levels. If you are just following the data, you need to panic and assume that you are in danger of having a heart attack.

However, a specialist will tell you that although this is a number, you cannot see things in isolation, what is your blood pressure? Your triglycerides? How about your CAC (calcium score)? How is your heart performing in a stress test?

Only then the doctor is able to say with confidence whether there is something to be concern or just mind your diet and you should be alright.

Similarly with marketing numbers, use them as an indication that something is not the right direction but before jumping into conclusions you must see things holistically.