Building a Growth Process review

Last week, we were able to review the basic concepts of Growth Marketing and how it differs from Traditional marketing. You can read about that here.

In this post, we will be continuing our weekly review of the Growth Marketing minidegree program from Cxl Institute by looking at what it means to build a growth process and the steps involved in doing that.

After reading this article, you’d have learnt the following:

• The Phases involved in building a growth process
• The growth funnel
• The importance of user-centric marketing.

Without further ado, let’s jump right into it.

Phases in building a growth process

There are essentially three main phases in building a growth process:

• High Level strategy
• Quarterly planning
• In-quarter execution

We’ll be breaking down these three different phases individually to see what they entail.

The High level strategy.

This is the phase where you have to define your growth model, Map out your customer journey and identify your growth channels.

Let’s start with defining your growth model. This is the phase where you identify what your growth model looks like for your company, you identify the inputs that are necessary to achieve your company’s top growth goals, be it user growth or revenue growth.

The most common framework for defining your growth model is the Dave McClure’s AARRR growth funnel which is an acronym for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral.

This funnel represents all the activities and steps involved in bringing growth to the company ranging from getting new users to the company, having those new users to do something significant, developing strategies to keep them, making them spend their money and turning them into loyal evangelists of your brand.

Outlining all the tactics involved in achieving all of these are what it means to define your Growth Model.

The next step in your high level strategy is mapping out your customer journey. This is very important in your growth process because as a growth Marketer, you want to make sure that whatever you’re building is User-centric that is, you’re building for your customer’s and from their perspective. We’ll talk extensively on user/customer-centric marketing in later reviews.

Every step of the above discussed growth framework has to be focused on the user. So you’re building your growth process via the lens of, ‘How can I offer more value to my customers’ instead of ‘how can I increase sales’.

A good way to map out your customer’s journey is by whiteboarding with sticky notes. First, create an ideal user persona, then you put your self in the place of a customer and imagine your journey to completing a purchase, starting from the different steps that your customer takes on their way from finding out about your product or service all the way through towards becoming a loyal, frequent habitual customer. Map this journey and all the touchpoints they came in contact with on a whiteboard with sticky notes and start thinking of ways to make this journey seamless for your customers by reducing friction.

The final step of the High level strategy is identifying growth channels. After defining your growth model mapping out your customer journey, this is the step where you choose the growth channels that will work for you from the pool of growth channels out there.

The next phase in building your growth model is Quarterly planning.

Quarterly planning.

The quarterly planning phase is the second phase in building a growth process and it’s in this phase you explore your funnel’s data, like what is your funnel telling you?, identify quarterly goals, then you build roadmaps to help you achieve those goals.

When you explore your funnel data, it gives you an idea into what the biggest areas of opportunities are. Other ways to get data to explore is through user surveys, calling and talking to customers. You just want to understand your customer’s pain points and set goals aimed at solving them.

One common goal setting methodology is the OKR which is acronym for Objectives and key results. This is a way of setting your goal such that you have an overall goal you seek to achieve which is the Objective, then there’s a measurable metric to determine if the objective was achieved, that’s the Key result. So, an example of a real case OKR would be to grow active users as objective and increase users by 5000 before the end of the quarter as key results.

The last phase of the growth process is the In-quarter execution.

In-Quarter Execution

This part of the growth process is all about the Build, Learn and Measure. There are four steps in this phase:

Design your experiment: This is where you build your hypothesis and set it up against an experiment. Remember in science that a good hypothesis has an independent variable, a dependent variable and is based on some assumptions. In the marketing context, a good hypothesis would be: say you’re trying to solve for retention for Uber eats. You could create a hypothesis that lots of people that eat on the first one don’t usually come back cos they used a coupon for the first one. In this case, your experiment would be to A/B test with the first time users. Divide them into two groups, send half of them discount coupons and leave the others out.

Ship your Experiment: This is the part where you implement your experiment. You ship your experiment out so you get results and measure it. This leads us to the next step:

Analyse your result: Here, you analyse the experiments to see if it validates or invalidates your hypothesis. Did those that received the coupon come back? Are there other factors responsible for the lack of retention or is this the only one? If your hypothesis are validated, you go to the next step. If not, you go back to step one and design another experiment.

Automate and Scale: This is a very important part of the growth process. You automate a validated hypothesis so that it doesn’t need manual operation to run since it has been proven to be a working tactic. You automate and scale it to get better results.

Summary

We have seen the various phases and steps involved in building a growth process, from having a solid strategy around your growth model, to planning your goals and executing them.

One thing stands out in all of these — the need to build your growth process from a user/customer’s perspective. This positions your brand as a user-centric one and makes your growth process more sustainable.

Next week, we’ll review User-centric Marketing and why it is important to build for your users/customers.

As always, feel free to share your questions, recommendations and suggestions in the comment section. If you enjoyed reading this, do share and sound a clap!