The traditional marketing approach is to create campaigns and content that appeal to the masses, whereas growth hacking is all about testing different methods on your target audience, then testing again and again until you find what works.
What is the difference between traditional and growth marketing?
Two main differences
1- What do you focus on?
- Growth is focused on the entire funnel
- Traditional marketing is focused on top of the funnel
2- The way you drive growth
- Brand marketing uses awareness
- Growth marketing using experimentation
Lean startup methodology has one of the most direct influences on growth marketing.
What does a growth marketing process look-like?
The first step is to have a goal (an objective), then to achieve that goal build a hypothesis.
What comes next is tracking the hypothesis results and iterating.
An e.g would be “Our customers care about X, so we will provide them Y”
You put your experiment into practice and then build the structure behind that.
Founders/marketers need to ask
What is our long term objective?
Two paths to get there
1- Brand marketing — one big shot campaign
2- Run as many experiments as possible and as quick as possible
If you just get 4 right over the course of 10 experiments. All those learning will build up to better understanding your customers.
The defining trait of growth marketing — Experiments
Let’s start with an example.
You have been tasked to find out how to retain users.
Traditional branding teams would not be equipped or focused on this. A growth marketing team might devise experiments e.g to send emails to users at certain trigger points to engage them more.
In this case, our hypothesis is “if people get reminded about our service or product they will use it more”
Some other hypothesizes could be
Hypothesis 1- Does the email actually raise retention rates?
Hypothesis 2 — If the email does make a difference, how do I send them the best possible email?
Hypothesis 3 — Which customers are more likely to open my emails?
Use the 3 Layer framework
- Whether doing X has any effect on Y?
- What is the right amount of X to increase Y?
- How do you personalize X for customer Y?
Growth marketing experiments have a compounding effect. They can help your startup grow even if they fail, because failure is a great data point. At my firm adveria we practice growth marketing.
