GrowthMarketing

Growth Marketing is a data-driven process of identifying and validating opportunities to improve product metrics. You may perceive a growth hacking team as a reconnaissance unit that identifies significant growth opportunities and informs product and marketing teams that develop full-scale campaigns, messaging, or product features.

Team setup might differ from product to product, but usually, the unit comprises growth/marketing manager, analyst, web/mobile developer, messaging/engagement specialist. This team generates hypotheses, analyzes related data, tests and validates opportunities.

The main goal is to validate each idea with the lowest effort; however, exercise might include new landing pages, ads/web/mobile experiments, messaging campaigns. The most important characteristic of this team is lightness and speed. At Mighty, we build growth teams that augment your team.

1. Growth Marketing

Analytics and Business Intelligence

The most important thing is to understand the company goals and have underlying metrics visualized and available to each teammate. Benchmark visualization is essential because it provides a starting point for the Objectives and Key Results process and related planning. When a team is planning the metrics visualization, they usually discuss and decide their importance and decide on which to focus during a particular period.

Later, during the performance review, business intelligence would provide an idea about the quantitative results and discuss how to progress even faster.
Analytics is more important for ongoing research and understanding the product and the marketing ins and outs. When taxonomy is well-planned, it's much easier for the team to get along with the analytics tools and conduct independent research even without data team involvement.

2. Growth Marketing

Marketing Automation

Well-defined data taxonomies can be super helpful not only for analytics purposes. Analytics events and user attributes can also power messaging and user engagement. Using systems like Braze or Customer.io, the team can set up activation, retention, upsell campaigns and target them based on previous user behavior.

So once you have an up and running Customer Data Platform with a well-designed and implemented data taxonomy, your marketing team will be able to set up and customize campaigns without the involvement of the engineering team. Moreover, when campaign engagement data is populated back into the data stack, it would be a matter of clicks to analyze the campaign performance and related revenue lift.

3. Growth Marketing

Conversion Rate Optimization

Building a well-converting product takes time and lots of dedication. Understanding how each product flow contributes to overall product conversion rates is foundational. With the initial data in mind, the growth team identifies the weakest chains in the customer activation journey and builds the hypothesis to improve the numbers.

Teams prove hypotheses through a myriad of methods like user testing, a/b, multivariate tests, feature flags, and so on. Early-stage startups can change things instantly and leverage growth opportunities right away as they don't have much to lose.

A/B Testing

For established products, where traffic supply is high, the team can prove their hypothesis with A/B testing. Nowadays, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) power the experiments. Teams leverage analytics events and user properties to target the experiments to a limited audience. Later teams use the same data to understand the differences in performance of each test variant against the target event.

Check Our Stack section to learn more about the tools we use for the experiments and leverage CDP. Feature-flagging is also an a/b testing technique. It's possible to deploy the test features to a limited audience, defined with the analytics events and attributes. After evaluating the retention cycle and flagged feature contributions, the team might decide to release it to a broader audience.

4. Growth Marketing

Customer Retention

Retention is a key to growth. If you don't retain your customer, you constantly need an advertising budget to get the audience as no one sticks around. For some industries, retention is the defining metric - let's consider subscription-based apps. There is a low chance that the company would compensate for the user acquisition with one month of subscription revenue. Such products need to find a way to retain users for months or even years.

Retention is the hardest to master, as each tiny change would take months to prove success or failure. It's normal if you lose more than 50% of the cohort during the first month, but at some point, a stable portion of the cohort should stick around and result in so-called retention plato. The value of that plato on the retention graph would define the speed of your growth.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

When you want to focus on retention, a few metrics could be better than Net Promoter Score. It helps to understand the attitude of your customers to your offering and the reasoning behind that. Most of the companies end up comparing their NPS against the competition.

Your team can analyze each Net Promoter Score right in Slack. This exercise would help to identify the root cause of user churn. We wrote an extensive article on leveraging Net Promoter Score to the full extent with advanced data products.

5. Growth Marketing

Profitability & ROAS

Profitability and Return on Advertising Spending are probably the most complex metrics to benchmark. To visualize them, you'd need to collect the raw data about the advertising spend from each marketing channel you use, marketing attribution data, and revenue data.

On average, that requires building 5-6 connectors and marrying all the data sources. At Mighty, we specialize in this area and build solutions based on our partner solutions like Fivetran, DBT, Looker.