I know, you’ve just developed “the best product in the universe”, only waiting to be discovered by customers. Once they try it, they will love it. However, the reality is that no one gives a… you know what. So, how do you find customers and convince them to give your product a shot? If you want to speed up your startup’s growth, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we will talk about GROWTH MARKETING (imagine the fanfare sound effect… this one 👇)
Let’s take a look at the theory first and then check out an example to understand what we’re talking about.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is an approach based on a growth marketing strategy, experimenting with growth hacking tactics and combining them into a comprehensive plan that leads to the growth of your business. Simple, isn’t it? Now let’s break it down to find out what exactly that means.
Growth Marketing Strategy
The base for successfully growing your business is having a strategy in place. To understand what will happen when people click that Google ad. What will happen when they visit your website? What if they don’t sign up and leave? How will you work with these people? And what if they sign up but never use your product? Simply, what is the flow from the first viewing of any of your content right through to becoming your customer and beyond? The first step is to identify who your customers are and which of their pain points you are trying to solve. You can find more on this topic in this article.
Growth Marketing Hacking Tactics
Once you have a growth marketing strategy in place, you can start testing tactics to find the ones that have the best results. The word “test” is exceptionally important here as you can’t follow the same route for each business, rather you need to run science-based experiments to find the tactics that work for your specific startup, helping you speed up the growth process.
This is, however, where many startup founders struggle – they either rely on growth hacking without a strategic marketing approach or ignore the importance of the scientific process of setting the hypothesis and exact experiment rules. Then it’s just a pure bet. You may win, but the chance of losing is significantly higher.
Why Do You Need Growth Marketing?
This question is partially answered right at the beginning of this blog post. But let’s look at it from this perspective: Do you want to grow your business as fast as possible without guessing and not knowing what you do? If you answered “YES”, then you want to adopt an approach whose goal is exactly the same. You’ve invested too much time and energy in coming up with a unique idea and turning it into an exceptional product not to deliver it to the market. And the market will not find it on its own. Your potential customers are so overwhelmed with other offers and distractions that they don’t have the time or willingness to search for your product. Your mission is to distribute it to them in the form they prefer, that is, to tell them exactly the messages they need to hear to use it.
And for this, you need to market the product, experiment, learn and implement these learnings. Or, as Eric Ries puts it in his book The Lean Startup, you have to create a “Build-Measure-Learn loop”.
“Build-Measure-Learn loop” demonstration, source: amplitude
SaaS Example of Growth Marketing
As we have answered what growth marketing is, we can now take a look at how it can be implemented in a SaaS company. Most founders of SaaS and other digital products face the same challenge: How do you get a critical mass of users and turn them into paying customers? When talking about the solution, we can split it into three basic sub-goals:
- Acquisition – These are the activities that help us acquire new Registered Users (or Leads) for the demo/free trial.
- Activation – In this step, we turn Registered Users into Daily Active Users (DAU).
- Retention – Next, we aim to convert them into paying customers.
The science is understanding in what order we should do that and what activities/growth hacking tactics we should choose to help us achieve the sub-goals mentioned above.
Disclaimer for growth marketers: Of course, these three sub-goals are not the only ones. You also want to work with your customer base to upsell and viralise the product, resell to churns, not to mention branding, which could be the most effective tactic in the long term. For the sake of simplicity, however, we won’t go into all the details here.
So, where to start? First, you want to identify your biggest strengths, weaknesses and current challenges. Then you need to decide which sub-goal you’re going to focus on first and what activities you will try to achieve it.
Let’s say you have a B2B product and want to acquire your first users. You could, for example, go for:
- Cold Emailing Campaign: Reaching out to the right people to talk about their major pain points and challenges can yield fantastic results (if done right).
- Social Community Outreach: Searching for conversations in social media groups and threads and delivering value to them can help you better understand your customers and improve messaging.
- Google Search: If people are searching for it, you should be there with your offering.
For activation and retention, you can experiment with:
- Lifecycle Email Campaign: Reminding people how your product will help them get rid of their pain points or overcome their challenges is a great way to explain the product’s features in a very natural and valuable way.
- Product Notifications: Of course, once they have registered and are using your product at least once in a while, you may want to motivate them to use/pay for it directly in the product.
So, this is a little taster of activities you could try, but keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all process. You should always analyse your specific business and situation to understand what you’re good at, where your opportunities lie and what goal you need to reach first.
If you’d like us to help you grow your startup or scale-up, feel free to schedule a short call with us, and let’s scale throughout the Universe together.
Happy growing 🙂