Growth Process | Week 2 | Reveiw

Growth Process and Experimentation

This is the second blog post as part of the series of blog posts in which I will sum up my learning experience with CXL Institute attending their Growth Marketing Minidegree.

I have ended last week blog post talking about building the growth process and Quarterly growth planning.
Today I will continue with "Building, Shipping and analysing Experiments" summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

#Brainstorming through a goal-oriented 

To make the best use of a brainstorming session with your team and other teams included if needed, you should gather the focus on a specific metric at a time and before that would be very helpful to explain the customer journey map so that attendees get the chance to visualize the customer flow and come up with ideas that represent opportunities. 

Another way that could help is to check the competitors, how their customer journey looks like and what tactics they are using in different stages of the funnel. You can as another growth marketer or people working in the same field, and learn from their experiences.  
when ideas are formulated into a hypothesis that makes it more testable and linked to data which make it feasible to turn it into an experiment. 

#Prioritization is the key

Now, you have a bunch of Ideas/Hypotheses/ Experiments, it's not wise to say let's test them all randomly because you lose the main power aspect of growth marketing as I see it which is the SPEED. The power of growth marketing is to test many and learn more but test as quick as possible to learn fast so that you accelerate and grow faster. To achieve this goal you need Prioritizing, but how to prioritize experiments? based on what? well, john explained a common framework for that called ICE framework which stands for Impact, Confidence and Effort. Impact; Measuring the projection impact of an experiment, what would be the effect of this experiment on business? and how big is it?.
Confidence; How confident; you are implementing this experiment and getting results, this one is a bit critical as develops along with different experiments and by experience but you can overcome this at the beginning by checking competitors if they're doing a similar experiment and seeing its result Or you may even ask other growth marketer's opinion.
Efforts; Focusing on assessing how much energy, time, money and resources are needed to achieve this certain experiment?. 
So you give each factor above a rate from 1~5 and then you have a priority filter that you can use to prioritize your experiments in a way that makes you certain that your experiments are prioritized to the north start of any business which is ROI 

#Experimentation Process

There are three steps in the experimentation process:

1. Designing the experiment
   Starting with an objective where you create a hypothesis and get the experiment setup
    
2. Shipping the experiment
   Put it into action
   
   
3. Analysing the experiment
   Based on the key metric set for this experiment, you check the results of the whole experiment, is it good? good then think automation and scaling, is it bad? good, you've learnt something about your customers, Now move to the next experiment. 

The experimentation process is all about the Build, Measure and Learn cycle. 
Now let's dive into a more interesting topic which is customer-centric marketing. 

#What's the Customer-Centric Approach? and Why it matters?

The name of the approach already explains a lot, it's a marketing approach that focuses on customers. Paul explained here how was the traditional marketing approach back then when he was a university student and how things changed completely now that the traditional marketing approach that's based on driving attention only can't be of help in today's buzzy world. I completely agree with Paul. 
Now customers when they need to buy any certain product, a billboard ad won't be enough to convenience them to buy it, it only can attract their attention if they get to see it among the 1000 billboards out there in the streets and if it was attractive enough.
Now customers do a search, they check your website and if it's not good enough they will simply leave in a matter of seconds, they will go to the next competitor on the list checking product, price and benefits, Checking social media and read reviews about your product. unsurprisingly they can do that all in a matter of mins. that's how the world is right now. 

That's why you need to invest more in getting to know a lot about your customers and thanks to all the digital tools out there to better understand the customer is not that difficult. When you get to have a better understanding of your customer you can design a detailed marketing strategy around them that has a better conversion rate and/or you can validate a marketing campaign, a hypothesis you have about your customer and start adapting accordingly to maximize your results. 

#How to get a better understanding of your customer? 

It's impossible to convince someone to do an action or something for you unless you know them, the better you know someone and the more chances you can convenience him/her to do something for you.
Starting the adoption of the customer-centric approach by knowing what are our customer's goals and what they want to achieve?. Consumer behaviour is rapidly changing especially now in the digital buzzy world, that's why we need as a marketer to adapt and be up-to-date.

Instead of focusing on who the person is? and their taste? as in traditional persona, Empathy mapping on the other hand focus on what questions they have? what do they want to achieve? what is influencing them? and what are their goals and pain points are?.
This way you get to have a better understanding of your customer but empathy mapping alone isn't enough because it does not consider that customer is on a journey of steps till reaching a purchase decision. 

#Mapping the customer's journey

It's important to map our customer journey as there are many touchpoints where we can meet with our today's customers/users from Facebook ads, Google ads to the company's website and more. While we can't be spreading thin all over these many channels we can know exactly where to put our efforts by a true understanding of the buyer's journey. What are the channels they are using? when they are using it?  then it becomes easier to tailor a message for them at every stage of their journey. 

More about the customer-centric approach in next's week blog post.