Growth Mindset and Skills

I was able to go deeper into growth concepts in my first week in the CXL Minidegree, the question “What is Growth Marketing?” is a difficult question to answer, because above all growth is a mindset and way to work. 

A growth marketing sets the goal above the means, growing is his main goal and which channel, technique or tool is used for this is secondary. That is why it is so important that a growth hacker has a broad set of knowledge and skills.

Is the process of finding shortcuts, hacks and other unconventional ways to help businesses grow. By finding and analyzing data, they integrate themselves into a business to use the findings from the data to boost customer attraction, retention, earnings and ultimately business growth.

Using the technology sector as an example, you don’t have to look very hard before seeing relatively new startups like Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber that have doubled (or more) their earnings and customer base within the first few years of operation. All of these have something in common: they have growth teams focusing on growth.

AirBnB is a good example: they used Craigslist in their early years. Craigslist was at that time the largest forum where people could rent a house. This was therefore the place where their target group was most active.

AirBnB began to place their own offer on Craigslist with a link to their own platform for potential tenants who sought more information. This way they managed to attract their launching customers from Craigslist and people kept hanging on AirBnB.

As an experiment they first performed this manually and later made a bot that could automatically place it on Craigslist and attract people to their app.

If the first studies section in the CXL Institute gave me an understanding of growth hacking mindset, the second section gave me a view of how to put it into practice with structured steps:

1. Defining a growth model

In defining your growth model, think about the customer journey, identify where they are currently and which area you want to activate.

2. Planning and monitoring

Cycles of testing should be done quickly. It's important to create short loops no more than 3 months, where you can identify and measure key metrics so that you can either fail, learn or succeed and automate.

3. Prioritizing goals

Decide which goals to pursue by utilizing the ICE method (Introduce, Cite, and Explain Your Evidence) — measure the impact, confidence, and effort it will take to test your goals.

4. Executing goals

Raise your hypothesis by an observation about your current customers and an insight into why they could possibly be behaving like that. To test your hypothesis, identify a variable that could influence the behavior you identified, test and analyze it.

But how are Marketers and Growth marketers Different?

Growth goal is to grow a business as quickly as possible, while traditional marketers don’t tend to look beyond the realms of marketing, the modern-day growth hacker explores every avenue to generate growth for a business. This may include traditional marketing strategies but is just as likely to involve research and development and product testing.

Growth marketers and traditional marketers can be effective at generating demand and attracting customers to your business. But marketers can bring a creative flair to the table, using their unique approach to bring your brand to life, growth hackers get into the detail to find the best ways to help you grow. 

You need a broad skill set: knowledge of data is necessary because that is the only way to find your main problem and its cause. Then comes creativity to come up with solutions for this problem and finally, a growth hacker needs technical skills to bring these solutions to reality. Here are some essential skills of any growth marketer:

1. Data Mindset

When we’re talking about growth hacking, it all comes back to data. Everything a growth hacker does is based on quality data. Finding it, analyzing it, understanding it and using it to inform the direction of the business and all decisions moving forward.

While the importance of data has started to seep into the minds of traditional marketers as the industry moves towards a more digital focus where useful data is more readily available, growth hackers use this on another level.

A growth marketer should set up a brand for future success. That means standing up analytics infrastructure that works.

When we’re talking about growth hacking, it all comes back to data. Everything a growth hacker does is based on quality data. Finding it, analyzing it, understanding it and using it to inform the direction of the business and all decisions moving forward.

While the importance of data has started to seep into the minds of traditional marketers as the industry moves towards a more digital focus where useful data is more readily available, growth hackers use this on another level.

Data analysis: Growth marketers understand data well enough to explain their findings to non-technical collaborators and they use it to build out hypotheses and larger strategies. 

Analytics technology implementation: Growth marketers know how to layer together analytics tools like Google Analytics and native platform metrics to capture timely, relevant marketing analytics for your team. They can also spot any reporting glitches that occur along the way. 

2. Conversion rate optimization.

Growth marketers think a lot about customer experience.

“It’s not just optimizing copy on a Facebook ad”

“It’s really about understanding the entire user experience across the entire funnel.”

Thinking like a new user helps them spot pain points that could be bogging down conversion rates: 

- Maybe checking out takes too many clicks. 

- Maybe a product page is slow to load. 

- Maybe the ad landing page has a confusing layout.

Website CRO: Conversion rate optimization can lift the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, whether that’s filling out a form or buying shoes. Growth marketers know what tools to use for testing — Hotjar and Google Optimize are popular

Testing framework creation: growth marketers know how to set up a testing framework - a workflow for getting the tests approved, determining the length of tests, and communicating their test results to the larger team. This is tough, though, since there are always multiple variables impacting conversions in every layer of the marketing funnel.

3. Aptitude for Marketing

While a developer’s background and the ability to analyze data are great, a growth hacker is never going to make it without a solid understanding of the marketing process.

What separates a good growth hacker from a great one is the ability to think both analytically and creatively, tapping into both mindsets to hit business growth targets while not losing focus on the essential elements that create a great customer experience and make a brand or a service attractive to consumers in the first place.

This includes things like an eye for design, skills in content creation and copywriting.

4. Different Tools

While there is some overlap between the roles of a traditional and digital marketer and growth hacker, the differences between the two are most pronounced when looking at the tools each one uses. While marketers place a great deal of focus on relationship building and rely on tools that help them in the day-to-day promotion of the business, growth hackers delve a little deeper and use a number of analytics and development tools to do their job.

Sources: CXL Institute, Grow with Ward, Growth tribe, Mari Luukkainen, HyperGrowth