Your Most Powerful Growth Hack: The Scientific Process

Originally published on Growth Marketing Conference blog by Gilles de Clerck

Marketing is about understanding and influencing customers behaviours. We aim to make people react to stimuli in predictable ways. For every action, there is a reaction and we want to be able to anticipate those reactions as much as possible.

That makes marketing a never-ending quest for truth. Never-ending because the idea of truth itself is an illusion. As human beings, there’s only so much we can grasp from reality. It is too vast and complex for our brains to fully make sense of, and changes at unprecedented speeds. Experiments are our gateway to reality. One experiment will tell you which subject line gets more opens, which image converts better and which copy gets clicked more. A series of experiments will gradually make you understand what your customers need, what moves them, where they hang out, how they like to be talked about. And how all of that can come together in a brand and marketing strategy.

What we call a ‘growth hack’ is the result of a thorough understanding of your target audience and its relation to your business. You find one by slowly making sense of the complex reality that is a business.

It sounds obvious and yet every day again people ask me if I can give them plug-and-play growth hacks for their businesses.

This obsession with tactics over process is the number one thing people get wrong about growth hacking. Your growth hack isn’t someone else’s.

To quote growth hacking godfather Sean Ellis:

“Sustainable growth comes from understanding best customers and figuring out how to find and acquire more of them.”

– Sean Ellis, Growth Hacking Godfather

I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I meet that hold the flag of creativity and innovation up high, yet fail to act on it because of fear of mistake and disappointment. They’re afraid to be wrong. Which in turn is why they lack both innovation and creativity and get outmanoeuvred by competitors who are willing to experiment and fail.

Rather than being afraid of being wrong, you should strive to be less wrong. Experiments and failure are inherently connected with one another. No matter how well-designed, 9 out of 10 experiments will fail, for the simple reason that as human beings we’re way worse at understanding reality than we think we are. Which is exactly why we need failure: it teaches us reality.

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

– Thomas Edison

Failure as a teacher is a liberating idea, because it implies you can’t lose. Losing would be not knowing, staying stuck in the dark guessing why your traffic isn’t converting.

What most companies don’t get is that failure is a feature of learning, not a bug. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. In fact, most breakthrough ideas are hidden within ‘failed’ experiments.

There is no such thing as failed experiments – only unexpected outcomes.

If the demographic you expected to click isn’t clicking that means you need to adjust your message. Or adjust your focus to target the demographic that is clicking, often with substantial implications for your initial value proposition altogether.

Reality is too complex for us humans to predict. Experiments are what enables us to test our ideas in reality. Failure is reality’s way of getting back to us and show us what’s real and what’s not. Whatever happens, there’s always a learning you can take with you.

YOUR MOST POWERFUL GROWTH HACK: THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS

You don’t need to be Einstein to do this. Science is about pursuing curiosity, embracing ignorance and relentlessly bridging the gap between the two.

The scientific process will remove the guesswork from your marketing and turn your company’s growth into something scalable, predictable and repeatable.

Step 1: Set Goals

Always start with the end in mind.

Step 2: Ideate on how to reach goals

After the ‘what’ comes the ‘how’.

This is where you come up with ideas to reach your objectives.

Step 3: Design experiments to test ideas

Turn ideas into experiments by identifying:

• the hypothesis to validate
• the variable to test
• the metric to measure
• the criteria to base success off

Step 4: Execute experiments to see how reality reacts

Time to unleash your experiments into the world.

Work hard, but smart. Use tools to facilitate and automate non-creative work.

Step 5: Study data & document relentlessly

Take the time to look at the results of experiments and try to understand the surrounding ‘why’ by combining quantitative with qualitative data.

Here are some guiding questions:

• What were the results of the experiment?
• How valid was the initial hypothesis?
• Why are the results what they are? Try to understand the whole story, not just the occurrence.
• Are there ways to segment or combine data to reveal new insights?

Remember: breakthrough insights are hidden within ‘failed’ experiments.

Document your experiments relentlessly. As experiments are all about learning and the most powerful learnings are often hidden within the failed ones, it is crucial that you keep track of what you have been doing and internalize learnings to avoid spending time on finding out things you already know.

Step 6: Rinse and repeat

Align goals, scale successful experiments, adjust failed experiments, come up with new ideas, design better experiments and harvest new learnings.

To learn more about how experimentation can help companies, read the full blog post here.