The first stage of every single growth marketing framework centres around customer research in order to explore and gather high quality growth experiment ideas.
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
Linus Pauling, Double Nobel Prize Winner
Ideas are the leading input to the entire growth marketing process, they are the rocket fuel for growth. Without a consistent, steady pipeline of ideas there’s a lesser chance your team will make an impact because there’s less to test and learn from.
So, where should you look to find high quality growth experiment ideas for your team?
Finding High Quality Growth Experiment Ideas
Growth marketing teams tend to gather high quality growth ideas across 5 different areas, we’ll dig into each of these in more detail below.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
The Wisdom of the Crowd
The easiest way to maintain a good pipeline of experiment ideas and to avoid idea fatigue is to democratise the ideation process. The more people you get involved in idea brainstorming and voting, the better your chances of finding and testing the best ideas.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”
David Packard, Co-founder, Hewlett-Packard
We often assume that the key to solving problems or making good decisions is finding that one “expert” who will have the answer - the Marketing Director, the CEO, the Agency, the Consultant. However, chasing “the expert” is often a mistake and better results come from employing the collective “wisdom of the crowd”.
In his 2004 book, “The Wisdom of the Crowd”, James Surowiecki outlines 4 conditions for a group to make better decisions than the individuals within it:
-
Independence - The various guesses have to be independent of one another. The best way for a group to be smart is for each person to think and act as independently as possible.
-
Diversity Of Opinion - It is important to have a diverse group of people with varying degrees of knowledge and insight. Some people may be experts, while others may just have a passing interest.
-
Decentralisation - The people making the guesses should be able to draw on their own local and specific knowledge as valuable information may not be disseminated.
-
Aggregation - To produce intelligent results there must be some way of aggregating the information of everyone in the system.
In growth marketing, this can mean involving (and incentivising) employees, partners, suppliers and customers in growth ideation.
Building Growth Experiment Idea Muscle
In the early 2000s some of the world’s best researchers from Harvard Business School undertook what remains one of the most in-depth studies into the origins of creative thinking. In order to understand what makes one person more creative than another they interviewed 100 of the world’s greatest leaders and innovators over a 6 year period - Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Howard Schultz, Peter Thiel and many others.
The study found that there are 4 main skills to building creative intelligence:
-
Observing
-
Questioning
-
Networking
-
Connecting
1. Observing
Observing involves carefully watching the world around you, scrutinising the behaviour of other people and other companies, and using those observations to gain insights and ideas for new ways of doing things.
“All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.”
Peter Leschak
2. Questioning
A core habit of the worlds greatest leaders and innovators is to ask a lot of questions.
Most individuals and managers focus on understanding how to do things, typically how to make existing processes - the status quo - work a little better. Creative individuals and leaders ask why. They challenge the status quo, challenge assumptions and frequently take the opposite position.
-
“Why … ?”
-
“Why not … ?”
-
“What if … ?”
As a growth marketer you should be inquisitive, challenge common wisdom and ask provocative questions.
3. Associating
“While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”
MIT’s co-founder Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 email to Wired magazine
Great innovators and creative thinkers often link questions, problems and ideas from unrelated fields. Associating describes this ability to connect the seemingly unconnected in order to deliver new ideas.
Connecting wildly different ideas, objects, services, technologies and disciplines often leads to the discovery of the best ideas. Look outside of your immediate work environment and consider other:
-
Areas of knowledge
-
Industries
-
Geographies
-
Customers
-
Business Models
If you are a growth marketer in a b2b business, consider looking b2c companies for inspiration. If you work in Finance, look at companies outside of your industry for ideas.
4. Networking
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
Bill Nye
Talking with other people is a great way to find and test ideas. Creative leaders spend a lot of time and energy finding and testing ideas through a diverse network of individuals.
As a growth marketer, you should begin to establish a network of other growth individuals to follow and exchange ideas with, such as joining the GrowthHackers Community and The Snack.
You may also consider:
-
Holding regular idea lunches with growth marketers outside of your company
-
Brainstorming a specific problem or objective with others in your company that are not in your team
-
Attending conferences and networking events
-
Participating in online discussion forums and groups
The goal is to connect people from different backgrounds, ages, industries, political views and experiences to uncover new ideas and to help you see things differently.
Storing Growth Experiment Ideas
As David Allen, the productivity guru once said “Your head is for having ideas not for holding them”. We need a store for ideas.
This could be as simple as an excel sheet, or a generic task or project management tool such as Trello or Asana.
A more customisable solution such as Airtable. For more information, see our article on using Airtable for growth marketing.
We have an airticle highlighting growth experiment templates for Pipefy, Trello, Airtable, Excel and more. Alternatively, growth experiment ideas can be stored in a dedicated growth marketing project management tool, such as Growth Method.
A consistent, steady pipeline of ideas is critical to the growth marketing process. There is no such thing as a “bad idea” or an idea that is “too crazy”. The goal at this stage completely unconstrained ideation. A good volume of ideas is important in order to find the diamonds in the rough.
Here is Brian Balfour again talking about how the growth team at HubSpot use this principles to generate new growth ideas. The link below should start around 14 minutes in, you should watch until around 17 minutes 30 seconds.
Brian Balfour on Growth Marketing
Remember you should always brainstorm on the specific Inputs that you believe will drive your desired outcome. If your goal is new website signups, brainstorm on the actions your team can take to influence that, such as increasing website visitors and improving conversion rates. Overarching goals such as new website signups are too broad and unspecific to be useful. Always brainstorm on your Inputs, not on your Outputs.