Having worked with businesses from 5 to 5000+ employees over the last 3 years, and with almost 1500 marketing ideas and experiments in the Growth Method platform, we’ve put together this guide based on everything we’ve learned so far on our journey.
What is included in our growth marketing guide?
The guide consolidates the systems, frameworks and thinking from many of our growth marketing articles into a more easily digestible format. We cover the core topic areas below with links to over 20 additional articles written by our team:
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
What is growth marketing?
Most of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries from antibiotics and water purification to breakthroughs in agriculture and sanitation, owe themselves to the scientific method - the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation. This basic process involves making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and analysing the results.
Perversely, the method of progress and discovery employed by many marketing teams today is to place big bets on big ideas, largely based on faith, and with no hypothesis or prediction of the likely outcome.
However, the world’s fastest growing companies, digitally native companies like HubSpot, LinkedIn, Atlassian and Slack are taking a very different approach. They all use the exact same process to run their marketing and growth teams. A process known as Growth Marketing.
Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a more rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results. It is a system, or framework, for running marketing teams optimised for growth.
Put simply, growth marketing is where the scientific method and marketing collide.
For more information see our article on What is Growth Marketing?, our guide to what growth marketing managers do and how to hire one, our comprehensive list of growth marketing conferences for B2B marketers, and our latest article here.
Why you need growth marketing?
Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results.
There are 5 problems with traditional marketing teams that the growth marketing process is designed to solve:
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Intelligent decisions are not based on assumptions or gut feel - Traditional marketing teams decide what to do based on assumptions, gut-feel, or the highest-paid person’s opinion (aka the HiPPO, for short). Every time you or your team makes a guess, you are introducing bias and risk into what you do.
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What works for others is not going to work for you - Copying what your competitors are doing, or what you see other companies doing online is not a strategy. There is no “one-size-fits-all” advice when it comes to scaling marketing.
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Growth is the sum of a lot of small parts - There is no one thing that will alter the trajectory of your marketing efforts or dramatically increase results. Implementing the latest marketing tactic or “growth hack” is unlikely to have any material impact on your business long term.
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The effectiveness of all marketing tactics decreases over time - The first ever banner ad debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78%. Clearly, nobody is getting that kind of clickthrough rate today.
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Every marketing team has finite resources and needs to optimise for efficiency - We live in a world with finite resources and unlimited expectations of results. A good marketing strategy helps to ensure marketing resources are allocated to the areas where you can gain competitive advantage.
The growth marketing process
The growth marketing process is a scientific approach largely based on agile best practises. The 7-step process is outlined below:
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Set goals - Having the best team, optimised processes and a world-leading technology stack doesn’t matter if the marketing team aren’t working towards a common goal.
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Research ideas - Ideas are the leading input to the entire growth marketing process, they are the rocket fuel for growth.
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Prioritise ideas - Every marketing team is resource constrained. For marketing teams to be effective, they must be able to accurately identify and focus on high impact work.
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Run experiments - Modern marketing teams operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty and constant change.
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Analyse results - Every experiment is an opportunity to learn more about your customers and successful growth teams understand the more they learn about their customers, the more they will succeed.
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Build assets & flywheels - Many marketing teams today are still structured around the idea of marketing campaigns. The best growth marketing teams achieve success by continually improving systems, assets and activities that deliver value over time.
How to implement a growth marketing culture
The People, Process, Technology framework (aka the “golden triangle”) is widely used to describe the key elements of a successful company or team.
People
Good growth marketers typically have a wide base level of knowledge, covering everything from user and behavioural psychology to data and analytics, as well as a deeper knowledge in one or two areas well-suited to growth marketing.
Process
Though it’s not sexy, some of the world’s most successful marketing and growth leaders talk more about process than about anything else.
Growth has nothing to do with tactics, and everything to do with process.
Technology
AB testing
Have a good understanding of conversion rates, traffic, MQLs, etc.
Growth marketing software platforms
https://growthmethod.com/marketing-project-management-software/
Our platform helps businesses build a performance marketing culture and grow in-house capability resulting in reduced costs and improved efficiency and results.
https://growthmethod.com/growthhackers-experiments/ or https://growthmethod.com/airtable-growth-marketing/