The Mindset of a Growth Marketer
Growth marketing is a mindset. A growth marketer sees marketing in a different light than how the normal marketing professional does. The average marketer has the belief that a product will sell and get customers as long as you pour dollars into it. They assume that people are waiting on the sideline for them to launch their products and as soon as they inform these people, they will automatically come in and buy. This couldn't be more wrong. Many products with big budgets have failed. Some brands spent millions of dollars advertising some years back, yet they don't exist again today.
At this point, you may be asking yourself how then does a growth marketer thinks. The below highlights this.
How Does a Growth Marketer Think?
1. A growth marketer is always testing and tracking to know what works. He makes a hypothesis based on the data available to him, tests, tracks, and automates it if it works. The traditional marketer sits on the sidelines. He pours marketing dollars into a promotion and hopes it succeeds. When it does, he doesn't know what caused it to succeed. A growth marketer on the other hand only works with what is testable, trackable, and scalable. He always knows what works because he is always tracking.
2. A growth marketer believes you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to grow a product. A traditional marketer won't agree with this. Their instinct is always to start with ads. A growth marketer thinks and sees things differently. Companies like Hotmail were built with this kind of mindset. With no external ads, Hotmail grew to 1 million users in just 6 months and 30 million users in 30 months. How did they do this? By using the product to promote itself. They added a message at the bottom of every mail sent (PS I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail).
3. A growth marketer isn't interested in reaching everyone. His only interest is reaching his audience. He finds out who his audience is, where he can find them, and reaches them precisely where they are. Instead of blasting the public with ads, the growth hacker precisely targets a specific audience interested in the product being promoted. He doesn't spread himself on all channels just for the purpose of doing it. He carefully researches his audience to know where they are, then goes after them on those platforms. A great example is Uber. Instead of spending millions reaching their ideal customers they waited for an event (Austin’s SXSW Conference) and offered free rides to the event attendees. These were thousands of high-income young adults who were its potential customers. A growth hacker is only interested in the cheapest, most effective way of reaching his exact audience.
4. Growth marketing is metric and ROI driven. A growth marketer identifies a set of metrics that impacts the bottom line, focuses on it, and runs a series of experiments to move the needle on those metrics. His only interest is tactics and ideas that move the needle. He is not interested in awareness so to speak. Some metrics that interest a growth marketer are Customer acquisition cost (CAC), Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), Retention rate, activation rate, etc.
5. Growth marketing starts with data and is always based on data. A growth marketer doesn't do things because of his instinct or because his gut tells him it will work. He is not biased by his personal preferences when making decisions on what ideas to continue running or to stop. He makes decisions based on the data available to him.
6. A growth marketer doesn't see marketing as something one does but as something built into the product itself. The product is then launched and optimized along the way based on customer feedback and data. This process is a repetitive one that goes on and on. Growth marketing starts from the point of product development. As Aaron Ginn said The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.
7. A growth marketer is not rigid or fixed in their thinking. They are fluid and always ready to change if the data says otherwise. They suggest changes to a product based on customer feedback. They are always getting feedback and using the feedback to make product or promotion changes.
8. Growth marketing starts with the minimum viable version of a product. Changes are then constantly made to the product based on customer feedback and data, till product market fit is achieved. A growth marketer won't promote a product the way it is if it's something nobody wants. To a growth marketer you don't necessarily promote what you have, you keep improving what you have till it becomes what people need. A growth marketer's work starts right from the development stage. He makes sure the product fulfills a real and compelling need before promoting it heavily. He suggests tweaks to be made based on customer feedback and data till this point is reached. Airbnb for example didn't start the way it currently is. It went from a little bed and breakfast to a networking alternative when hotels are fully booked, to the current model of you being able to rent any space, from a tent to a castle.
9. The growth marketer's interest is turning the first couple of users into evangelists of the product. He favors this over an endless cycle of promotion to attract new users via ads. The mindset of a growth marketer is to help build a product that will invoke a desire in people to spread the word about it. He turns dedicated customers into marketing tools. What features can be added that will make it easy to spread the word about a product? What changes can we make to a product that will make people interested in telling their friends and family about it?
He thinks of how he can use another platform's popularity for his benefit. He thinks of free, unconventional ways he can tap into the network effect of a popular platform to grow his product. e.g. what Spotify did with Facebook where Facebook friends could see when their friends were listening to music on Spotify. Another example is Airbnb making it easy for their users to share their listings on Craigslist with just the click of a button. He understands that virality is not an accident, it is engineered.
10. A growth marketer is not only interested in bringing in leads. He is interested in bringing in lifelong customers. he understands that his job doesn't stop at lead generation or sign-ups. He engineers ways to make the product he is pushing sticky enough for users to stick around. He goes into the data to see if there is something common among retained users, then optimizes towards getting more users to do that thing when he identifies it. An example is Twitter noticing that people were more likely to stick around if they followed 5-10 accounts on the first day. This made them build a feature where people were encouraged to follow 10 people and given suggestions on whom to follow by manually selecting them.
11. A growth marketer is always striving for improvements. He understands that whatever the current state of a metric, it can always get better. Hence he is always testing and iterating. He has the mindset that everything can be improved even if it is great already. He pours himself into the data to see the next point of improvement in the funnel.