Marketers traditionally are focused on creating awareness, but it doesn't provide deeper insights about customers experiences. How does your marketing funnel align with your typical customer journey? It's time to learn how to optimize customer journeys with hacking tools that allow marketers to do the work of an engineer without being one themselves.
80% of customers feel that a brand’s experience — across the entire customer journey — is just as important as the products or services they offer. Unfortunately, less than half of marketers surveyed believe they provide an experience that fully aligns to these expectations, according to the report State of the Connected Customer report.
Growth marketing is a focus on the entire sales funnel, whereas traditional marketing limits itself primarily to just the top of it - the acquisition stage - getting visitors to your page. It recognizes that retaining existing customers while acquiring new ones not only accelerates true growth but also saves you money. Gain five new users while losing three existing ones, and you’ve only grown by two. Gain those same five while losing none? You’ve grown by five. That might sound like an oversimplification, but if retention doesn’t factor into your marketing, you’re cutting your acquisition efforts off at the knees.
In traditional marketing concepts, the marketer is only responsible for reach awareness and attract visitors to the webpage based on a pull mindset. The growth mindset embraces the customer's journey and wants the user to feel the value when using the service of a product. Free up more time as a creative marketer and to build marketing experiments.
So, level up as a marketer and get stuff done in the digital playing field in the business landscape of highly demanding customer's expectations. You invest a lot to attract visitors to your web page with campaigns or social media impact, now it's time to catch their pain points in the customer journey and nurture the relationship. How do you do that? Put on a learning mindset and build a marketing experiment, measure the impact and improve.
What's the difference between Growth Marketing and Traditional Marketing?
Growth Marketing is focusing on:
How to get people to discover your product
How to get to an AHA moment as quickly as possible
How to deliver core product value as often as possible
The major difference between traditional marketing teams and the new way of structuring growth teams is that a growth team takes ownership of the complete funnel from start to finish and therefore has a holistic view of what improvements will impact conversion the most.
Let's start with the mindset of traditional marketers responsibility and new possibilities with the growth marketing mindset.
![Growth Marketing vs Traditional](https://thinkingmedia.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/AgileGrowthMarketingvsTraditional.png)
It's about understanding the whole customer journey beyond campaign and page visitors. Testing touch points across the journey aligned with cross-functional growth team. You can optimize customer experiences by optimizing the full customer journey. Learn by testing A and B page experiments and build a collective understanding of the impact and growth it levers. Find metrics that matter for the customer experience (that could be other than business metrics).
Build marketing experiments to get insights about pains and gains in the whole customer's journey, do not only count reach and acquisition. Agile Growth Hacking skills are about understanding the whole customer journey beyond campaign and page visitors. Testing touch points across the journey aligned with cross-functional growth team.
![Service Canvas Customer Journey](https://thinkingmedia.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ServiceCanvasCustomerJourney.jpg)
The marketing needs to be based on data-driven customer-focused learnings and collaboration both inside and outside your organization. Develop an organizational capacity to work with the Growth Funnel.
This way CMO's will expand their role beyond traditional marketing and top-of-the-funnel activities and align modern technologies with advanced capabilities to drive business performance and growth. To convert customer insights to deliver personalized value in real-time throughout the customer journey and lifecycle. The CMO should transition to the new role of Chief Engagement Officer. The marketer that learns about to communicate with the right message to the right person with the right data information in the right channel at the right time every single time will win in the marketplace.
Sean Ellis, the founder of the term “growth hacker” in 2010, declared: An important step is the automation of the marketing programs that work. All of this will continue to free up more time for creative marketers to build marketing experiments that truly push the envelope on results.
The Traditional Marketing Funnel Creates Strategic Silos
The funnel AARRR framework was originally created by Dave McClure. Pirate Metrics is a growing marketing framework coined by Dave McClure to scale company growth. It focuses on optimizing the marketing funnel by looking at five key phases of the customer journey – Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral – or AARRR for short.
![Dave-McClures-Pirate-Metrics](https://thinkingmedia.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Dave-McClures-Pirate-Metrics.png)
One of the common answers to “How does your product grow?” is a picture of a funnel. Linear channels are less valuable since they are not always repeatable and scalable like other growth loops. Growth is a Team Effort. Growth requires a combination of Product, Marketing, Analytics, and Business Development and to grow a product effectively you need competences to take ownership of both internal and external factors. Internal in terms of product a nd user experience and external in the sense of having a consumer-focused approach that understands the market.
Growth Marketing vs Traditional.
Growth is rarely the result of one big breakthrough. It’s the sum of many things coming together over time.
Instead of looking at growth hacks only, agree on a systematic process for how you work to achieve long-term growth with your team. These are some steps to get started and you should always try to refine and improve your process over time, says Nick Larsson a growth hacker at the startup Truecaller.
Read how Truecaller reached 300M users with the Startup’s Growth Machine.
How do you measure growth success?
The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base. The North Star metric concept originally emerged from Silicon Valley, and is best utilized by companies that invest in long-term sustainable growth, says Forbes. The value that the product creates for your customers drives their engagement and ultimately creates value and strategic direction for your company.
Growth Hackers often use North Stars Metrics. For example, for Medium (longer articles) the metric is "total time reading," for Facebook it is "daily active users," for Airbnb the metric is "nights booked". The KPI could also be monthly active users.
Start to pin down your North Star metric, then create a mechanism around it that can help you drive growth. In order to build your growth model, you should look into the variables that define your metric. Those variables are steps along the consumer journey, like new users, engagement and retention. Mapping them and creating a comprehensive model of their relationships can help you understand their interactions and grow your key metric.
When growth is broken down to learn the real value delivered to customers it becomes clear that this is not just a marketing responsibility.
Most teams within an organization play some role in delivering value to customers. Sales and marketing attract new customers into the funnel, but the product and customer support teams play a key role in ensuring prospects and customer are able to experience the core value of a product.
Coordinating these siloed teams to work together on growth initiatives can be very challenging without a metric that focuses them around a common goal.
Agile Marketing is applying agile management methods in the context of marketing.
Your organization needs to build agile capacity to be able to navigate in a world of constant change. Once you learn what customer wants and you can focus on growth and scale. Start with a growth learning mindset and develop the culture, bring in the agile management principles into the whole organization to act and respond faster. Agile mindset – change the culture with seven principles.
Read More Growth Marketing: A Five-Step Framework Forbes
8 Hacks To Accelerate Your Growth in 2019