Growth Marketing in Startups

I was reading an article in TechCrunch on growth marketing, I remembered the day when we tried to find a growth marketer and as mentioned in the article, it’s very hard to find the right person. After months of searching, we have realized one of the founders should take up this job. Being some background with customer’s journey and retention experience on SaaS B2B, I have taken over this responsibility and built the growth team for VaycayHero. I am sharing here some of the basics that I have learned during this process.

Basic of Growth Marketing:

The basic lies on to do the reverse engineering of the customer journey. This means you need to pick a channel and go through how a user landed from a channel (or directly) to your site/app, done some activities, and convert or left. As a growth innovator, one needs to find out possible experiments to a selective channel (s) to work profitably and at scale. Growth marketing is a way to create a relationship between Users and Growth.

Goals:

The goals are,

1. Bring users through the selective channel(s).
2. Remove all the blockers in the customer journey.
3. Increase engagement time.
4. Understand user motivation & engagement pattern.
5. Eliminate the reasons for the drop-off.
6. Convert the lead.
7. Identify the ways that bring more similar users profitably and at scale.

Data & Analytics:

Data is a critical part of growth marketing. You need to think through how data will be collected along with a growth implementation. This data need to be analyzed in a various segment to understand and many times original approach needs to be tweaked. You can use various analytics tools available and also you might need to add a few custom approaches to collect additional data.

Growth Team:

You need to build a growth team comprised of front and backend engineers, data analysts, and marketers (innovative). The team members need to be very smart, innovative and someone who loves to do continuous experiments, self-aware. I have hired the engineers and blend them to play with the data, innovations, and a growth mindset. This team built on the foundation where experimentation is part of the culture. The job of the team to come up with experimental ideas (bottom-up approach), prioritize them, and implement them in an agile way and measure the success.

Approaches:

The approaches to coming up with growth ideas vary and as I mentioned earlier, you need to know your customer journey in detail. For example, we figured out most of our guests travel with a group and they share booking details with their friends. We have come up with few ideas on how can we make it easier to do it and keep all the team members in the group in sync with their trip. This helped for future prospective and increases our user base as all the team members are seeing our brand repeatedly. This approach comes by talking to customers, spent time with the customer service, and see various analytics data. Meet as a team, discuss the observations, and come up with various ideas. Prioritize the ideas based on the RICE( reach, impact, cost & effort) methodology and implement them through your agile process. Timeboxed the experiments, as in most cases you will not get the outcome of it immediately and you need to tweak the experiments based on the data collected. This is also applicable when you created an advt on a social platform, you need to play with multiple versions of the advt and tweak it based on the data. It is a very engaging process and you need to be very disciplined in executing it.

Conclusion:

As a startup founder, you need to come up with an innovative way to build the growth team and you need to start thinking from day 1. This team is going to stay longer and so you need to be careful about whom you bringing to this team. I am blessed with this experience to build the growth team, executing the experiments, and see the growth. Being an engineering leader, it’s a different experience than building a large-scale engineering platform (which I did for the whole of my carrier). At VaycayHero, we have done more than 300 experiments on email, social and web, other growth channels, and able to generate 10M+ revenue before we get acquired.

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