A Data-Driven Approach To Growth Marketing — Guide
It can be easy to overload your growth marketing team: join new trends, push more ads, new features. But none of these decisions should be made based on what you think unless you have data to back you up.
Your experiments shouldn’t be a shot in the dark.
The growth hacking methodology, coined by Sean Ellis, is all about creating a culture of experimentation where growth marketing teams are continually experimenting, analyzing, and learning new ways to impact your entire funnel.
You can simulate your customer’s journey, collect feedback from loyal customers, and imagine what would improve their experience, but at the end of the day, only real data matters.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, and maybe you know your business so well that you’re right and you end speeding up the process, but might as well be the source of misconceptions.
Regardless of where you focus or how you call your marketing team, you should think about starting running experiments to optimize your user experience (and consequently improve conversions) — and the only way to do this is basing your decisions on data. You would be impressed with how the benefits go beyond increasing your MRR.
Benefits of a data-driven approach
Escape from some of the biases
Growth marketing teams are usually running out-of-the-box experiments precisely on this growth lever. But to grow the business against a relevant KPI to their strategy, it all starts with collecting and analyzing data on different steps of the customers’ journey (i.e., behavioral data and industry benchmarks) and identifying points that can be improved.
Seeking data-driven business decisions helps you to discover the needs of your target audience, understand their behavior, and predict what happens once you put a new idea into experimentation.
You’re no longer guessing what they want or what will happen. With data, you know it because you know what you need to measure, and you’ve measured it already.
Empower your team
Like a flywheel, growth marketing teams are always testing new ideas based on hypotheses that will lead to a conclusion and validation (or not) of those ideas. But for teams to be able to make decisions about ideas to suggest, prioritize, and validate, they need to learn how to manipulate data.
Whether it’s an experiment looking for more website traffic or capitalizing on referral, this framework has a positive impact on teams encouraging innovation based on data, with an expected result that will impact core KPIs for their business.
Gain flexibility
At GrowthHackers, every member of every team in every department has the right and incentive to suggest a growth idea. We promote this across the onboarding and ongoing journey of employees, making sure they are well aware of the downsides: none, and the upsides: everything.
Being responsible for the user’s entire journey gives you flexibility in the scope of experiments you can perform, and having a data-drive mindest helps you to be always aligned to where the company wants to be.
It is super important to make it clear to everyone that if a growth idea that was suggested and tested doesn’t work out, the “suggester” won’t be blamed for it, it’s ok. And whether that idea is validated or not, there is so much that you can learn from the results that fuel your desire to keep suggesting new ideas.
Build Your Growth Marketing Team
Recently, the Growth Teams in GrowthHackers and HubSpot joined forces and launched the Data-Drive Approach to Growth Marketing guide. In this guide, you will learn about the growth hacking approach to data-driven marketing, how to get organized, gather and select ideas to test, and then show you a few examples of experiments we’ve run in the past and how they performed.
Click here to download your free version and start running marketing experiments based on data and make improvements that make our customers fall in love with our products.
