Is traditional marketing dead? Growth hacking vs Traditional marketing, what is the difference? — Review.
Growth hacking and traditional marketing have two main differences. The first one is their focus, the second one is their way of approaching work. Let’s discuss the first difference: what do they focus on?
Traditional marketing — Focus on the top of the funnel, generation of awareness, and bringing in leads for the sales team, working in totally different team unit from them.
Growth hacking — Focus throughout the entire customer journey, from awareness to growth.
In the picture below you can see a typical customer journey in a subscription product.
Now let’s discuss the second difference: what is their way of approaching work?
Traditional marketing — Big risky bets on one idea. Because they are bets with almost no previous test, they come with a high risk.
Growth marketing — Experimentation, many small bets, defining hypothesis upfront, defining the most efficient experiment to test this hypothesis, generating data to learn from it, learn fast and repeat the cycle. Big bets begin only after there is substantial data to prove there are going to be great results from that idea.
And what is the common profile of a growth hacker?
A growth hacker is someone who works in a relatively new era of digital products, data, and product-led growth. Because of that, a growth hacker needs a mix of product, data, technical and marketing skills to focus on alternative growth experiments. An experiment can be called growth hacking, which in short, comes from the skillset and the mindset of a growth hacker.
“A mindset that every strategy is a hypothesis is the defining trait of a growth hacker. Guesses on what’s going to work are only your assumption”
Why did the term “growth hacking” emerge?
First and foremost, there is no silver (or golden) bullet that’ll make your business grow. Growth hacking is a process, a series of actions you take, to accelerate learning in a more linear way than the traditional work of sales & marketing.
The term growth hacking first started to be discussed with professor Steven Blank teaching how startup owners could find a working growth strategy in the fastest way with as minimal resources as possible. Sean Ellis was one of the first who coined the term “growth hacker”, in 2010.
Why is growth hacking so important now?
A few main points are:
- Traditional marketing channels are already expensive and saturated.
- Most projects focus heavily on the product, but the real challenge is in distribution.
- New channels are popping up very rapidly (see image).
- Acquiring is not enough. Activation and retention are also key.
- It’s all about return on investment.
- It’s not about tips and tricks. You need a smart process.
And how do I build a growth process for my company?
I split the way I build a growth process into six main phases.
First phase: map your customer journey, having their perspective in mind.
- How does your customer consume your product?
- What is the best way for a customer to purchase from you?
- How does your customer interact with your product or service?
Start with one persona, and map their ideal journey.
Second phase: define your growth process framework.
I recommend checking two very well-known process frameworks and adapting them to your customer’s journey.
There is the AARRR framework, which stands for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referrals (see image).
There’s also the SaaS framework, which stands for Sales as a Science, by Jacco Van Der Kooij, founder @ Winning by Design. I recommend reading his series of books.
In the Third phase, identify all of the growth channels you can use to interact with your customers.
With the customer journey and the process framework on hand, identify all of your growth channels, for each phase. For example: in the acquisition phase there are several channels we can count on. Gabriel Weinberg (in the book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth) listed 19 of those channels:
Fourth phase, define your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).
This means defining the main metrics according to your business models. After doing this, we will bring experiments to move those metrics. For example, a quarterly growth planning:
- Objective: grow our customer base.
- Goal: achieve 10 new enterprise customers by the end of the quarter.
If you would like to learn more about OKRs, I recommend reading the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr. The author was Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s advisor (both founders of Google).
In the Fifth phase, formulate experiments.
Now it’s time to formulate logical thoughtful experiments that are testable and feasible, with assumptions based on data. But how should you design your experiments?
A great framework for that is to tell a story following a narrative, starting with:
HYPOTHESIS — We believe that ….
TESTING — If we do….
METRIC — Is going to change…
CRITERIA — And I’ll accomplish…
Sixth phase: prioritize, run experiments, measure it, learn fast, repeat the cycle or double bet and scale it.
I believe the last phase is the toughest and one of the most important parts of the entire process. It requires great execution from the growth hacker and the team involved.
After running experiments, analyzing the results, and learning from them, comes to you the decision to double down your bets and scale that experiment with more resources or repeat the cycle of formulating and running experiments.
Is traditional marketing “dead”?
In my opinion, yes. There is little market space for marketers following the “traditional” focus and way of working. The top 1% of marketers are already professionals with a versatile skill set in product, data, technology, and UX.
This was just the tip of the iceberg.
This post just covered a bit of growth marketing. If you want to deeply learn about it I recommend you to check CXL and Growthtribe, both have very practical content about growth, with the elite practitioners in the world and an affordable price.
