Building A Growth Process

A must-read for every entrepreneur. The manual of the AARRR framework.

Hi, today I’m going to be sharing more of what I have learned from the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree. If you run or own a business, then this is an important read for you.

Here are the things I will be covering in this article:

• The most important metrics to monitor in your overall growth model.
• How to identify growth opportunities on a quarterly basis.
• Important ways small, dedicated teams boost your metrics, as opposed to large teams.
• Brainstorming tactics to ensure you get the most out of your ideation process.
• The ICE framework: impact, confidence, and effort.
• Ways to incorporate the build, measure, learn cycle on a quarterly basis.
• How the experimentation process works through real-world examples.

The Growth Model Framework

The most common framework for a growth model is generally Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for startups, which is the AARRR framework. So, this basically means Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referrals.

Every customer goes through these five (5) metrics in any business.

• Awareness: Knowing about the brand.
• Acquisition: Signing up for the site for the first time, or visiting the site for the first time.
• Activation is taking that first action, or making the first purchase.
• Retention is sticking around, coming back, and using the site regularly.
• Revenue is the first purchase, or how many purchase the customer makes.
• Referrals: when they share your brand with somebody else.

This can vary slightly for different businesses, but it’s essentially the entire view of your funnel. All of those metrics represent opportunities to grow your business in different ways. Setting goals through the context of where the customer is in your business journey helps you design programs, campaigns, and experiments based on who that customer likely is, how much do they know about your brand, how much have they interacted with you in the past, and what actions have they taken.

The Planning Process

After you have established the basic foundations of your growth model, you now understand your channels and you’ve mapped the journey of your customers; you can now get into the planning process.

The best way to do this (the planning) is to go through the lens of your customer journey and the growth model. Think through all of the different steps that your customer takes on their way from finding out about your product or service all the way through becoming a loyal, frequent habitual customer. Look at the funnel, explore your data, and try to identify the biggest areas of opportunity.

“Where are people falling off the most in your funnel?” Is it that they’re visiting your website and then none of them are converting or very few of them are converting? Is that the biggest area of opportunity? Or are lots of people actually converting from web visitors to their first purchase, but very few people are coming back for their second purchase? Or do you have cart abandonment issues?

One of the most important things to being effective at growth is prioritizing the most impactful things and finding the most impactful ways to grow the business.

The first step in coming up with a good plan, setting the right goals, and building a roadmap is to really understand the biggest areas of opportunity and the biggest pain points for your customers, ’cause that’s really what you should be solving for.

How to effectively brainstorm

1. Focus: When brainstorming, it is best to focus on specific goals. If you want to focus on acquisition opportunities, then focus. The worst way people do brainstorming sessions is to bring people into a room and say, let’s just talk about how we can grow the business, and they talk for 10 minutes about acquisition strategies, 20 minutes on retention, then referrals, then back to acquisition. It’s just all over the place. Get really focused on a specific metric and then go deep on it. So, instead of saying “let us spend the next hour brainstorming on how to grow the business", you say “let’s spend the next hour brainstorming on how to increase referrals or conversions, or whatever metric you want to focus on.
2. Collaboration: A helpful way to brainstorm and set the conversation up for success is bringing in people from other teams, have someone from your team walk through the customer journey for everybody else to understand what it currently looks like for someone who is activating for the first time. You’ll very quickly see areas of opportunity to improve.
3. Research: Look at other businesses that are successful in your niche for inspiration. Research what they are doing with their email marketing or their landing page optimization or their referral program, or their social media. The goal of brainstorming is to maximize the generation of ideas. things. What are the different ways that you think you can affect a metric?

The Experimentation Process

This is where the Build, Measure, Learn cycle comes to play. There are four steps in this process.

The first step is designing your experiment.

This is where you take your hypothesis and get it set up to run as an experiment. A good hypothesis, has an independent variable, a dependent variable, and it’s based on certain assumptions. So, what’s your objective or goal? Write that down.

Analyze your experiment, learn what’s working and what’s not. Automate what worked and repeat the cycle.

In my next article, I’m going to be talking about user-centric marketing. Thanks for being a part of my growth journey.