Traditional vs. Growth Marketing

This week I started Traditionally vs. Growth Marketing from CXL. It is my second week out of twelve weeks. I read before about Marketing Funnels in Digital for Dummies by Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry and I got the chance to dive deeper through this course.

Marketing funnels are the steps that your consumer until conversion, usually it is hard to keep up with and can be frustrating to measure each step of your marketing funnel. Funnels can vary depending on your strategy and no one can fit it all.

The major difference between Traditional and Growth marketing is the funnels. Traditional marketing is about the top of the funnel while Growth marketing is about moving your consumer through the funnel until conversion.

Other main difference is that usually in Traditional marketing, the marketer is not open to experimenting, only knowing one or two channels and keeps on pushing through them but without experiment or using any of the optimization techniques.

But with Growth it is always about experimenting, there is no one channel that you would prefer without research and experimenting. No type of content or message that is out there without testing.

Starting with accepting that you don’t really know what consumer want or need, where are they and how they interact, and most importantly to stop assuming that you know your consumer.

The lean startup and Growth Marketing

With the emerging technology, the variety of businesses in the market, and the options available to consumers it is hard to launch a product and compete in the market. Lean startup is about developing products that consumer already needs so market already exists as soon the product is launched.

Growth marketing operates efficiently in the lean startups as it is all about defining a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis to see your results.

The pillars of Digital Marketing

Marketers focus only one part of the digital scope and usually it is social media while ignoring other potential channels and strategies that can be more efficient.

Beginning with the most left behind, Search engine optimization and what it holds in achieving business goals and KPI’s. What is different about SEO is that you optimize to exists where your consumer is trying to search

Google and Bing are the most used search engines on the web, especially Google after the fall of Yahoo. Google is on frequent change and updates to avoid what happened to Yahoo. Yahoo was once the biggest platform on the web and it turned to a platform full of spam, advertisement and poor user interface.

To avoid this, Google is always on frequent updates to move original content up and to eliminate untrustworthy links and domains.

Search engine optimization beholds a value for your business, optimizing your content to be pushed by search engine algorithms to be visible for your consumer while searching.

Another pillar of digital marketing is Search Engine Marketing, although it may sound similar to Search Engine Optimization, it is not. Search Engine Marketing is about paying to be visible in the search engine for specific keywords. For instance, if someone is searching for shoes and you bid on that keyword to be visible in the top results.

The difference between search engine optimization and search engine marketing is that search engine optimization is organic while search engine marketing is paid.


Growth Marketing and A/B Split

One of the most techniques that shapes the process of Growth Marketing is A/B Split tests. A/B Split tests is testing two or more variation to see which one is performing better. One known technique of A/B Split tests is to split your budget to 80/20 and use that 20 in testing between two variants and the winner gets the full 80.

Another technique that works well is working with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the behavior that defines the need of humans, those needs are physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs works well with Copywriting. Testing a variation of text using A/B Split can boost your key performance indicators. For instance, imagine you have a business that serves Graphic Designers by providing courses that help them in their career progress. Crafting a caption that goes along with the safety need is different from belonging need.

Here are two examples that use different Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. First, if I am going to write a caption using Safety needs so maybe I will go with something like “Designers, don’t be left behind and check the latest feature you can use to improve your performance”. What if we used Love and belonging needs, maybe we can go with caption like this “Check out features designers are using today to improve their performance” or maybe we can user self-actualization needs like “Be the next Art Director….”

After crafting different texts variations, use A/B Split to test their performance and find out which message will achieve higher key performance indicators from Safety, Belonging, or Self Actualization.

Another technique you can use A/B Split tests with is Media Buying and Planning. Whenever you start a campaign you are supposed to craft a persona that represent your consumer characteristics to reach the right audience and to avoid ending up with the wrong ones.

Buyer Persona, Avatar, or Consumer Profile are all names that represent your consumer. Defining the personality, behavior and the psychological part of your consumer is part of defining your avatar. Where he communicates, what channels your consumer use, what type of content they engage with and much more. Answering these questions will definitely increase your key performance indicators as it will help in reaching the right audience.

So you can A/B Split tests with avatars by testing different variations, maybe by targeting different locations or different interests to find out which one would perform better and which one will be more representative of your business and increase your key performance indicators.

To summarize, A/B Split Tests is a concept not a tool, you can use A/B split tests in almost everything. If you are not using A/B Split then you are missing a lot, maybe there is a much better version that you didn’t discover yet. Using A/B Split will make you closer to discovering what performs better for your business while eliminating all the assumptions.