## Growth Marketing Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Accelerate Your Company’s Growth by 5x

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# Introduction to Growth Marketing and Its Importance

Growth marketing, or growth hacking, literally translates to “hacking growth.” Growth hacking achieves company growth through various, primarily marketing-driven initiatives. These initiatives are often referred to as hacks.

The growth hacking process involves the step-by-step generation and testing of hacks that lead to growth. Growth marketing helps companies achieve rapid, exponential growth by continuously testing hypotheses. Exponential growth means expanding the company two, three, five, ten times, and so on.

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# How Quickly and Realistically Can Growth Marketing Scale Your Business?

According to Growth Academy, one of the largest schools teaching hypothesis testing, testing 10 hypotheses per week can result in a 400% increase in key metrics. For example, if your revenue was $1,000, a 400% growth would bring it to $5,000.

Excluding weekends, holidays, vacations, and sick days, there are approximately 221 working days in a year—44 weeks of five working days each. Only 30% of experiments prove successful. If you test 10 hypotheses per sprint, you end up with 132 working hypotheses annually.

# What is Growth Marketing and Why Do You Need It?

A growth team, or growth marketing team, helps hack your company’s growth. They seek solutions that can quickly improve key business metrics, such as increasing revenue, lead generation, average ticket size; enhancing feature activation; closing more deals; and reducing user churn.

To achieve this, the growth team formulates hypotheses about what and how to act to increase these metrics and tests them swiftly to determine which ones truly impact the key metrics.

# What Differentiates a Growth Team from a Traditional Marketing Team

A growth team operates differently from other teams, such as the traditional marketing department. Here’s how:

• Speed and Volume: A growth team launches and tests numerous hypotheses quickly, aiming for rapid iterations rather than lengthy projects.
• Data-Driven: Decisions are based on data and measurable outcomes rather than solely on creative input or intuition.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Growth teams work closely with product, engineering, and other departments to implement and scale successful experiments.
• Fail Fast Mentality: Embracing failure as a learning opportunity is crucial, allowing teams to pivot and adapt strategies swiftly.

# Types of Growth Teams

Growth teams typically fall into two categories:

1. Product-Focused Growth Teams: These teams concentrate on enhancing the product itself to drive growth.
2. Marketing-Focused Growth Teams: These teams focus on marketing strategies and initiatives to fuel growth.

However, growth experiments can be conducted in various areas such as HR, Success & Support. It all depends on the goals set for the growth team.

# How to Launch a Growth Team

To build an effective growth team, you need to:

1. Separate the Team: Ensure the growth team is distinct and dedicated solely to experimenting with growth hypotheses.
2. Set Clear Goals: Define the team’s objectives and identify the key metric to focus on.
3. Assemble the Right People: Bring together individuals who can cover all necessary roles for testing growth hypotheses.

# Developing Strong Hypotheses and Prioritizing Them for Testing

A growth hypothesis is a risky assumption that if you take a certain action, users or customers will respond in a specific way, helping to increase a particular metric by a set amount.

## How to Formulate a Hypothesis

• Brainstorm with the Team: Collaborate with key growth team members to generate hypotheses that can impact the key metric.
• Validate Focus: Ensure the hypothesis targets the key metric and doesn’t focus on too narrow a segment.
• Document All Hypotheses: Keep a centralized record of all generated hypotheses.

## Prioritizing Hypotheses for a Sprint

Not all growth marketing hypotheses should be tested immediately. Here’s how to prioritize:

1. Regular Growth Meetings: Hold consistent team sessions to discuss and review generated hypotheses.
2. Sprint Planning: Develop a plan for the sprint based on these meetings.
3. Assign Responsibilities: Allocate specific team members to launch each hypothesis.
4. Coordinate with Affected Teams: Ensure synchronization with departments impacted by the sprint’s hypotheses.

# Testing Hypotheses and Analyzing Results

## How to Test

To test 10-15 hypotheses weekly efficiently:

• Limit to MVP: Focus on minimal viable products to conserve time and resources.
• Track Hypotheses Status: Monitor the progress and status of each hypothesis.
• Seek Statistically Significant Data: Test until you gather enough data to confirm or reject the hypothesis.

## How to Analyze Test Results

Once testing is complete:

• Review Outcomes: Assess the results against your key metrics.
• Gather Comprehensive Data: Understand why a hypothesis succeeded or failed.
• Iterate and Learn: Use failures as learning opportunities to refine future hypotheses.

## Managing Tested Hypotheses

• Scale Successful Hypotheses: Implement and expand on what worked.
• Discard Unsuccessful Hypotheses: If a hypothesis fails despite efforts, close it.
• Share Insights: Communicate the findings with relevant teams to inform their strategies.

# Why and How Growth Teams Should Interact with the Six Main Teams in a Company

A growth team can play a supportive role for various departments by conducting experiments that enhance their metrics. Here’s how:

1. Marketing: Share growth hypotheses results to refine marketing strategies and channels.
2. Production: Involve production leads in growth meetings to ensure quick scaling of successful experiments.
3. Editorial: Test article topics and lead magnets to optimize content effectiveness.
4. Product Marketing: Collaborate on feature release formulations to better position the product and engage users.
5. HR: Partner with growth to enhance employee recruitment and align on company vision and values.
6. Sales: Learn from sales strategies to attract targeted leads who are genuinely interested in the product and related services.

# Building a Strong Growth Team: Checklist

To ensure your growth team is highly effective:

• Align Team Goals with Company Objectives: Link the growth team’s tasks directly to financial and strategic goals.
• Focus on MVPs: Concentrate on developing minimal viable products to expedite testing.
• Thorough Hypothesis Development: Carefully craft and discuss each growth marketing hypothesis before testing.
• Data-Driven Ideas: Base hypotheses on user behavior, data insights, research findings, and experiences from other teams.
• Analyze and Learn: Examine test results meticulously and understand the reasons behind each outcome.
• Embrace Failures as Learning: Use each unsuccessful hypothesis as a chance to improve and inform future strategies.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with other departments related to the hypotheses being tested.
• Avoid Safe Bets Only: Challenge the team to test innovative hypotheses beyond guaranteed successes to foster genuine growth.
• Establish a Growth Process: Develop regular procedures for hypothesis testing and metric improvement, rather than searching for a single magic growth hack. Incremental improvements can collectively lead to significant business enhancements.

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