Marketers Guide to Growth Spurts

Editor's Notes

1. My name – blah Today I’m going to be talking all about growth. If you’re marketer tasked with growing a company, what are some of the things you should be thinking about to hit your goals/targets.
2. For us marketers who are focused on growth, big is always better and there have never been so many opportunities and challenges to grow a company We have access to all this content that can give us great tactics on how we can grow faster, and lots of marketing tools to help us do it. But our competitors have access to the exact same things. Competition for audience has never been so fierce.
3. Really audience acquisition is a lot like trying to acquire money
4. Making your first million is the hardest, or so I’m told. Once you’ve made that first million, you can start to leverage that money to make wise investments and add further millions.
5. It’s just the same as growing an audience, once you have an established audience, it’s easier to do new things, make them successful and keep growing
6. A good example of this is HubSpots new podcast with our CMO Mike Volpe. It’s a great podcast, and we could leverage our current audience to help us launch it and within a couple of weeks it was the 5th most popular business podcast. That podcast is now helping us to attract new people, it’s helping us to grow our audience even further.
7. Ok, so let’s talk about growth, here are some of my thoughts on what’s important to acquire an audience for your brand and to use it wisely.
8. For me there are really 4 key components of a strategy that will lead to regular growth spurts for your business. You need to have the right goals and understand what metrics you’re prioritizing You should always be gathering insights from both your competitors and market in general to help you come up with ideas on what you should be doing to grow your audience A really key part of growth is experiments. You should always be experimenting with new tactics, figuring out what’s not only going to help you grow faster, but are things your competitors are not doing. If you’re just doing the same things as your competitors the winner will always be the one who started first. There is always a big advantage in being an early adopter. And the last part of this, which is obviously pretty important, is the promotion.
9. As a marketer your goal should always being with
10. Who is your dream customer. Who is the ideal fit for your product or service.
11. And what problem does your product or service actually solve? How is your product going to make their life better. Understanding these things is at the heart of how some brands are able to grow so fast.
12. For example Slack is an instant messaging application and is one of the fastest growing B2B companies of all time. They’ve just opened offices in Dublin
13. They’re growing really fast. They have well over 500k customers, I think over 170,000 paying customers. They’re adding 1 million in ARR every 11 days. ARR is annual recurring revenue.
14. Their goal is to simply solve the problem of information overload in the office. This is a problem I’m sure we all experience.
15. We lose so much time to interruptions in the office, most of it coming from email. 28% of our working day, which is about 2.1 hours is actually lost to these interruptions
16. The interesting thing about Slacks business is their customers know they have this problem, but have no idea that a solution exists. For the most part Slack isn’t competing with other companies.
17. Instead they see their job as understanding what people think they want and translating the value of their product into their terms. They understand the goal of their company and the problem they solve for people who use it.
18. Their goal was to simply transform the experience of getting a taxi. Traditionally getting a taxi was a nightmare, standing out in the rain, trying to find one, not having the cash to pay for it. All these things that used to be so frustrating about getting a taxi were solved by being able to do it all through a simple app.
19. When Uber first started they gave away free taxi rides to people at tech conferences in San Fran. They knew these were the type of people who would share their experience if it was a good one.
20. And that’s what happened, these people loved the experience so word spread. Again a company rallying around a very specific goal and finding the right people to share that with.
21. In HubSpot our goal is to help both marketers and sales people grow their business
22. We’re pretty obsessed with solving the goals and challenges of our customers.
23. Everyone in HubSpot understands their goals and challenges, and how HubSpot helps to solve them. This is Marketing Mary, she is one of our buyer personas. Describe buyer persona. Everyone from the marketing team, to sales teams to services teams knows our different buyer personas and how our product helps them.
24. And like the previous two companies, this approach has also helped us grow pretty fast as well.
25. Growth spurts don’t happen unless you understand the goal of your product or service and educate your customers on how it will solve their problems, in their language.
26. Once you understand your goal, you want to focus on the right targets
27. The problem I see with small marketing teams is they try to focus on too many targets
28. This is a typical B2B marketing funnel and the different metrics you can be accountable for, <explain metrics> If you have a relatively small marketing team, you can’t try focus on all these at once. You need to pick a couple that will help you grow.
29. When we launch in new countries, we really only focus on traffic and blog subscribers initially.
30. We launched in both Spain and Germany last year, this helps us focus on the right targets as we scale our company in those countries. It sets us up for success.
31. What I see big marketing teams do is spend too much time worrying about best practice or coming up with 12 month strategies, which are for the most part, totally pointless.
32. What they should be doing is executing against measurable targets. At all times you want to spend the majority of your time actually executing on marketing, instead of coming up with big complex plans.
33. For growth spurts to happen you really need constant execution against measurable targets.
34. In HubSpot we use trello to plan out our goals and targets across each month.
35. We use a traffic light system to keep us on track. Green is everything is looking good for us to achieve that goal and target Orange is, we could have a problem hitting this, we should really talk about it And red is, we are definitely going to miss this, let’s figure out why and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
36. The next part of our growth plan is around acquiring insights from both our competitors and market in general to figure out what we can do to grow our audience.
37. Here is a dirty little secret about marketing
38. Not everything we do actually works.
39. And sometimes what works does surprise us. Back in day myself and my brother had a affiliate site selling sneakers. We ranked pretty well in Google for different brands but we wanted to get a second listing ranking as well, so we decided to leverage Youtube. Our videos of us trying on shows got over 1.6 million views to day. That site was sold a long time ago.
40. When marketing some of the things we do won’t work and what work may surprise us, but we can definitely stack the cards in our favor by doing some work to try validate our ideas before they ever go live.
41. There is nothing new about trying to validate your ideas before acting on them. One of my favorite stories on this is from Subbuteo. It’s a popular table soccer game. The game itself was first promoted in a magazine called Boys Own in 1946
42. They managed to get 2,000 orders for a game that didn’t even exist. They actually created the game in 1947 to fulfill those orders and went on to create a really successful company.
43. For marketers today it has never been so easy to validate their ideas.
44. It makes it really easy to figure out who your competitors are. This is a really great feature. It will create this table of who it feels your competitors are and show you things like the number of keywords you have in common, these are keywords you are both ranking in the top 20 for. This SE keywords are keywords they are ranking in the top 20 for and are creating traffic for their site. Really great information for us to know.
45. Once you’ve gathered those insights, you want to leverage all of that knowledge to start experimenting with different tactics to grow your audience Experiments mean we want to always look for new tactics that can help us grow faster than our competitors.
46. I really like this quote from Niel Bohr, who was a famous physicist, on experiments. “An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.” What that really means is ….
47. They screwed up a lot . This is a really important part of being a marketer. As we said earlier, not everything we do will be successful. But it’s important to constantly test new things. We want to find new tactics we can leverage to outgrow our competitors
48. The last part of your growth plan is to get really good at promoting. Promotion has never been so important. As competition for audience get’s more fierce, your ability to promote the things you do will play a massive role in how successful you are.
49. Ok, so we haven’t much time to cover promotion, here are some quick fire tips.