Growth Marketing Mindset – Part 5

Growth Marketing Mindset is about growing your brand through experimentation.  May it be helping your customer and changing people’s mindset on how your products and services can change their life and community for better. You need to change first.

In this last article of 5 articles on growth marketing, we will see; why growth marketing is a mindset about the dataset. I touched it briefly in my first article.

Growth Marketing is about looking at marketing efforts’ data and turning them in your brand’s favour to achieve desired results to generate more revenue, keep existing customers, and increase user engagement.

Growth Marketing is a Mindset rather than skill skillset I am not saying skill set is not business leaders are not keen to experiment with marketing.  There are several reasons let me discuss a few of them here.

1. Marketing teams in organisations are quite comfortable with traditional marketing strategies and dipping their feet in and out of digital marketing. They find excuses for not experimenting with newer strategies with excuses of “Oh, we don’t know how it will help us. Or we still don’t understand how it can help us”. Growth marketing is about experimenting with and adopting new strategies.
2. The marketing budget is an afterthought in many businesses.For growth marketing to work, marketing must be built within the product life cycle, not as an afterthought.
3. To disrupt the market; product-market fit is important. The marketing efforts must start before they develop a prototype during the product research phase. Yes, businesses spend money on getting market data, but they rely on quantitative data rather than qualitative data. That is fine. However, qualitative data has to be captured with the organisation rather than from marketing agencies. So, this means that they need for growth marketers in the team.
4. Traditional Marketers with digital marketing experience may not have the technical expertise to read data or even look for specific data. Data collection is current, and it cannot be retrospective.
5. Finally, for this article, marketers are not salespeople. Marketers are educators who educate about your product and how it can solve your market’s problems. They are problem solvers.

Few examples of Tech start-ups which embraced growth marketing mindset

Some examples I am mentioning below, which I adopted when they rolled out in the past. I am an early adopter, and I used to mentor tech start-ups. My start-up, which started after finishing, we let it die when one partner passed away. That is a story for another day.

2. Hotmail—Yes, it goes back to pre-2000. Growth marketing is not a new branch of marketing. Many tech start-ups adopt it because they had to improvise their marketing as they are bootstrapping.  I still use my @Hotmail.com email address. The Hotmail was a precursor for Outlook.com
3. Gmail—I still have my Gmail account, which I created from my invite. It was an “invite-only” system to drive growth. The “invite-only” is one of the growth marketing strategies which many start-ups follow. At one point, people even bought the Gmail invite on the eBay.
4. LinkedIn—One of my friends worked at LinkedIn.com and invited me to join this professional network in 2004. It was my first social platform. I used to ask my colleagues whether they were on LinkedIn all the time, even when they didn’t know about it. LinkedIn initially was focusing on getting tech people and tech companies on its platform. That is why I am a bit cross with them; they are following Facebook these days.  They were innovators; Facebook followed their strategies; now, it is the other way around.
5. PayPal was another tech start-up which followed unconventional marketing to think differently about paying online. They used referrals to grow their business initially before on messengers, emails and blog.
6. The last one I recently got on, which is clubhouse.com. They are adopting the same growth marketing strategy of invite-only to grow their platform. They follow the scarcity marketing tactic to up the novelty factor of their platform.

Above are not just some start-ups which used the growth marketing strategies.  There are many successful ones. Some of them are Airbnb, Uber, HubSpot, Slack, Netflix, Instagram and Groupon. One day, I will write above them.

Here are links to my other articles in this growth marketing series. Next week it will be about list building strategies.

1. What is growth marketing? 
2. Difference between Growth Marketing vs Digital Marketing
3. Growth Marketing Process and Strategies
4. Growth Marketing Metrics
5. Linkedin Article from 2016