Marketing & Growth
It’s more than running A/B tests.
It’s more than white lab coats.
More than reaching statistical significance.
It’s a state of mind. A worldview where you’re willing to fail.
A way of thinking that challenges the way you run your business. Experimentation means you’re willing to start from scratch and learn exactly what your customers want.
It trades everything you thought to be true for things you know to be true.
It never stops.
And it’s the only sustainable way to grow.
Whoops, there goes the shop.
The place you invested so much time in just disappeared overnight. No fire, flood or lightning strike.
It’s gone – vanished.
If this really happened we’d be shocked.
And it just happened. The physical store has all but vanished for many industries. It’s not coming back, ever.
Like most hobbies of obese Westerners, shopping is done on the lounge with a smartphone.
How will we adjust to this digital way of life? Can we still connect and build relationships on a 6 inch screen?
Do people behave differently when searching for things in a store compared to on a phone? Can we still grow our business without a physical address?
The answer is always yes. The how is much harder.
Perhaps one of the greatest trends in digital behaviour is a lack of concentration.
Tweets are short. We use multiple devices at once. Often, we never use apps more than once.
Information is everywhere, uncensored and almost free for all. How then, do we expect to keep telling our stories the same way? How can we expect to sell the same way as we did before – when people used to pay attention to ads and billboards?
All we know is that we can’t follow the status quo and sell the facts. We have to have a unique story or emotional connection to break through the noise.
2 things we can try:
The Growth Hacker Marketing movement is gaining momentum. ‘Growth Hacking’ isn’t the easy way to reach your customers, because that doesn’t exist.
It’s the recognition that the most successful new startups don’t rely on big media and advertising budgets to reach their customers. Instead, they target precisely the right segment.
Communities of people who naturally look our for a type of product you offer.
This slideshare includes some of the tools we can all use to optimise our marketing. I hope you find it valuable.
My recommended reading list includes a book on Growth Hacking by Ryan Holiday. It’s a great read.
When we design or create things, it becomes more about how it looks than what it does. Appeal over function.
The irony is that users quickly forget what looks great. But if it works and is relevant to our needs we’ll use it every day.
The goal should be ‘how can we make this relevant’, not ‘how can we make this look great?’
Some Marketers are obsessed with data. Data is great because it gives us the information we need to make decisions.
Sales are down because people can’t find the right product.
Our most valuable customers live in Melbourne.
Only retirees visit that page.
That’s valuable information because we can use it. We can improve our models and tinker with our strategies.
However the obsession starts when we care more about the numbers than what the numbers represent. When we rely only on the data, we fail to realise that the data is merely representative of human behaviour.
And human behaviour is completely unpredictable.
We should absolutely find more ways to learn more about how our customers behave. But lets not forget they are humans, and numbers can’t fully capture the way we think, feel and act.
Sean Blake Blog