Forbes: A pragmatic approach is the key to successful growth hacking
Heikki Väänänen | Founder, Exec. VP of Growth
In my latest Forbes article, I discuss organizational growth (specifically growth hacking) and how businesses looking to grow must utilize all the data they have at hand – including CX data – in order to maximize growth potential within the organization.
Organizational growth is a challenge. In part, because there is a systemic disconnect between what the customers want and need from the business, and what the company perceives is best for its patrons. Luckily, there are lots of growth hacking processes that exist to help businesses successfully implement these strategies within their organization. One of the most compelling is known as the GROWS process.
The GROWS Process
The GROWS process is a clear, effective framework that businesses can adopt to trial new ideas and drive customer growth. In essence, it applies the scientific method to customer growth, with the idea being that by conducting experiments with different growth ideas, and then gathering data on the results, companies can reliably work out which ideas will work and which won’t.
The process consists of 5 steps:
- Gather Ideas
- Rank Ideas
- Outline Experiments
- Work (execute the experiments)
- Study Outcome
Construct Ideas Based On CX Data
Gathering ideas involves looking at quantitative and qualitative data on where the company has room to improve in its sales and marketing efforts or product metrics. Ideas must then be generated based on the findings of the collected data, and should look to address the One Metric That Matters (OMTM), which is described in growth hacking as the metric that matters the most to a startup’s growth at a given point of time.
- Metric can be anything (e-commerce might use wish-list-to-cart conversion ratio. Brick-and-mortar store might use visitors to the premises, basket size, or referrals)
- CX data should form the backbone of whichever metric is chosen
Get Your Priorities In Order
For growth hacking to be a successful endeavor, it’s important that businesses formulate their ideas into categories which take into account the trade-off between input (in terms of investment of money, time etc.) and output (in terms of results in the event of success) ,as well as the likelihood of success in the first place.
- Once prioritized, form hypotheses and outline the experiments the company intends to run, including how to use CX data from customer feedback pathways to build tests
- Each test should be designed so that they can be run in a short amount of time (around 2 weeks), in order to maximize learning potential and increase the number of experiments that can be run
Outline Experiments and Test, Test, Test
The testing phase is arguably the most important phase of the GROWS process. Ensure that teams are synchronized and have all the resources they need to run the experiments.
The final step of the GROWS process requires the organization to study the data and assess whether each experiment has been successful or not.
Businesses wanting to take their testing to the next level can also look to validate their beta tests with customers.
Organizations can look to create a playbook of successful tests and the data gathered should be used to make real changes within the business that will help to target weaknesses and improve the customer journey.