You Don't Know Growth #3

In some of our last weeks issues and tweets we discussed the fact that affiliate marketing is one of the most misunderstood and underrated performance marketing channel.

Growth might be even more misunderstood.

What the heck is growth?

Key Takeaway: Growth is not just getting your customer base to go up and to the right. It is a systematic approach to acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers using qualitative and qualitative data to inform growth experiments via engineering, product, marketing and in some cases sales. This is done via Growth Loops rather than just Marketing funnels.

Brian Balfour was the first to really clearly articulate growth when he began writing about it in 2012. He brought to life so many of the learnings I was going through as an in-house growth practitioner and served an exponentially growing need for growth insights and answers to questions.

Along with the growth pioneers like Chamath Palihapitiya (started and built Facebook growth team), Brian was one of our inspirations for starting RBL in 2014 shortly before he launched Reforge.

Reforge has helped codify so much of how growth, product, and marketing leaders think about how to efficiently grow a modern business.

In the interest of educating and sharing our thoughts on clarifying and debunking myths here are some key terms in growth.

Growth Model: Your qualitative and quantitative model of how your product grows. The growth model allows you to Communicate, Identify, Set Goals and Metrics, Make Strategic Bets, deterministic rather than random.

Growth Loop: Growth Loops make up your growth model. Growth loops can be utilized for acquisition as well as retention. There are a number of different growth loop options that businesses can utilize to grow, such as 1) Paid Marketing 2) Content Marketing 3) Viral Marketing and 4) Sales. A loop requires inputs and outputs and a continuous movement. Loops have core properties.

Here is an example of a paid marketing growth loop at its basic level:

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What about Growth Hacking?

The answer is : STOP. Don't say Growth Hacking. ;) Say Growth.

A good post from Adam Fishman growth veteran and he does not pull any punches ;) Stop calling it Growth Hacking right now

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Why does this matter?

If you are attempting to hit aggressive goals, stay profitable, keep pace with competition and make sense of the quickly changing landscape of e-commerce, technology, and platforms that enable customer acquisition and retention, you need to have a very clear understanding of how your business will grow.

While two of the three pillars of the RBL flywheel require a deep understanding of paid marketing, given how competitive growth is, practitioners need to understand how viral growth loops, and potentially content growth loops can help you as well.

Ideally you have multiple loops working together to both acquire, engage, and retain users like Airbnb does here:

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Airbnb combines multiple loops:

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So what should you do about it:

Have a clear goal and point of view on HOW you intend to grow your business in your product roadmap, data, marketing, and a well documented thesis. Apply to reforge if you have not already. A good starting point will be to really immerse yourself in Brian Balfour's writings. If your business is a start up or you are in the early days, I highly recommend Steve Blank's Business Model Canvas.

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Now for some of our more regular scheduled programming...

Affiliate Marketing Partner of the week

Button

https://www.usebutton.com/

What do they do? Button is a technology company that enables mobile focused brands to integrate partners for improved user experiences. Their PostTap product allows affiliates to deep link into the right mobile app page to create the best user experience.

Why does it matter? In the affiliate marketing world, the native app solutions exist but have some limits. Legacy networks enable a lot of core tracking but have some gaps. Button does a great job of allowing smarter direct linking. They did this with Hotels.com routing users from m.web to mobile app yielding an overall 3x increase in conversion rate.

“Mike Drop”

Your dose of knowledge from our resident Paid Media Master, Mike McElhaney.

Our head of all things Paid Media, Mike McElhaney is known to drop knowledge bombs on clients and our team, adding a ton of value. He is a 4x reforge cohort participant and has ran over $10M on paid media. Here is his biggest takeaway in the last year as it relates to growth and experimentation and one of his favorite reforge gems:

"Do a pre-mortem on your test ideas to plan for different potential outcomes on your experiments before they happen."

Why does this matter? This will enable you to more accurately think through potential outcomes and follow up actions ensuring that your pipeline takes into account all cost benefits in the future, not just short term.