Nov 11, 2021
Growth formula to level up your brand, measure and streamline the activities
Growth is the primary target or intention of every business or a brand. People do seek for growth in sales, leads or brand awareness in every stage of the business. In terms of growth, growth hacking is a renowned concept which every marketer or business owner is willing to embrace and utilize in their operations. Sometimes they invest on expensive tools and resources to achieve the growth. Is that really necessary?
As a business owner or marketer, you are the ones who possess the highest and best knowledge about the brand you are running or the business you own. In that context, growth plan is something that you should start and continue working on. Let’s discuss on how you can initiate this process and handle it effectively?
Having the growth mindset
Firstly, it is essential to make the mindset for the growth. It is clear that everybody wants to acquire the market leadership, increase sales and customer life time value and many more growth-related targets. However, during the journey people lose their focus due to the distraction with new targets and tasks. As a result of this, growth mindset gets interrupted and businesses starts to lose margins.
So, how to concentrate on growth and keep the focus towards the targets?
This is the key point of this formula. If you make this step correct, all the victory will be with yours.
In order to maintain the focus, it is true that some level of inspiration is required. In other words, you should be able to visualize the growth which is happening at the moment. Obviously, that would not be the growth at every time. There may be gradual failures in KPIs, sudden peaks and drops, remaining static and much more. That particular data will educate you about the actual proceedings and convince you to take necessary actions to keep the things up and running.
Should you focus only on sales growth?
Basically no, but that should be the priority. Other than that, this growth formula focuses on metrics related to the upper layers of the sales funnel. For an example social media reach, impressions, site visits have to be enhanced and conversion rates need to be improved in order to generate revenue. Therefore, growth in every platforms and metric is significant to experience a better final output.
Most people expect achieving the exponential growth from the very first stages of the process. That approach is better but you might or might not see the expected results by overnight. It requires a constant focus and regular alterations to identify what is generating results and what is not. Therefore, the process can be simply started by measuring the performance of the current ongoing activities and it can be optimized gradually with the continuous evaluation.
Understanding KPIs
In this exercise, data is our most valuable asset that gives insights and tells stories. In order to make the accurate decisions from data, specific KPIs should be set up to measure the performances of activities and behaviors. You can simply utilize own platform analytics (Instagram insights, Facebook insights, Google Analytics) to track the numbers.
Other than standard metrics, you can define your own metrics and KPIs such as average order value, cart abandoned rates, customer retention rates, customer lifetime value. Arranging everything in a simple Excel file will help you to get an overall picture about the current performance.
Data visualization
Visualizing data is the next big thing in this strategy which reveals you many stories about the proceedings. With the use of Excel, data in a table can be simply converted into a graph. Moving step beyond, particular data can be integrated with Google data studio to make a real time dashboard to display the performance. Google Ads, Google Analytics and other Google platforms can be directly link to the data studio easily. In addition, sales and social media data can be feed into the platform using a Google sheet.
Document the changes
In parallel to this, you should document and have a track of all the changes and enhancements that has been applied to the digital platforms. You should not miss even the slightest changes that take place. For an example changing header images, uploading FB image/ videos, changing audiences in FB campaigns need to be track down with the date.
Outcome of this strategy is, by the end of the week or month, you can crosscheck the activities with the KPIs and understand what had worked and what had not. And you will not be repeating the tasks in any of the hypothesis or split tests.
Track everything and Visualize (Daily/ weekly/ monthly)
The next key stage is starting of the reporting and tracking down the KPIs. This has to be done weekly, monthly and daily basis.
· Daily — leads, purchases, app downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups
· Weekly — Social Media reach, impressions, site visits, geo location status
· Monthly — All KPIs
In addition to the time and day based general reports, try to be innovative on KPI combinations. For example you can analyze Avg. CPC Vs clicks in one bar chart. That information will reveal you correlations between metrics and ultimately guide to take better decisions based on that.
Data visualization techniques are important in this stage because it reveals the actual flow and helps to identify trends and make predictions. Using Google Data Studio, you can make comprehensive reports and dashboards as well.
After finalizing all the reporting mechanisms, it’s time to evaluate and optimize the process. Here, your primary objective should be looking for the growth of all the KPIs. I have noted down some sample scenarios and actions to be taken in particular situations.
Hypothesis development and testing
Testing is a key part of any marketing strategy. As much as you test, you will find more ways to grow your business. Hypothesis is an assumption you build to improve the process. Even though the term hypothesis is new and strange, this process could be something that you might already engaged in. However, it has to be structured and organized to get the best outcome for the business.
Ex:-
Allow users to download a resources document from the site itself, rather than sending it to the email.
In this example, objective of the business is to educate users about the service and take them to the subscription purchase page. That will shorten the customer journey and they will access the purchase page with a better awareness about the service.
So now, this hypothesis has to be verified with the data. In order to do that, you have to specify a target and time frame before start monitoring the results. After the specified time frame, results should be assessed to measure the success of the hypothesis.
To sum up, it is all about monitoring and applying solutions. The process can be started right after you finished reading this article. Just create an Excel sheet with the current activities you have been doing and start reporting and visualizing the data. On the midway, you will find impressive points and knowledge about your product and the audience. With the continuous hypothesis testing, you will find out a pathway to grow exponentially. Further, it will maintain the consistency which most of the business owners lack.
