Stan decided to make immediate offer redemption part of the deal. So many people were already doing it on their own that making it mandatory might just inspire the rest to do so, too. The offer was then linked to stores near the ends of the joggers’ routes to make it an easy yes. This first tweak strengthened the momentum already building.
Next, Stan added a step that customers were already taking on their own—but made it even more attractive, so that more of them would participate by offering another discount for friends when a jogger posted a selfie on Facebook with their free drink. In the process, Marketade capitalized on our love affair with selfies as well as our desire to associate ourselves with products that make us look good and our excitement about sharing great deals with friends.
The result? Marketing gold. Stan’s tweaks to the campaign really only took what customers were already doing and made it a standard part of the deal, but by tapping into what people were willing to do anyway and attaching a reward to it, he increased the momentum of the campaign dramatically.
If Stan hadn’t been checking his analytics religiously, he wouldn’t have known about the customer response until it was too late to take advantage of it. But by listening and observing and tracking, he was able to make his campaign into something much more effective than it ever could have been in its original form.
That is agility.
That is marketing momentum.
» Growth Hacking: Agility on Steroids
You may have heard the term growth hacking being thrown around the internet in recent years. What is it, exactly?
Growth hacking is an extreme version of agility tactics. It is a method used by many tech startups that burst onto the scene with a vengeance, disrupting their industry by growing from literally nothing to a thriving business in as little time as possible.
Unlike established companies, these growth hackers don’t feel bound by conventional marketing methods, and they don’t try to meet a long list of marketing goals—instead, they look for uniquely creative ways to get as much as possible out of their marketing efforts, and obsess over one thing and one thing only: growth. They scrutinize analytics constantly, and make major changes instantly based on trends and insights gleaned from those analytics, to amp up results. Focus is key in growth hacking—every single move is based on data and aimed at growth. It’s the perfect marriage of left-brain and right-brain, creativity and science. And this uber-emphasis on agility means that growth-hacking companies can sometimes go from 0 to 60 in just a few weeks—the momentum produced can be almost unbelievable.
New businesses in other industries can use these tactics, too, as can established companies, with just a little tweaking to accommodate needs other than growth alone.
Here’s a real-world example:
A Fortune 500 client of ours was launching a new educational app for kids. It enabled kids to practice math and English skills they needed more help on, as well as work ahead of their grade level for enrichment. It displayed results to parents, so they could keep track of their children’s progress, and could even be synced up with input from teachers and used by school systems. All in all, it was a really exciting new tool for kids, parents, and educators alike.
The client wanted to make a big splash, so the Marketing Zen team decided to use growth-hacking techniques to reach the client’s ambitious goals for explosive growth.
First, we set up a killer landing page, designed with one simple conversion in mind—capturing people’s email addresses. We kept it focused, with minimal text, a strong call to action, a design centered around the sign-up field, and a short demo video. This landing page was our cornerstone, our growth-hacking focus. We wanted email addresses so that we would have a huge audience of excited potential users to contact as soon as the app launched.
Next, we set up social media accounts for the brand, and started an intensive campaign to spread brand awareness among our target audiences. We ran paid ads on Facebook targeting moms, in order to gain fans for the Facebook page, get our name in front of them, and drive them to the landing page. We researched influential mommy bloggers and educational gurus, and followed them on Twitter, in order to encourage them to follow us in return, to make them aware of our existence, and to drive them to the landing page.
Then, we started an influencer outreach campaign, building strategic relationships with some of those mommy bloggers and influencers in the field of education, and offering to write guest blogs on their sites. Posts we wrote for them reached their audiences and others, as we also shared them on Stumbleupon via paid ads. In fact, one post went viral on Stumbleupon, getting reblogged over and over again. In every guest post was a link to the landing page.
But that’s only where the campaign started. Every step of the way, we kept one eye glued to the analytics. When we saw that traffic was hitting the landing page, but not converting at the rates we wanted, we tweaked the text and design and even added special offers in return for signing up, until we had created a veritable conversion machine. When we realized how effective our outreach strategy was in generating new traffic to the landing page, we sweetened the deal for influencers in order to get more of them on board, offering them exclusive deals and early access.
Nothing was sacred. Everything was susceptible to change if the analytics so dictated. And thanks to our growth-hacking tactics, our pre-launch campaign built up a sizeable email subscriber list and kept them excited through regular email updates, continued activity on social media, and outreach, so that even before the app launched, its momentum was already substantial—and it’s still growing.
The radical agility practiced by growth hackers clearly demonstrates the link between analytics, agility, and marketing momentum.
» Your Turn
So how can your company make the switch to an agile marketing mindset?
As we saw above, it’s all about the analytics.
But before you can start using analytics to inform your marketing strategies, you first need to assess your current situation, define targets and goals, and create an overall plan. Otherwise, you won’t know what you’re aiming for or whether your efforts are having the effect you want them to.
With that in mind, here is how to lay the necessary groundwork for agility in your business:
1. Start with a clean slate, assessing absolutely everything in your current marketing strategy with a critical eye.
If you truly want to embrace agility, you’ll need to let go of some things you’ve grown used to—or even attached to— in your current marketing strategy. Assume the mindset of a complete stranger, a consultant coming in and seeing your marketing strategy for the very first time. What does your overall strategy look like currently? What are all the moving parts? What have your results been like, both for individual campaigns and channels, and overall? Why do you do the things you currently do?
» Business X (let’s say they’re an IT solutions provider) has used the same basic strategy for years. They put their website in place, optimized it for search, and have pretty much left it alone since they built it. They do have a blog, updated regularly and enthusiastically by an employee who treats it a lot more like a personal blog than a company blog, rambling about his views on various topics rather than creating actual marketing content. They send out email newsletters to their customers and prospects every so often—not really
