Sean Ellis’s growth hacking methodology is all about cultivating an experimentation culture in which growth marketing teams constantly test, analyze, and discover new ways to impact your entire funnel.
You can replicate your customer’s journey, collect feedback from loyal customers, and brainstorm ways to improve their experience, but only real data matters in the end.
Regardless of your focus or how you refer to your marketing team, it would help if you considered running experiments to maximize your user experience (and thus conversions) — and the only way to do so is to make data-driven decisions. You’d be surprised at the extent to which the benefits extend beyond boosting your MRR.
Data-driven Approach Benefits
Get rid of some biases
Typically, growth marketing teams do out-of-the-box experiments centered on this growth lever. However, to expand the business according to a meaningful KPI for their strategy, it all begins with gathering and evaluating data on various stages of the customer experience (i.e., behavioral data and industry standards) and identifying areas for improvement.
Pursuing data-driven business decisions enables you to ascertain the needs of your target audience, comprehend their behavior, and forecast what will happen when you experiment with a new idea.
You are no longer making educated guesses about what they want or what will happen. With data, you know because you know what to measure and have previously measured it.
Embrace your team’s potential
As with a flywheel, growth marketing teams are constantly testing new ideas based on assumptions that will ultimately result in the validation (or rejection) of those concepts. However, teams must learn how to use data in order to make decisions about which ideas to suggest, prioritize, and validate.
Whether it’s an experiment to increase website traffic or capitalize on referrals, this approach benefits teams by fostering data-driven innovation with an expected impact on their business’s main KPIs.
Increase your flexibility
Being accountable for the full user journey broadens the breadth of experiments you may conduct, and having a data-driven mindset keeps you always aligned with the company’s goals.
It is critical to communicate to everyone that if a growth concept presented and tested does not work, the “suggester” will not be held accountable; it is OK. And regardless of whether the proposal is proven or not, the results provide a wealth of information that fuels your urge to continue proposing new ideas.
Last Words on Growth Marketing
Check out this guide to understand more about the growth hacking approach to data-driven marketing, what to do to get organized, gather, pick ideas to test, and then a few examples of previous experiments they ran and how they fared.
