How to achieve growth?

When thinking about how things can create massive adoption and engagement as quickly as possible, you need to optimize your project for growth. That’s where Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking come into play. If you solely think about monetizing and achieving a fast, most efficient Return on Investment (ROI), then you will probably not be sustainable. Have the discipline to not optimize for these things at first and instead think about building core product value.

Product value is something that anyone within your target audience can intrinsically wrap their heads around. So, as soon as you’ve identified your main target audience, it’s time to provide them with value and set yourself up for strategic growth.

Step 1- Core Product Value: make your product/service useful for your users
Step 2- Growth: figure out how to make it easy for your users to share it with others

STEP 1 - Core Product Value

Focus on creating a “real connection” with your users by directing your energy towards core product value.

There are some who call this experience of realizing core product value the WOW moment, or AHA moment. The WOW moment is that specific point in time when a person first realizes how your product can benefit them.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the former head of growth at Facebook, shared a simple yet powerful framework for achieving growth by building core product value:

1. How do you acquire users and get them through the front door?
   a. What is the one thing that people are here to do?
2. How do you let users experience the WOW moment as quickly as possible?
   a. What is the WOW moment they want?
   b. Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible?
3. How do you deliver core product value to users as often as possible?
   a. Why can I not give that to them as often as possible?

It’s vital to think about the metrics that can help you identify and answer these questions above, instead of simply going with a “gut” feeling. Rapid experimentation, data, AB testing, usability tests, and benchmarks can all help you get closer to these answers.

STEP 2 - Growth

After you’ve managed to create real value for your users, you should think about how to strategically boost growth of your project.

The PIRATE funnel, also known as the AARRR Framework, by Dave McClure is a popular Growth Marketing framework that can be used for almost any business and is a simple 6 steps schema established through the customer journey. The difference between marketing teams and growth teams is that growth teams focus on optimizing the full funnel. While marketeers often only consider the top of the funnel - awareness and acquisition - growth marketing teams think about the funnel in a holistic way. Simply put, Growth Hacking and Growth Marketing aim to measure, test, and optimize the process through which a visitor becomes a paying customer.

Dao Nguyen, analyzed what makes things go viral and presented a very interesting TED talk.

When analyzing videos with 90k viewers watching live streams of goats in an office, the questions were:

• Do people love office pranks?
• Do people love goats?

Nguyen analyzed what people were thinking and feeling and hypothesized that they were actually excited because they were participating in the shared anticipation of something that was going to happen. After testing the theory with other videos, for example, one of an exploding a watermelon (800k views), she came to interesting conclusions:

It’s not about how to make “something” go viral, but rather about what people are thinking. This leads to the concept of cultural cartography: don't just think about the subject matter; think about the job the content is doing for the viewer/reader.

This idea of thinking about the job of the content really fits together to the concept of core product value.

Focus on creating value. Full stop.

How can you help achieve value? Some attributes Nguyen identified were:

• Humour: funny, effortless
• Identity: to explain this is who I am
• Connect: bond with others
• Helps me do something: explains something
• Helps me feel something: curiosity, sad, restore faith in humanity

Finally, you can see that achieving growth is about optimizing core product value and then thinking about how you can deliver this to your potential customers/users within the PIRATE funnel. Marketing is no longer just about the awareness and acquisition stages within the funnel. It is shifting towards a holistic approach that focuses on optimizing all funnel stages.

How are you achieving growth? What strategies have helped you build a community? Let us know in the comments below!