It’ll take an adaptive mindset, innate curiosity and openness to challenging our own assumptions. And there’s already a model marketers can learn from: growth hacking. Hacking Better Marketing Growth hacking grew up among tech startups that needed a lean and fast approach to marketing that emphasized growth: growth in the number of users, sure, but just as importantly, growth of customer engagement with an app or service, such as number of visits, time spent using the site and so on. Marketers of all stripes are beginning to elevate customer experience as a core functional goal for our profession. Traditional marketing also tosses around a lot of military lingo about making conquests, or taking the high ground as we take aim at our targets. Growth hacking focuses on connecting with an audience by being flexible and even collaborative in shaping how an app or service develops. It helps you be a better listener, communicator, teacher and helper, building real relationships and loyalty. By testing ideas — good and bad alike — you learn an incredible amount. We’re Just Beginning In the end, growth marketing comes down to one goal: using the data of our experiments to shape great customer experiences. And the amount of data we can leverage is only just beginning to be understood.
of your efforts
It’s no stretch to say that “data-driven” has been the defining
mantra for marketers in the 2010s.
Some marketers have embraced data as a panacea for every
challenge they face, while others have hoped the notion of “data”
as a cure-all would go away if they just ignored it.
The messy reality is somewhere in-between.
So how should data-driven marketing pragmatically evolve over
the next decade?
The way I (and not a few others) see it, leveraging data to
deliver better customer experiences has become one of the CMO’s
most important responsibilities. But to actually succeed in that
goal, we also need a driving philosophy to guide, motivate and
organize our approach, allowing us to thrive in a future
supersaturated with data-driven experiences.
It’ll take an adaptive mindset, innate curiosity and openness to
challenging our own assumptions. It’s about experimentalism, in
other words. And there’s already a model marketers can learn from:
growth hacking.
Hacking Better Marketing
Growth hacking grew up among tech startups that needed a lean
and fast approach to marketing that emphasized growth: growth in
the number of users, sure, but just as importantly, growth of
customer engagement with an app or service, such as number of
visits, time spent using the site and so on. That means growth
emphasizes not just customer acquisition, but discovering how
customers use a service, then making it work better to encourage
those customer behaviors.
When done right, it equates to working smarter, staying agile
and being willing to question whatever assumptions we brought to
the table. Our customers don’t care about our sacred cows or
intentions — they care about the effort and experience of using a
service.
Marketers of all stripes are beginning to elevate customer
experience as a core functional goal for our profession. And that’s
a big reason why growth hacking has moved from the startup culture
into the broader stream of our profession. The most effective among
us are able to couple the “agnostic agility” of growth hacking — a
willingness to pivot to any1 approach that holds promise — with
marketers’ essential empathy for our customers.
That combination of data-driven empiricism and marketers’
traditional skill sets will be crucial to how we move forward.
The New Rules of the Data-Driven Marketing Game
A focus on customer engagement, backed by a culture of
flexibility and responsiveness, are the new rules of the game. I’ve
been part of enterprises, like Twitter, where that hacker mentality
of experimentalism is the soul of company culture.
Here are a few lessons marketers can learn from it:
1. It’s empiricism with empathy
Growth hacking is scientific — more mad scientist than…
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