Growth hacking helps companies achieve rapid multiples of growth by continually testing hypotheses. The more hypotheses you test, the more growth you get in metrics. By testing 20 hypotheses per week, you can get an 800% increase in the key metric. A growth team of 3-5 people can increase key metrics by 10, 20, 40 times on a limited budget. The growth team differs significantly in its approach from other teams, such as the classic marketing team. The next companies should not create a growth team: Companies and employees who aren't willing to make mistakes. Companies that don't have the resources for tests: people and money.
Growth marketing or Growth hacking helps companies achieve rapid multiples of growth by continually testing hypotheses. The more hypotheses you test, the more growth you get in metrics. To have time to test a lot of ideas, you have to do it quickly.
How fast and how much growth is realistic with growth marketing?
The more hypotheses you test, the more growth you get in the metric. You need to do it quickly to have time to test many ideas.
By testing 20 hypotheses per week, you can get an 800% increase in the key metric. If the revenue was $100 000, then with an increase of 800%, it becomes $900 000.
Minus weekends, holidays, vacations, and sick days, there are approximately 221 working days per year. That's 44 weeks of five working days. According to statistics, only 30% of experiments are successful. If you test 20 hypotheses per sprint, you get 264 working hypotheses per year:
20 hypotheses a week x 30% successful hypotheses = 264 successful hypotheses a year
For comparison, if you test one hypothesis per week, the annual increase is 30% - not that impressive, but not bad either.
What is a growth team and who needs one?
The growth team helps hack the growth of a company. It looks for solutions that can quickly improve key business metrics:
Increase revenue, leads, and average check
Close more deals
Reduce user churn
To do this, the growth team hypothesizes what and how they can increase these metrics and quickly tests them - checking which ones actually affect key metrics and which ones don't work.
A team focused solely on growth hypotheses allows you to scale your business quickly. A growth team of 3-5 people can increase key metrics by 10, 20, 40 times on a limited budget.
Who needs a growth marketing team?
A growth team will be helpful for a company of any size - whether a startup or a large business:
A startup needs to make a product that will buy, build a sales funnel, find channels of attraction, and grow fast as a result.
A big company needs to find opportunities to improve metrics in multiples. Plus, to create new products knowing that they will appeal to users ahead of time.
As you can see, the growth marketing team is necessary for most companies.
Who shouldn't create a growth team?
The next companies should not create a growth team:
Companies and employees who aren't willing to make mistakes. It will prevent them from putting forward even the smallest bold hypothesis.
Companies that don't have the resources for tests: people and money.
Companies that are not willing to give autonomy to the growth team. The source of hypotheses for the growth team should be data on user behavior, analytics, and the experience of past hypotheses, but not the manager's opinion. He or she can bring ideas, but he or she should not dictate to the team what to do. That can impede growth.
I think these 3 points are not about your company.
How the growth team differs from the classic marketing team?
The growth team differs significantly in its approach from other teams, such as the classic marketing team.
In marketing, they launch full-fledged projects, set quality standards, and set longer launch dates. It can be a couple of one-week sprints or even several months for large projects. It's essential to achieve project goals - failure is unacceptable in marketing. What do you do if your marketer fails 7 out of 10 projects?
The growth team works differently:
It runs many hypotheses fast, 25-30% of which are failures. And that's okay! It's part of the process to learn.
Limited to minimally viable products - MVPs.
Speed is important. In other teams' tasks, this approach is no good.
It prioritizes testing the offer over working out the creative that will contain it.
When working in a marketing and growth team, brains have to work very differently.
It isn't easy to combine marketing or any other tasks with the growth team's work. Practice shows that you can't do both well. For example, the quality of marketing projects can decline. It is better to separate the teams and set up each team's processes tailored to their objectives.
What are the growth teams like?
Usually, growth teams are:
Product
Marketing
But you can experiment in any area: HR, Success, or Support. It all depends on the goals you set for the whole team.
How to launch a growth team?
For a growth team to be effective, you need to:
Allocate exactly a separate team to hypothesis testing
Set the right goals and define the key metrics
Assemble team members who cover all the roles necessary for hypothesis testing