DropBox famously supercharged its by leveraging its product—it gave away storage space for each new referral to its business. This integration of product and marketing was new at the time. Sean Ellis, then DropBox’s first marketer, coined it “ hacking.” Another marketer, Andrew Chen, followed on by calling hackers the “new VPs of marketing.” Coupled with the success of Facebook’s own team, many high-ech companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest started building and developing the discipline known as marketing. What Is Growth In this post, you’ll learn the following: marketing is a holistic and data-driven approach to marketing.
It focuses on the
Entire funnel (rather than just the top of the funnel) and applies the scientific method—formulating hypotheses, testing these hypotheses, then refining executive data or eliminating them. Originally known as hacking, Sean intended for the term to mean “creative, collaborative idea generation and problem-solving to thorny challenges.” However, subsequent marketers focused too heavily on the “hacking” aspect, treating it as the “silver bullet” to solve marketing issues. The term “growth marketing” was promoted to refocus the discipline. Then, each team is given a metric that measures success at each layer of the funnel. But the problem is that the teams then optimize for their metrics… at the expense of each other. For example, a typical goal for marketing teams is the number of leads.
What Is Growth leads
Can be low quality, which then impacts other teams (e.g., low-quality leads are harder to convert and retain). That’s just one problem. Another problem is that USA CFO these teams rarely communicate and collaborate with each other. In those scenarios, for example, product teams miss an opportunity to tap into the marketing team’s expertise on how to market new features. This silo-ing of departments is one reason why DropBox’s innovative referral program would not have happened at most companies. Growth marketing solves this by putting the focus on the entire funnel.
Marketing teams often have no idea what’s working Traditional marketing is hard to measure. Famous American merchant John Wanamaker once quipped. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” With hardly any idea of what worked, marketers came up with campaigns and tactics based on gut instinct and (hopefully) educated guesses.