Strategy - Introduction
Overview
You’re going to learn how to craft a professional growth strategy.
A growth strategy is a list of steps, at a high level, of what you should try first, based on what is most likely to succeed.
How do you know what’s most likely to succeed? Most marketers have to rely on experience. Pattern-matching. In most cases, gut feel.
But at Demand Curve, we’ve worked with 20 times more companies than most marketers. We have 20 times the experience for what works across companies. And we diligently keep data on them.
So our pattern-matching is orders of magnitude better. Our intuition is better. Our systems are better.
Which means you get to avoid a lot of beginner growth mistakes you’d otherwise make.
Why is a Growth Strategy important?
With a growth strategy, you systematically work day-to-day on the things that have the highest impact on your revenue. At its core, a growth strategy is a giant, prioritized to-do list.
We see too many teams doing too many low-impact things at once: writing tweets, drafting email newsletter blasts, preparing Instagram photos, etc., without a real idea of whether those ideas are likely to attract real customers.
A growth strategy lets you test methodically, making sure that your work is high-quality — so you can rule out the things that don’t work faster. And save yourself time.
Examples
Here are some example growth strategies we’ve developed, based on real clients:
Strategy 1: Coffee Machine with Delivery Service
Rewrite, redesign, and rebuild the homepage to better distinguish between the coffee machine and the coffee delivery service. A/B test it.
Rewrite, redesign, and rebuild the pricing page to do the same thing. A/B test it.
Fix the onboarding flow to convert better.
Set up Facebook/Instagram ads
Make sure to test offer and lead gen ads for an in-home demo.
Set up LinkedIn ads pointing at free demo page.
Write drip emails to ping people who signed up for the mailing list.
Set up Google Ads
Set up Pinterest ads.
Reach out for custom sponsorship, focusing on professional magazines.
There’s a lot of work involved at each step of the strategy. The strategy doesn’t have to be long. The order of the steps, and what steps you pick, are incredibly important — since it’s a huge time investment.
Strategy 2: Board game mobile app
Overhaul the onboarding flow to get people playing sooner
A/B test two new variations of the landing page
Fix App Store copy to convert better
Set up Apple Search ads
Set up Facebook/Instagram ads
Create push notifications to remind people to play
Set up Snapchat ads
Set up Tapjoy ads
Structure
Fundamentally, there are two parts to a growth strategy.
Acquisition Channels
These are the way people hear about you for the first time. These are things like Facebook ads, cold emails you send out, news articles that come out about you, podcasts, et cetera.
Spending time on the right channel is the most important thing you can do to grow. Unfortunately, most marketing teams jump to a channel without considering all their options.
We want to avoid that.
We’ll be spending most of weeks 2 and 3 of the course on acquisition channels.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is everything you do to get someone who is already aware of you to actually buy.
These are things like testing out new homepages, shortening forms, and calling people who clicked your ad.
We teach you qualitatively about good CRO practices during week 1, and really dive deep using data in week 4.
Prioritizing
You combine your acquisition channels and CRO ideas into your growth strategy — the steps you’ll need to take to get more paying customers.
When it comes down to figuring out what to do first, you ultimately need to think about the ROI (Return on Investment) of each task you have: how much revenue you expect to make from doing it, and how much it will cost (in time and money).
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