Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
Growth hacking, growth marketing, growth, growth, growth – spot the overused marketing terms! Fundamentally, the idea of growth marketing is about driving a culture of experimentation. From a marketing point of view, this means ensuring that we're experimenting on key parts of customer acquisition, customer awareness, customer activation, revenue retention, and referral.
Growth marketing has the potential to drive better metrics around the entire customer lifecycle. The best way to do that in a culture of experimentation is to not get into the habit of changing everything all at once. That means we need a hypothesis regarding what to change.
As an example, you might hypothesise that changing the colour of your call to action button will drive better conversion. Importantly, you change only the colour – you don’t change the shape of the button or its position on the page, even though those things may help as well. You test one thing at once in order to improve the effectiveness of that specific change.
As discussed previously in Agile, the contents of Agile marketing and market operations is how we talk about it. If you get into the habit of changing regularly and testing and understanding how those hypotheses actually have worked, you can change things regularly and often and then gradually get better and better around the areas you're looking for.
Your experimentation timeline depends on your traffic volume. From a Triggerfish perspective, the clients we deal with usually have enough traffic to justify experimentation on a week-to-week basis. Because B2B traffic tends to be lower, experimenting on a weeklong timescale or longer is best practice.
More important than time, however, is willingness to fail. There’s every chance that changing the colour of your CTA button doesn’t win you more conversions – in fact, you may lose some. If you’re afraid of this, however, you’ll never get to the point where you make changes that can supercharge your growth.
At Triggerfish, we create a hypothesis for every implementation. We define our metrics – if we make change A, we’ll see result B. A result other than B is not a success. Then we make sure that the changes we make are helping to add up to our weekly and quarterly goals. If the changes we make are working, then we can continue to optimise in that same direction. If not, we change course.
As a marketer, it is important to be curious. Running your application without making changes can slow your rate of growth and make it impossible to scale. Meanwhile, the changes you make may not add up quickly, but they add up faster than you think. If you’re confident with experimentation, then success is right around the corner.
We strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we've helped our customers shift their thinking to a growth mindset, check out our case studies.