Momentum. Shama Hyder

client wanted to make a big splash, so the Marketing Zen team decided to use growth-hacking techniques to reach the client’s ambitious goals for explosive growth.

      First, we set up a killer landing page, designed with one simple conversion in mind—capturing people’s email addresses. We kept it focused, with minimal text, a strong call to action, a design centered around the sign-up field, and a short demo video. This landing page was our cornerstone, our growth-hacking focus. We wanted email addresses so that we would have a huge audience of excited potential users to contact as soon as the app launched.

      Next, we set up social media accounts for the brand, and started an intensive campaign to spread brand awareness among our target audiences. We ran paid ads on Facebook targeting moms, in order to gain fans for the Facebook page, get our name in front of them, and drive them to the landing page. We researched influential mommy bloggers and educational gurus, and followed them on Twitter, in order to encourage them to follow us in return, to make them aware of our existence, and to drive them to the landing page.

      Then, we started an influencer outreach campaign, building strategic relationships with some of those mommy bloggers and influencers in the field of education, and offering to write guest blogs on their sites. Posts we wrote for them reached their audiences and others, as we also shared them on Stumbleupon via paid ads. In fact, one post went viral on Stumbleupon, getting reblogged over and over again. In every guest post was a link to the landing page.

      But that’s only where the campaign started. Every step of the way, we kept one eye glued to the analytics. When we saw that traffic was hitting the landing page, but not converting at the rates we wanted, we tweaked the text and design and even added special offers in return for signing up, until we had created a veritable conversion machine. When we realized how effective our outreach strategy was in generating new traffic to the landing page, we sweetened the deal for influencers in order to get more of them on board, offering them exclusive deals and early access.

      Nothing was sacred. Everything was susceptible to change if the analytics so dictated. And thanks to our growth-hacking tactics, our pre-launch campaign built up a sizeable email subscriber list and kept them excited through regular email updates, continued activity on social media, and outreach, so that even before the app launched, its momentum was already substantial—and it’s still growing.

      The radical agility practiced by growth hackers clearly demonstrates the link between analytics, agility, and marketing momentum.

      

      » Your Turn

      So how can your company make the switch to an agile marketing mindset?

      As we saw above, it’s all about the analytics.

      But before you can start using analytics to inform your marketing strategies, you first need to assess your current situation, define targets and goals, and create an overall plan. Otherwise, you won’t know what you’re aiming for or whether your efforts are having the effect you want them to.

      With that in mind, here is how to lay the necessary groundwork for agility in your business:

       1. Start with a clean slate, assessing absolutely everything in your current marketing strategy with a critical eye.

      If you truly want to embrace agility, you’ll need to let go of some things you’ve grown used to—or even attached to— in your current marketing strategy. Assume the mindset of a complete stranger, a consultant coming in and seeing your marketing strategy for the very first time. What does your overall strategy look like currently? What are all the moving parts? What have your results been like, both for individual campaigns and channels, and overall? Why do you do the things you currently do?

      » Business X (let’s say they’re an IT solutions provider) has used the same basic strategy for years. They put their website in place, optimized it for search, and have pretty much left it alone since they built it. They do have a blog, updated regularly and enthusiastically by an employee who treats it a lot more like a personal blog than a company blog, rambling about his views on various topics rather than creating actual marketing content. They send out email newsletters to their customers and prospects every so often—not really on a regular basis, but as often as they can get to it. And they have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, since they heard that every business worth its salt these days had to have social media accounts—but rarely have the time to post.

      The results of their digital marketing efforts have been lackluster. Their site gets some traffic, but most deals are still made via the same old outbound techniques their salespeople have been using for years, cold calling chief among them. Their newsletters don’t seem to have much of an effect, unless they announce a sale or deal, and their social media accounts sit mostly idle. Their blog is popular with its writer’s friends and family, but doesn’t seem to attract many other visitors—or more importantly, any leads.

      Basically, they are online because you have to be in order to be taken seriously. And with a pretty much nonexistent ROI from their inbound marketing, they felt they couldn’t really justify the amount of resources it would take to keep up with everything on a regular basis.

      When Business X took a good look at their current strategy, they realized that they didn’t really have a solid “why” behind most of the things they did. They also admitted to themselves that they had been checking analytics only sporadically, and certainly not taking any action based on the data, other than growing frustrated with the few resources they were putting towards marketing.

      

      A COMPANY GETTING IT RIGHT

      Business operations and customer relations software company SAP is a multinational behemoth that’s been known and respected the world over for more than forty years—and is a great example of a large enterprise fully embracing the concept of agility and establishing a robust testing and optimization program.

      In 2009 SAP VP Shawn Burns set about creating enterprise web analytics at the company to replace a disparate set of analytics tools then in use in various divisions of the very large organization. Six months into the process of getting all of SAP’s business data and analytics “under one roof,” so to speak, Burns had a realization—he understood that just having all that data in one place wasn’t maximizing its value. What SAP needed was to, as Burns put it, get “a process and dedicated team” that would focus on the data “to squeeze the value out of it.”

      The result of Burns’s epiphany was the creation of SAP’s Test Lab, a dedicated testing and optimization team that, since its creation, has run tests and optimized elements across SAP’s marketing efforts in different channels and even different global marketplaces.

      SAP’s Test Lab keeps an organized queue of tests to be performed that are ranked by value to the company, knowing that the Test Lab is a finite corporate resource. The team also keeps documentation to preserve institutional knowledge gained from every test. Now the team runs around twenty-five tests each quarter.

      Why such a limited number of tests? The Test Lab’s goal is continual improvement and optimization, and their team is willing to run multiple iterations on specific testing areas, such as visual imagery in marketing material, to fully optimize results for each element in a given test.

       2. Identify your business goals.

      Of course you’re already aware of your company’s overall goals. But listing them out on paper puts them in the forefront of your mind, and will allow you to refer back to them easily while working on your marketing plan. Every aspect of your marketing strategy should be directly traceable back to your overall goals as a business—otherwise, you’re wasting resources.

      » Business X’s list of overall goals: To increase sales by a specific percentage each year. To reach more prospects, create brand awareness, and establish themselves as industry leaders. To boost the number of clients who enter into long-term consultative contracts, rather just buying a solution in a one-time transaction.

       3.