Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons. I'm the CEO of Qualitance. Since we are into a brand new series. And it's all about growth marketing. And today I'm going to give you sort of the big picture. If you will, I'll give you some of the context and background to growth marketing.

I'll give you a sense of some of the practices that make up growth marketing and where it kind of fits in on the product journey. Yes. The journey of building a brand new product or service, maybe even building a business. It all, uh, will be put into order at the end of this 10 minute session together, which will be really fun.

Uh, so what is growth marketing now? It's very likely that you've probably heard about growth marketing. [00:01:00] Uh, but you know, like a lot of things, I think it reminds me a bit of design thinking. Everybody's heard of it, but not everybody really knows what it is or there's a lot of different points of view.

Well, it's the same with growth marketing. Let me try and help you with having been on both sides of the fence on the product side and the marketing side. I think it's made up of three, the first growth hacking. That's really what. Super smart startups have done to get, you know, big results with small investments.

Then there's the second piece of it, which is sort of more the performance marketing world, which is where people are all about cost per click cost per action. And lastly, it's the full funnel marketing world. Where you test every step of the user journey. For me, if you think about growth marketing, it really is made up of these three main ingredients.

And of course, different people use different balances between the, between the three. But [00:02:00] these really are. Great starting points for thinking of the fusion, to what has become growth marketing. Now, another way to think about growth marketing is it's a combination of lots of data experiments in the, in that funnel that we were talking about.

Lots of creative design, whether it's for marketing materials, sort of product entryways. Or as some serious automation and tech, uh, in the backend, that's also a very good definition of growth marketing. And already you can start to feel that it's pretty expansive because it's not just marketing. It really is a very multidisciplinary practice.

Here's my favorite definition of growth marketing. It's got three ingredients, the full funnel data insights. And conversions, aha. Conversions, big piece here. So now that I've kind of primed you with these different ideas and combinations, [00:03:00] what I've pulled together is just a simple written definition, which I'm going to read to you now that you've got a little bit of context and let me see if I can really make the case for defining growth marketing.

Here we go. Growth marketing is the fusion of data and conversions throughout the full marketing funnel. It is a continuous process of building measuring and learning the steps involved practices, such as technology, automation, data experiments, and design creativity. The end objective whilst hard to achieve is a healthy growing product and business.

All right. That was my shot at it. Here's another guy who's really kind of caught the magic in growth marketing because it really flips traditional marketing. And this is from one of my favorite authors Ryan holiday. Here's his definition of growth marketing. Instead of bludgeoning them public with ads or dominating the front [00:04:00] page of a newspaper to drive awareness.

They growth hackers, use a scalpel precise and targeted to a specific audience. Ryan holiday. He's such a good writer, isn't he? So there you go. We've got a definition. Now I want to try and map it to kind of where it pops into the process where you might expect to start doing growth marketing. Now I'm going to be a little bit contrarian here, and I'm going to say if you're building a product, it begins on day zero.

That's right. I think step one, before you've launched the product, you should be baking in the marketing into the product itself. And I think Strava is a great example of where the marketing really has been baked into the product from the start. And the next step before you're into these massive global campaigns and buying lots of paid media, the growth marketing team can really get involved in the second step, [00:05:00] validating customer satisfaction, and then, okay.

And then go crazy. It's Showtime, find traction and look for what we call distribution conversion fit. Now a lot of marketers will say until you have product market fit, you shouldn't be doing growth marketing. But I challenged that notion. I say, get growth marketing and get it right in to the very beginning.

Now there's many different case studies that you can find on growth marketing, probably the two most richest, most powerful examples are Dropbox and Airbnb. Both of these companies, did, I mean, archetype or growth marketing thinking to transform how they products grew, how they achieved product market, fit, how they got traction and how in the end, they just went to the stratosphere.

Dropbox grew massive.  bye bye. For it, baking in the marketing right into the product so that if you were using the product. Back in the day as [00:06:00] oldies like me, remember when cloud storage was like a really scarce commodity. And what they would do is they would give you free extra storage. If you upgraded your account, if you referred a friend, I mean, you got white for this, a whopping 500 Meg per friend.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was a big deal once upon a time. And they even rewarded you for connecting, uh, your, your Facebook or Twitter account. The point here is that they baked in referral right into the product itself. And that's how they grew Airbnb. On the other hand, they did some cool stuff with integrating with Craigslist, but I think such a great growth hack was changing from amateur to professional photography.

So what they went out and did is. They looked at the listings and they realized that if they did a professional photo shoot where you know, what the bed was made, the lighting was good, proper [00:07:00] lenses. That whole thing is shot at a good time of the day. Um, signups for that listing, uh, increased 2.5 times.

That's it 2.5 times. So these are two just fantastic, uh, powerful, uh, stories that show you sort of the growth mind, a growth marketing mindset in practice. Now the, the last, uh, thought that I want to leave you with, as we really try to. Lay a foundation of definition of understanding of growth. Marketing is a great quote from Sue Hale, who is the chief executive officer at Mixpanel panel, which is a great product in your growth marketing stack.

And he's got a quote, which I think really speaks to the mindset of growth marketing. So here we go. Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their [00:08:00] gut. They will be either lucky or wrong. So they have it CEO of mixed panel kind of laying down the absolute truth there. And I think what this really points to is how much of traditional advertising and marketing were just guesses having been.

On Madison Avenue. I have witnessed like a lot of hard work. Don't get me wrong, but in the end is still traditional. Mocking was a lot of guessing, maybe some good taste. And when in doubt, blast the reach and frequency and it will kind of work out right. Well, in this day, in age, Everything is turned. You know what it ain't top-down here's now here's an ide...