Growth Driven Design: Digital Marketing's (Not So) Secret Weapon?

(9 min read)
Marketing, Sales and Web Development... together in harmony?
​Data based decisions being made, with information being fed back via closed loop reporting to keep departments aligned, informed, agile and working collaboratively towards common goals?

Yes it is possible. And it's already happening.

Growth driven design (or GDD) is relatively new as an 'official' methodology and continues to gain traction amongst web developers, sales professionals and marketers alike: perhaps because GDD just seems to make sense. 

This article explores some of the core concepts around GDD and it's alignment with growth marketing. We'll go on to suggest how marketers can apply a growth mindset to tie together and drive effective customer centred digital strategies in an increasingly data-driven environment.

What is Growth Driven Design? (the 2 minute version)

Growth driven design (or 'GDD') was born from the idea that the process of traditional website design is broken.
You may have experienced this 'broken process' first hand in your organisation if you've ever had to build or rebuild your company website.

When you think 'website', do any of these issues and risks sound familiar?

• Big upfront cost
• Big time commitment (often 3-4 months+) with limited visibility during the development stages 
• Issues with scope, budget or project running late

• Launching based on plans and assumptions
• Design work largely subjective 
• No guarantees the site will perform for your users
• No major updates til the next redesign (2+ years)

Growth driven design not only sets out to solve these common issues, but it's also tightly integrated with marketing and sales. What analysts learn about website visitors and behaviour helps to inform and improve marketing and sales strategies and tactics (and vice versa). 

Image source: Hubspot and www.growthdrivendesign.com

In addition, there is a phase of 'continuous improvement' built into the process.

​Continuous Improvement follows a 'launch pad' site which is aimed at being the minimum viable product to go live with. This launch pad site is still a complete site, but is made live with the understanding that it isn't perfect (websites in general, by the way, are never perfect).

With traditional web design, going live is usually considered the end point - break out the champagne and move on.  However, with GDD - the launch pad website forms a starting point to work from and begin collecting the valuable user data which will guide future decisions around features, pages, design and content. 

** There are plenty of resources online that cover growth driven design in more detail. For a deep dive, check out Hubspot's own excellent GDD certification course and growthdrivendesign.com 

Image source: Hubspot and www.growthdrivendesign.com

What is Growth Marketing?

Another logical extension of these concepts comes in the form of Growth Marketing (and just quickly - we do mean growth marketing here, not growth hacking).

​A Growth Marketer, in a basic sense, could be any data driven marketer whose goal is attracting more engaged customers, leading to growth. Typical efforts may be towards running experiments such as A/B testing, digging into user data to derive meaningful insights and focusing around conversion rate optimisation.

As this article on Drift puts it - the key difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing is:

"traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, the growth marketing job description requires focusing on the entire funnel."

Source: http://www.coelevate.com/essays/growth-vs-marketing-vs-product

Fundamentals of a Growth Driven Mindset

As we then look at both Growth Driven Design and Growth Marketing, we start to notice some convergence in the core values of both mindsets:

 Growth Marketers should definitely:

• Be fearlessly creative.
• Be willing to measure everything.
• Be able to admit failure.
• Get sh*t done, but never say it’s done​
• (From the Optimizely Blog )

Core Pillars of a GDD Mindset:

• Unbound Creativity
• Focus on the User
• ​Always Be Learning
• Get Stuff Done (GSD)
• (From Hubspot's GDD Course )

Notice anything similar?

Since we're starting with a (somewhat) unified mindset, let's next take a look at tying together three of the core principles and putting things into practice...

1. Everything Starts with the User / Customer

It's no secret businesses are realising the importance of putting the customer at the centre of marketing, sales and service efforts.

​According to Adobe's recent 2017 Digital Trends report, 71% of respondents considered 'optimising the customer experience' to be 'very important' for their digital marketing over the next few years. 

Both growth driven design and growth marketing share a similar user-first philosophy:
​

• Identify your most valuable customers (personas).
• Use data to gain real customer insights and drive increased user engagement
• Always focus on delivering the highest value first that's likely to solve a customer's challenges or pain points. 

Hubspot goes a step deeper on this last point to suggest this comes even before business needs. This makes a lot of sense when you realise that there is often a gap between what a business wants and what the business' customers want.

When you focus on solving for the user first, solutions immediately become more meaningful and less time is wasted on building 'solutions' that nobody actually wanted in the first place!

Image from https://app.hubspot.com/learning-center/2345788/course/7/152/gddagency#en

2. Focus on The Whole Funnel

Customer experience should not be the responsibility of one individual or department; it is the responsibility of the entire organisation. Therefore, it makes sense to consider the entire funnel (not just sales, marketing or customer support) when focusing on growth driven initiatives with the customer at the core.

... many different parts of the organization are responsible for delivering the ultimate customer experience. ​Providing a seamless customer experience thus begins with the customer’s perspective at the center of the organizational structure and requires all parts of the organization to work together in lockstep.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/leading-and-governing-the-customer-centric-organization

Once you have adopted a user/customer first approach and identified your highest value customers, it's important to:

• Consider how to appeal to these customers throughout the entire funnel and stages of their buyer's journey 
• Continue to delight customers post purchase (and long after the sale) with the ultimate goal of them becoming promoters for your business

For business operations - the aim should be to unify the organisation around these goals.

Only a basic understanding of the modern purchase funnel is needed to realise how important this full funnel mindset and approach can be and how critical it is to long term business success:

The modern purchase funnel

3. Continuous Learning & Improvement

Be willing to measure everything; be willing to admit failure; always be learning; get stuff done. These core principles all ring out in support of an agile, experiment-driven approach to marketing. 

In new businesses this is particularly important, because:

• You don’t necessarily know exactly who wants to buy your product
• You don’t know exactly how to write the copy of the pages of your website
• You don’t know what ads people are going to respond to

Though even in well-established businesses where the consumer environment is changing at a rate faster than ever before, the principles are valid. Besides, with so much access to data and software and tools such as A/B testing so readily available, why wouldn't you test, measure, learn and grow?
​
Lastly - close the loop and make sure the data from customer service is flowing back to sales, vice versa and all the way through the funnel. Say no to silos.

Say no to silos

Putting It Into Action

 Now you've got your 'grown driven hat' on and you're ready to tackle the whole funnel.
​
Where do you start? How do you prioritise?

Conveniently, Growth Driven Design suggests an 8 Step Framework for prioritising the changes and attention/focus areas for websites (or 'website hierarchy'). 

The two interconnected pieces of this process then are the 'GDD Website Hierarchy' and the 'Continuous Improvement Cycle' (Plan > Build > Learn > Transfer).

In order of priority/hierarchy:

1. Audience 
   There's no point in undertaking many of the actions below unless you first have a good flow of visitors to your website, so here is the logical place to start.
   
   Metrics to track: Unique visitors - month on month growth
   
   
2. Value
   Once you've started to grow an audience, it's important to provide them with value. Ideally the main content or features should be geared towards solving a user's pain point(s). 
   
   Metrics to track: Engagement metrics will give you some clues here (time on site, bounce rate, social shares etc.), or you can be more forward and ask your users how useful they find your site directly via surveys.
   
   
3. Usability
   People may overlook a few small usability issues if they see great value in your content; for how long, that depends. It's important to address this point next and make sure the website is easy to use and intuitive.
   
   Metrics to track: Specific task tracking, including user surveys and live testing is one way to tackle it. Use listening tools to track comments in social media, sentiment analysis or even a reduction in the quantity of support tickets around certain issues.
   
   
4. Conversion Rate Optimisation
   Taking usability a step further, reduce friction and grease those wheels to conversion. Analyse the reason for funnel dropouts. Consider heat mapping to gain insight on how users interact with pages, A/B test.
   
   Metrics to track: Funnel tracking and % dropouts during stages.
   
   
5. Stickiness
   Now you've things flowing, give users a reason to keep coming back. You can track return visits quite easily with most analytics tools.
   
   Metrics to track: Subscribers, number of visits per user.
   
   
6. Personalisation
   Start considering ways to personalise the experience for specific personas or user segments. You can tackle this manually, or software allows you to serve automated, personalised content in many ways. 
   
   Metrics to track: This is a way to get more granular on points 1-5 above. Once you have a personalisation strategy in place, go back through steps 1-5 for each segment.
   
   
7. Assets
   Offering assets for free which are so valuable that users would be willing to pay for them.
   
   Metrics to track: Each asset should be tracked individually to see how they generate leads, social shares etc. Compare how different assets perform with a lead scoring system.
   
   
8. Promoters
   Track how many people are sharing your website and business assets with others. Measure how this factors into attribution for major conversion goals.
   
   Metrics to track: If every visitor is referring at least one other (a referral ratio greater than 1.0), then you should be seeing growth. Social shares, email invites or 'refer a friend' programs are other indicators.

We're assuming in the example above that a company website forms the central point and conversion funnel of the overall sales and marketing efforts. Credit for the 8 points above to Hubspot.

For more help on implementing the steps above, or for in house training sessions on growth driven concepts, you can speak to one of our experienced digital consultants.

Hat On. Ready to Rock.

In Conclusion

Concepts like growth driven design and growth marketing reinforce a convergence towards a customer first, data driven mindset. Whilst some organisations find this shift easy, others are still struggling to adopt this approach and move towards customer experience excellence.

Even in 2017 a number of challenges still exist around this, such as navigating data, cultural challenges, strategy and creating momentum within the organisation, as well as digital marketing skills gaps. McKinsey&Company suggest a three tiered approach to tackle these challenges at an organisational level.

For marketers, the movement starts with the right mindset, then considering the key actions:
​

1. Everything starts with the user/customer
2. Focus on the whole funnel
3. Continuous learning and improvement
4. Prioritise in logical order. Highest value first.

​We hope this article has provided some ideas to light that 'fearlessly creative' spark.

A footnote:

An article first published in 2012 from the IPA (with Thinkbox) demonstrates the importance of and improved effectiveness of pairing short term, data driven campaigns with long term creative ones. The report examines the business effects of 1,000 advertising campaigns from over 30 years of IPA Effectiveness data. Of particular note - it warns about the danger of using very short-term metrics as primary performance measures for long-term success, since short term and long term effects work differently. We felt it important to reference the article here: https://www.thinkbox.tv/Research/Thinkbox-research/The-Long-and-Short-of-it