On my old website I had this section where I sketched out the growth marketing process, as I don't have that website anymore I'll put it here and would love to hear your feedback!
1. Define Objectives and Key Results
In the first meeting after we start together we define the outcome, you might recoginze the wording by Neil Patel (must-read!). Usually I try to make this meeting as small as possible, but it should at least include CEO and CMO.
The key results (KPI's) strongly depend on the product, the phase you're in and who you have report the numbers to, be it investors, CEO's, owners and so on...
If you're far enough the most important KPI's for SaaS products are:
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
The first question you might think: what about the churn rate? As Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital points out is that Churn Rate is sufficiently factored into LTV, but I'd like to point out exceptions suggested by a product manager:
What if the SaaS is only used for a small period of time, like a couple of weeks? CAC + LTV look very good but churn rate is terrible?
What if you want to the KPI's leading thoguhts in a different direction? LTV is very money-focused, leads to the question "How can I make more money?" while churn rate reads more into "How do I make people stay longer/come back to the product?".
Christoph Janz is also suggesting talking about other metrics you can use if the startup is too early to have enough data for above metrics, let's have a look at that:
Visitor-to-trial conversion rate: Landing pages to singups
Trial-to-paying-account conversion rates: Signps to payed accounts
Engagement and retention of your early users: Usage metrics within the product
Enthusiasm: Engagement around the product, for example in Social Media
2. Kick-Off-Meeting
This is the meeting where all stakeholders need to come together and throw their thoughts in.
The product: what's the product, how's it working?
Define Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Persona (for B2B) or Target Market (more B2C)
The value: Value Propositions
Scalable marketing ideas open brainstorming
Prioritization of those ideas
3. Set up the tech stack & define the basics
Most of the time there's some catch-up to do with tracking and implementations. One or more of the following tools and definiteions need to be set up, or the information needs to be gathered:
Google Tag Manager
Google Data Studio
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Marketing Automation like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot
Introducing UTM tags
Personalized Mailing like LemList
Set up PPC, like Google Ads, Facebook Business including an Ad Account, Taboola, Outbrain, and many more...
Tools to support LTV and CAC calculations or other tracking
4. Start of growth marketing iterations
The growth marketing iterations is a continuous process, that - honestly - get's messy from time to time, especially when there's a lot to catch up with. I oriented myself along Neil Patel's process:
Concepts & Prioritization: The "kick-offf"-meeting introduced this but
Implementation & Testing
Analysis & Rollout
The framework we're orienting ourselves there is the "pirate framework": AAARRR
Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral
5. ... and the reporting
At every point in time there needs to be a definition on what needs to be reported to whom. Usually high-level reporting includes a get-together with the CEO or other stakeholders to report about performance and hold-ups.
Since the growth hacking process is so integrated in the product development the backup of the CEO is critial. If that wouldn't be the case we'd be in performance marketing, where you optimize your conversion and don't care about the performance after it.
