STUDY OF GROWTH AND MARKETING

STRATEGIES AT PREGRAD PVT LTD

A PROJECT REPORT

Submitted in partial fulfilment for the

award of the degree of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY
in
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

by

Yash Chhajer
Registration No 18BMEN076

Under the Guidance of

Mr. Yash Pratap Aggarwal

&

Mr. Ankur Saxena

School of Engineering

JECRC UNIVERSITY
JAIPUR, RAJASTHAN

(JULY 2022)

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Title Page i

II. Offer Letter ii

III. Certificate vii

IV. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 4

V. Declaration 5

CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION 6

CHAPTER II - DOMAIN OVERVIEW 10

2.1 Work of growth marketer 11

2.2 Core components of growth marketing 12

2.3 Impact we are creating with growth marketing 13

2.4 AAARRR - growth marketing pirate funnel 14

2.5 Important goals and measurement of a growth marketer 16

2.6 Branding is so important 18

2.7 Set your goals 18

2.8 Toolkit for growth marketers 21

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 2.9 Introduction to growth marketing 21

2.10 Culmination of growth marketing 22

CHAPTER III - PROJECT OVERVIEW 27

3.1 Handling the community of 13k+ students 28

3.2 Managing the collaboration with brands PAN India 31

3.3 Conducting webinars in colleges PAN India 31

3.4 HANDLING THE LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN 35

CHAPTER IV - METHODOLOGY 42

4.1 Methodology and Concepts 42

4.2 Reaching your business goals 43

4.3 Marketing sales and software providers 44

4.4 Common concepts that underpin growth and marketing 44

4.5 Growth and Marketing tactics 46

4.6 The key resources in growth marketing 48

CHAPTER V - MY CONTRIBUTION AND LEARNING 57

CONCLUSION 85

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REFERENCES 86

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 TABLE OF FIGURES

3.1 SHOT OF OUR DISCORD COMMUNITY 30

3.2 LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN SHEET 36

3.3 LINKEDIN LEAD CAMPAIGN POST 39

3.4 INSTAGRAM LEAD CAMPAIGN CREATIVES 39

3.5 SEO 39

3.6 EMAIL LEAD CAMPAIGN 40

3.7 WHATSAPP LEAD CAMPAIGN 40

3.8 SESSION ON DIGITAL MARKETING 40

3.9 CAMPUS RECRUITMENT PROCESS 41

4.1 PEOPLE PROCESS TECHNOLOGY 49

4.2TRELLO 51

4.3 MONDAY.COM 52

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4.4 SLACK 54

4.5 G SUITE 55

4.6 ALGIE & SCUM 56

5.1 GROWTH MARKETING 101 74

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 APPROVAL

This Project Report on “Study of Growth and Marketing Strategies” by Yash

Chhajer is approved for the award of the degree of Bachelors of Technology in

Mechanical Engineering.

Examiner(s)

Guide(s)

HOD

Date :

Place - Jaipur

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 PREFACE

The internship gives an overview of Growth and Marketing with the sense of

working, the key job is to look at every channel, every source, and even every step

of the buyer journey or user acquisition funnel and look for areas to grow.

This Internship guides you in managing analytics stack and can build a custom

tracking & testing system or work with a selection of third-party tools such as

Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, etc. Sometimes they will build very

insightful dashboards for their teams and superiors, so they can quickly see Key

Performing Index and important user data in one place.

This Internship is organised into tests. With a clearly defined target metric/objective

to grow, and a prioritised backlog of ideas to test, he/she begins executing these

tests. If the test is to be performed inside the product, the Growth Manager must

collaborate with an agile development team for example to implement the changes.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to acknowledge our debt to each & every person associated with this

Internship. This Internship required huge Commitment from all the individuals

involved in it.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my project guide Mr Madhav

Chaturvedi & Mr Ankur Saxena for the opportunity to work with Pregrad. It would

never be possible for us to take this Internship to this level without their innovative

ideas and their relentless support and encouragement.

I’d like to thank HOD Mechanical, Dr Pankaj Sharma Sir and our Mentor Mr. Yash

Pratap Aggrwal and all the faculty of Mechanical Department for their kind and

active support and valuable guidance during the work process.

Without their Courage & Support, the internship would have been Futile. It was only

their building Support & Morale me in attaining the Successful completion of the

Project.

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 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the Internship entitled “Growth and Marketing Associate” is an

authentic record of my work carried out at “Pregrad Pvt Ltd” as requirements of six

months industrial training for the award of the degree of “Bachelors of Technology”,

from JECRC University, under the guidance of “Mr Yash Pratap Aggrwal”, from 1st

January to 20th June 2022.

Date: 20th June 2022

Name : Yash Chhajer

Roll no : 18BMEN076

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 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

Pregrad is India's first Virtual Campus, where we provide a Mentor Led E-Learning

platform that shares a vision of solving problems with regards to students’ careers and

providing them all the opportunity to be self-sufficient in this era of resilient

competition.

At Pregrad we believe in learning and more importantly applying theoretical

knowledge to solve industrial-level practical problems. We understand the relevancy of

skills in today’s market, therefore, we don’t compromise with our quality of education.

Here, we not only focus on relevant technical skills but also upgrade them to the

desired market level. In addition, we provide the overall interpersonal growth of the

candidate and make them an all-around player.

What do we value:

● We are a team of differentiated and ambitious individuals, united by a common goal.

● We believe flexibility in roles and freedom to execute ideas are the two foundation

values for aggressive and steady growth.

● We constantly protect, evolve, and better our culture. We are a super energetic and

experienced team where we cherish moments and add value to the organisation.

We are India's largest and fastest-growing Virtual Campus of technology innovators

including startups and student innovators. We work with over 650 colleges all across

India including tier 1, tier 2 & tier 3 colleges.

Just to get started, I am sharing what we have been doing in the ecosystem and how

colleges, startups and developers are an integral part of everything that we are doing.

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We are majorly dealing with the gap in the education sector. Where students are just

running behind the jobs without any prior skillset in that domain, due to that they are

not able to get the jobs in that domain. So on that gap we are building a bridge, as we

are providing the students with the proper industrial knowledge about that domain and

we are giving them a platform to learn and after that we are providing them a place to

implement their skills as we are connecting them with recruiters and providing them the

internships so they can enhance their skill set by working in the industrial environment.

And we are now building India’s first virtual campus with all the amenities that are in

a normal university, where a student can learn a skill, grab his pre graduation

certificate, take part in the co curricular activities too. The goal of the company is to

improve student outcomes, enhance individualised education, and reduce the teaching

burden on instructors.

The essential objective of the company is to improve the quality of education and

enhance the learning process. Most importantly, technology should magnify the

teaching and learning process as well as facilitate better performance of educational

systems as it emphasises upon effectiveness and efficiency.

Pointers company majorly focus on:

● Provides More Immersive Learning

● Customises Learning For Each Student

● Technology should provide Easy Access To More Learning Resources

● Tech should Add Fun To Learning

● Technology should Better Prepares Students For Today's Jobs

● Technology should Teach About Digital Life

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Internship Profile:

Growth & Marketing Associate

My Role:

● Effectively & Efficiently Acquire New Customers

● Prioritise Revenue

● Utilising user data to pivot marketing campaigns for more engagement.

● Analysing the overall sales funnel impact and making adjustments where

necessary

● Updating and/or abandoning any traditional marketing campaigns

● Managing social acquisition channels

● Developing hypothetical solutions to address these problems, including a/b

testing

● Proactively communicate with experts, clients, and all other relevant

stakeholders. -Work as Mentor & Speaker at some given Time.

● Pursuing customer acquisition that has a foundation of longevity in the

marketing strategy.

● Identifying challenges throughout all departments, not just the marketing team.

Mode of Internship:

The mode of internship is offline. I’m currently staying in Noida

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent

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• Strong written and verbal communication skill

• Good knowledge in Marketing and Verified Certifications in domain.

• Other general qualities like leadership, decision making etc.

Job Description

● Working toward the growth of the Pregrad

● Manage & Execute Program & Initiatives

● Conducting and Hosting Campus Activities & Events.

● Work with a cross functional team (Product, Services, Sales) to establish

growth strategies to support Big Drop’s revenue goals.

● Create, manage and experiment with new user acquisition campaigns.

● Conceive and execute on a wide range of content campaigns to drive education

and engagement.

● Manage all social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,

Instagram, YouTube) and drive content creation.

● Manage SEO

● Analyse data to monitor revenue performance and uncover areas for

improvement.

● Prepare and present recommendations, reports, and findings from experimental

data all the way up to the executive level.

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 CHAPTER II : MY DOMAIN OVERVIEW

Growth and Marketing is an approach to attracting, engaging, and retaining customers

that's focused on relentless experimentation and an intense focus on the unique,

changing motives and preferences of your customers. By building and delivering highly

tailored, individualised messaging aligned to your customers needs, you'll be able to

optimise your organisation's growth rapidly through a multitude of channels, especially

the ones that matter most to your customers. Let’s take a deeper look at what it means

to be a growth marketer, and highlight some common opportunities where a growth

marketing team can optimise the user experience.

Growth marketers use growth hacking techniques to experiment with different

channels and strategies frequently, optimising their tests incrementally to determine

how to best optimise their marketing spend. Growth hackers were keen to use a range

of innovative experiments and constant analysis to increase their user base at lower

costs as quickly as possible.

Growth marketing has evolved past the “get-growth-quick” tactics of growth hacking.

However, that doesn’t mean successful elements of its rise to success have been

forgotten. Growth marketing continues leaning into its testing, experimentation, and

expansion roots, and applies these principles to campaigns throughout the customer

journey.

As marketing technology has advanced, so has the sophistication of the growth

marketing field. Growth marketers are using A/B testing and multivariate testing to

develop experiments around what content is seen and when by different user segments,

and using the results to develop highly optimised strategies for each identified user

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segment, going down to the individual level.

Marketers can develop highly personalised campaigns that seamlessly reach users

across multiple channels, enabling them to follow the users' own behavioural cues to

build customised strategies that will optimise growth. Looking further down the funnel,

growth marketing generates greater rates of customer retention and satisfaction, as well.

When you prioritise delivering valuable customer experiences, you’re no longer

attempting to monetize your audience. Instead of pushing content geared toward

conversions and revenue, you’re now seeking new ways to add valued information to

each user’s evolving journey. Growth marketing focuses on customer relationship

building and fostering loyalty; it’s a long-term strategy where authenticity and

engagement creates advocacy and organically grows customer lifetime values.

2.1 Work of growth marketer

Well, for starters, they usually have a very broad background pulling from various

marketing specialties. They are what some like to call “T-shaped marketers,” in that

they know enough about a wide range of marketing topics, yet they can go very deep in

one or two of them.

A growth marketer may work at an agency, or in-house for one company or they

could be an independent consultant or freelancer.

Growth marketers usually begin new projects by gathering data, analysing all of the

information available to them, and formulating a growth strategy.

Then, they’ll get tactical and begin launching campaigns as soon as possible. After all,

the best growth marketers don’t want to sit on the sidelines; they want to get in and

work on real campaigns so they can learn from the data and continually optimise for

better results.

Maybe they’ll start with a paid advertising campaign to drive traffic to the top of the

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funnel, or maybe they’ll start by focusing on the product or service that’s being offered

in order to either improve it or get more of the existing users or customers talking.

The possibilities for what a growth marketer can do are limitless. As long as they have

the right mindset, they can accomplish some very impressive things in a short amount

of time.

2.2 Core Components of Growth and Marketing:

1. Cross-channel marketing:- Cross-channel marketing is a strategy that involves

interacting with both prospective and current customers through a variety of mediums

or marketing channels. Businesses who use cross-channel marketing determine the best

methods and approaches for contacting various types of customers. Marketing channels

may include:

● Email subscriptions

● Digital advertisements campaigns

● Online forums or discussion groups

● Social media posts

● Podcasts

● Networking events

● Guest blogs

● Websites

● Public reviews

● Quotes in external publications or websites

2. A/B Testing:- A/B testing is a method for examining the similarities and

differences between two variations of the same thing. Growth marketers can use A/B

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testing to determine the best version of a particular marketing strategy, program or type

of content. Once a growth marketer figures out which variation has the greatest success

gaining, engaging or keeping customers, they can improve upon that variation during

future campaigns. A/B testing typically involves testing the same two variations with

multiple subgroups of your business's target audience, as sometimes various types of

customers may respond best to different tactics.

3. Customer lifecycle:- A customer lifecycle is the journey your customers embark

on as they learn about, interact with, buy or convert, and re-engage with your company.

For simplification, there are three critical lifecycle stages that growth marketers focus

on: activation, nurture, and reactivation. Each stage plays a specific role as a

contributing factor to customer experience and is often marked by specific campaigns.

The activation stage is the initial stage of the lifecycle where companies seek to activate

consumer attention and interest. Growth marketers target customers with welcome,

onboarding, trials, and other introductory campaigns to build familiarity and credibility.

2.3 Impact we are creating with Growth Marketing

Traditional marketing involves “set it and forget it” strategies that burn through a set

budget and hope for the best. Think Google Adwords and display campaigns with some

basic ad copy. These strategies can be a great way to build traffic to the top of your

sales funnel, aiding to increase a company’s awareness and user acquisition, but that’s

where the value dwindles.

These data-driven marketers are highly involved in shaping a strategy, trying new

experiments, and failing fast to quickly zero in on what works.

But growth marketing is also a stochastic process, like biological evolution. This means

there is an element of randomness to the strategies that might work. The only way to be

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certain what will be a fruitful road to go down is to start throwing things at the wall and

see what sticks.

Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels

and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.

In a way, it’s an updated version of conventional marketing that is mixed with

unconventional strategies, new technologies and data.

It adds new layers to traditional marketing models such as A/B testing, data-driven

marketing campaigns, AI, automation, SEO optimization, analysis of user experience or

dynamic ads and so on.

Traditional marketers are often masters at one thing like copywriting, design or video

marketing and so on. But growth marketers need to know more than one thing because

they have to run a bunch of different experiments.

So they should be able to design the visual, write the copy, shoot a video, edit the

video, set the Facebook ads, run A/B test and then analyse the data of the ads to

understand what happened.

2.4 AAARRR – Growth Marketing Pirate Funnel

Awareness:

In this stage, you educate your prospects about your brand and solution. Make sure

people know that you exist.

Examples: SEO optimised website and articles, cold email outreach, viral content,

how-to videos or any kind of social media ads that focuses on spreading awareness and

so on.

Acquisition:

The acquisition is the phase where you collect your prospects’ personal details.

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Examples: Gated content, subscription forms, landing pages, chatbots, free trials,

eBooks, cheat sheets or case studies and so on.

Activation:

Also known as WOW moment. People signed to your product and you need to act and

make them use the product right away when they’re still interested!

For example, Twitter makes you follow at least 5 people because if you don’t follow

anyone, you wouldn’t understand how Twitter works.

Retention:

The main goal here is to make customers come back to you. The best way to do this is

to keep your customers delighted.

To improve retention, growth marketers might look at how to offer personalised

support for customers or how to improve the value users gain from a product.

Example:

Starbucks loyalty program is a good example of that. It makes sure that you keep

coming to get your rewards and encourages you to buy new products.

Revenue:

Getting more money from current customers. Here the ultimate goal is to upsell,

cross-sell, sign a new contract or higher subscription plan. Or you can prevent attrition

and churns.

Example: Amazon always offers super personalised complimentary products to upsell

or cross-sell.

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Referral

People are so in love with your products they refer your business to others. But they

can’t do that without referral materials.

So love alone is not enough. You need to water that love with referral campaigns and

programs.

Example: Refer 1 friend to win X, 5 friends for Z and 15 friends for Y.

2.5 Important Goals & Measurements for a Growth Marketer:-

Goal: Get Traffic to Your Site :

A major one goal of any growth marketing manager will be to boost traffic numbers.

This is done in a variety of ways.

Organic Traffic :

These are the users who arrive at your site after performing a search with a major

search engine. In order to optimise organic traffic, you want to do all the things that

help you rank near the top of the search results. This includes sharing your quality

content with other sites so that you build up inbound links and producing content that

has been thoroughly search engine optimised.

An example of an organic growth hack is how Nerdwallet used a survey on emotional

overspending to drive organic traffic to their site, and pitch other sites to include

backlinks to the post. They were able to successfully secure links from The Simple

Dollar, QuickenLoans, Yahoo, and Fidelity.

Paid Traffic :

These are the users that come to your site via your advertising channels. You want to

monitor how much you are spending, the number of impressions your ads are

generating, and the CPA.

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 Lately, more and more companies have been experimenting with native advertising,

which involves non-traditional ad placements that are made to look like they are more

content focused. Dollar Shave Club would be the folks to emulate when trying

experiments in the native space, as they leveraged that medium with great success.

Referral Traffic :

This is any and all traffic that does not come from a major search engine. So, social

media traffic as well as all the other sites linking to your content.

If you are doing things right, people will start sharing and talking about your content

simply because they are naturally inclined to do so. This is the definition of viral

content. Tracking the volume and source of all referral traffic will help you to optimise

in this regard.

You can use competitive analysis to gain an edge, such as monitoring your

competitors’ engagement spikes on social media and then trying to reverse engineer

their success.

Publishing guest blog posts can also be a great way of building referral traffic.

On-site metrics :

It’s always critical to know what’s actually happening on your site. You want to know

where your visitors are coming from, what actions they are taking, and how long they

are spending on the site. Another important number to monitor is your bounce rate, as

it’s a great indicator of the relevance of your content or landing page.

The nurture stage is where companies nurture and engage consumers to strengthen

relationships. This stage typically accounts for the majority of cross-channel marketing

customers receive from brands: sales, promotions, recent updates, newsletters, and

more.

The final reactivation stage focuses on re-engagement. It’s this stage where companies

reactivate customer engagement to drive retention and loyalty through campaigns like:

post-purchase, abandonment, loyalty, or win backs.

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 No single stage outweighs another in terms of importance. Customers naturally

progress through this lifecycle at their own speed, but growth marketers proactively

accommodate their changing needs using an arsenal of need-specific campaigns.

2.6 Branding is so important!!

Branding is the act of connecting a product (or business) with a particular name,

symbol, or features and ideas to make it recognizable. Branding gives your business a

personality. And customers become loyal to a brand if they relate to the brand’s

personality. Your brand can be trustworthy, luxurious, passionate, tasty, fun, innovative,

caring, professional, or safe. It all depends on your target audience and how you want

to position your business in the market. In essence, branding is the practice of

differentiating one business from another through a name, logo design, story,

messaging, and so on. Just like a business, any product can become a brand.

This is known as product branding. Companies may sell similar products and

services, but depending on their branding, they can attract completely different

customers who feel connected to their brands for specific reasons. Branding is not

merely the design of your company. In fact, you can’t design a brand. Creating a logo

design and visuals is part of branding, but first, you need to define your brand values

and identity, voice, and personality. Branding is the associations your customers have

while interacting with your business, its products, and services. Each interaction shapes

those associations; the buying decision is not solely based on product features. This is

why customer service and social media presence are key factors in branding, as they

form a relationship with customers.

Set your goals :

Goal: Get Leads & Improve Conversion Rate

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All the visitors in the world don’t mean anything if they aren’t being converted into

new users. Here are the key areas to optimise.

Conversion Rate :

What is the overall conversion rate of people coming to your site through any avenue?

You should give extra scrutiny to any pages that have significant drop-offs compared

with other parts of the site.

Hubspot experimented with different website designs and found one that doubled

their overall conversion rates.

Landing Page Conversion Rates :

What is the conversion rate of users who hit your main landing page? There are many

ways to optimise here, such as tinkering with copy, design, and layout.

An interesting area to experiment is in the length of the headline for content you

display on a landing page. For example, it’s been shown that shorter, punchier headlines

generally perform better.

Blog/Email Subscribers :

Are you producing compelling content that people actually want to read? That needs to

be your first priority. For an example of a company blog that people genuinely love and

get a lot of value out of, go explore the blog of SEO company Moz. They craft

long-form content that many people would pay for, but Moz gives it away for free.

If you are already creating good content, you then want to make sure it is driving the

actions you want? You can figure this out by analysing things such as the click-through

rate, subscriber growth, and shares.

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Increase free trials to paid plans :

If you have a freemium product, you ultimately want to convert users on free trials into

paying customers.

A great example is how the growth marketers at DocuSign leveraged tracking

technology to expose certain premium features to only a unique subset of users. Their

tests allowed them to know exactly what features to show, and their experiment resulted

in a 5% lift in upgrade conversions.

Goal: Retain Customers

Reduce Churn- Churn refers to the percentage of users who sign up for your service but

then stop using it. This is an especially critical metrics for SaaS companies in growth

mode because churn is the archenemy of exponential growth. If you are losing a

significant portion of your customers, you simply won’t be able to achieve the critical

mass of users you need to start making serious revenue.

Analyse every aspect of why users stop using the service and ruthlessly iterate to plug

the holes. One area that could be tripping you up? User interface. Make sure it’s smooth

and seamless, or people will leave.

Increase Average Order Value :

By tracking and analysing user behaviour, you can start to target them in ways that will

increase the average order value. Areas to look into include bundling, targeting

customers based on past behaviour, and upselling.

Increase Lifetime Value :

Once you have a customer on board, how do you maximise the value you get from

them? Strategies might include conducting user surveys to find new features people

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want, encouraging customers to switch to an annual billing cycle, or providing targeted,

premium, customer service.

Goal: Build a Brand :

Once you have a company that is trusted, reliable, and provides a great user

experience, you can leverage that into building a true brand. Meaning, your name can

become synonymous with quality in that particular industry.

It starts by building a great company culture. Then, the process of brand building can

be helped along with a smart PR campaign, influencer marketing, positive word of

mouth, and referral programs.

2.8 Toolkit for Growth Marketers

In order to grow with the best, you’ll want to leverage some of these fantastic services.

● Leadpages — helps you build customised landing pages.

● Adroll — track the people who visit your site through ads

● Sumo — build an amazing email list

● Ahrefs — the industry leader in building quality keyword lists

● Proof — increase conversions by letting the customer do the selling

● Post — see who is sharing your posts

● Buzzsumo — analyse the content of any of your URLs in detail

● Voila Norbert — build relationships with important marketers with this email

finding tool

● Amplitude — helps you find your stickiest features

● Apptimize — A/B test your mobile app

2.9 Introduction to Growth Marketing

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The old marketers’ didn’t have anything to do with the customers once the sale was

complete. There was no attention towards after-sale services. Even the way the sales

process started was awkward. The manager would typically cold call a customer or

conduct a face-to-face meeting to propose a sale. The advent of digital sales made a

mess of it all.

The marketers got a lot more data at their disposal than they had ever utilised. The

word ‘customer’ became leads, MQLs, and SQLs instead. It meant that there was a

significant change in the conduct of business processes. It instigated a need for a new

marketer who could handle all the new operations well.

The old marketers had no idea of after-sale services. The new age expected more than

that from the organisations. It led to companies quickly realising the need to focus on

its services after the sale is complete. The old-age marketers became redundant, and the

new age ones replaced them.

2.10 Growth marketing is a culmination of the following –

● A house of strategies – Gone are the days when marketing performances were

tracked once in a year. The new approach follows a cyclical sprint model where your

performance is monitored continuously and optimised.

● Serving the right customers the right way – Marketing no longer looks to

generate value from the customers. Its primary focus has now shifted to providing

optimum benefit to the customers.

● Marketing budgets now look to serve profitable customers so that they extract

the utmost value from the brand.

● Revenue growth is secondary; the primary goal is to generate, retain and

monetize customers – Today, companies like Xiaomi and so many more are looking to

build a broader customer base instead of making high profits from each sale. They

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firmly believe that if the products are excellent, customers will stick to them and buy

more and more, thereby helping the brand to earn more.

● A mixture of strategic marketing with tactical performance marketing – Growth

marketing concentrates less on immediate sales. It is instead, more concerned about

securing long term sales by creating awareness, loyalty, and sufficient demand.

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 The Growth Marketing Process:-

Step 1: Identify Which Area Needs the Most Attention:-

Before you can start a growth marketing experiment, you need to have a reporting

system in place that can track the impact of every change you make. You also need to

have a baseline for how your business is performing in the six pirate metrics areas.

Once you have that baseline data, you can identify which areas you’re doing well in

and where you need to improve. Once you establish the high-level area you want to

focus on, break it down into micro areas of opportunity.

Step 2: Design an Experiment Around Your Designated Focus Area:-

The first step for designing your growth marketing experiment is to develop a

hypothesis. After you know what you want to change, you need to come up with ways

to make that improvement. That change could be as small as rewriting a web page

headline or as large as re-designing that entire page.

Determine what action you think will cause the biggest change and then craft your

hypothesis by filling in these blanks: “Given [our current data], we believe taking [this

action] will impact [these results] by [this much].”

Keep the SMART goal framework in mind when crafting your hypothesis. If your

hypothesis isn’t specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely, you won’t be able

to obtain actionable results from your experiment.

Then, outline an experiment that will test your hypothesis. Your experiment will

actually need to influence your hypothesis and should include some form of baseline

against which you can compare your results.

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Step 3: Implement the Experiment:-

Run your experiment for a designated timeframe or until your results have statistical

significance. Setting guidelines in place prior to starting your experiment will help

prevent you from jumping to conclusions too early. You need to be patient.

It’s normal to see drastic differences immediately after implementing a change, but

those results will even out over time.

Additionally, try to test one thing at a time. The more variables you add, the more

difficult it is to conclusively identify the reason for the results you’re seeing. If you’re

already running one experiment in an area, wait until it’s over before starting additional

tests.

In our experiment, we changed our lead scoring system. We separated fit and interest

into two separate stages of qualification. Under the new system, our leads were

identified solely on interest. Then, we created a list in our CRM using all the minimum

requirements to be a good fit for us. Anyone who became a member of that list was

qualified as an MQL.

We conducted this experiment over the course of a year, and because we couldn’t just

change our lead qualifications for just a portion of our database, we didn’t have a

control but instead compared the results after the end of the year to the data collected

before the experiment started.

Step 4: Analyse Your Results:-

When your experiment is over, compare your results to your initial hypothesis. Did you

reach your goals?

If your experiment underperformed, did it do so poorly that you want to stop pursuing

that avenue for improvement? Or, did you just see insufficient results that require

further testing?

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 If your experiment validated your hypothesis or exceeded expectations, how can you

use your findings to improve your company’s processes even further?

When analysing your results, make sure your control or baseline is directly related to

your experiment. If there’s a seasonality to the subject of your experiment, you should

be comparing your results to the equivalent season.

Step 5: Start Your Next Experiment:-

The purpose of a growth marketing experiment is to influence a key performance

indicator (KPI) metric which impacts your overall pirate metric area. If the results of

your experiment sufficiently improved your company’s performance in that area, then

you can start over from step 1 and identify the next area for improvement.

If your experiment didn’t get you completely to your goal, then you should start over

from step 2 and look at different ways to impact your KPI or different metrics that can

impact your overall performance in the area where you’re experimenting.

Because our SQL conversion rate didn’t increase the way we wanted it to, we decided

to examine other factors that could be involved, like follow-up and response time.

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 CHAPTER III - PROJECTS OVERVIEW

I am responsible for building and maintaining Pregrad’s community both online and

offline and public perception. The job requires engaging audiences on a variety of

outlets including online forums, social media platforms, Discord, Slack, in-person

groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are. Since different digital spaces

have unique cultures and best practices, we are the consistent tone and voice of the

brand.

I have worked on the collaboration part too, where we have to connect with different

companies and recruiters to hire the students from our platform. I’ve successfully

targeted and completed 37 collaborations.

And with that I’ve targeted the industry professionals for being the mentor at our

virtual campus. They guide the students to learn and provide them the proper

mentorship.

I have handled the offline collaborations PAN India. We have managed to do

Webinars and seminars to raise awareness among students why learning should be that

much necessary and why you should be specialised in your domain of interest.

Webinars give us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our

product is valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a

name with a face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal

relationships and have real-time conversations.

To generate lead opportunities using secondary research. Manage, nurture and convert

leads into sales opportunities. Identify strong potential prospects using initiative and

28
creativity. Route qualified and appropriate leads to the sales team for further closure.

Work closely within a small sales & marketing team and develop cooperative working

relationships across functions. Provide accurate and timely information as required to

managers and senior management. Out reaching accounts using emails and other

channels.

3.1 Handling the Community of 13k+ students

I am responsible for building and maintaining Pregrad’s community both online and

offline and public perception. The job requires engaging audiences on a variety of

outlets including online forums, social media platforms, Discord, Slack, in-person

groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are. Since different digital spaces

have unique cultures and best practices, we are the consistent tone and voice of the

brand.

The virtual campus which we are dealing with is providing the students with the

opportunity to enhance themself before their graduation. As a community manager, all

your messaging, content, and crisis management across networks should be prompt,

consistent with your brand, and empathetic to create a loyal and delighted community.

A community manager acts as the liaison between an organisation and its audience.

They act as the voice, tone, and moderator of the brand through community support,

content distribution, and digital engagement to build brand presence and trust, both

online and in-person.

It's important for community managers to be knowledgeable about and across the

business. Community managers should be able to rely on their experience with their

organization to confidently address their audience or tap into internal resources to

appropriately handle any issues that may arise. Beyond a working understanding of the
29
business, managers need to build productive, professional relationships both internally

and externally in order to be a more authentic and reliable brand ambassador.

In order to advocate for and preserve an organisation's brand, community managers

must have incredibly strong soft skills. Above all, empathy, good listening skills, and

adaptability are crucial to promoting favourable impressions of an organisation.

Beyond interpersonal skills, the best community managers are actively researching

trends and hot topics -- by engaging with the latest industry developments, community

managers are better able to connect with relevant audiences and provide them with the

most updated resources and best practices.

Community managers are responsible for building and maintaining a brand's

community -- both online and offline -- and public perception. The job requires

engaging audiences on a variety of outlets including online forums, social media

platforms, Slack, in-person groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are.

Since different digital spaces have unique cultures and best practices, community

managers must be the consistent tone and voice of the brand.

Building on the usefulness of a PR skill set, community managers must be vigilant of

their organisation's brand presence and assess the potential consequences of their

corporate communications. Brand presence includes consistency of voice across

platforms to keep the company on track in terms of target audience awareness and

engagement. Consumers should be able to recognize brand voices across pillars --

whether they're seeing a post on Instagram or a question on Quora.

Beyond direct interaction between the brand and its audience, community managers

also record and report the engagement they see on at least a monthly basis. Other teams

that create content operate mostly on the backend, so it's the community manager who

30
sees the response from consumers. They can help track whether followers are confused,

or what kinds of changes they are seeing within digital communities.

By building positive relationships with the members of your community -- whether

they have a positive impression of your brand or a negative one -- you're building a

reputable and trustworthy brand perception.

We have built a virtual campus with all the amenities which are there in a normal

university. We are managing the community by engaging the students, providing them

with the upskilling opportunities and providing them with the pre graduation

certificates in their specialised domains.

I’ve created the whole framework of the community on discord and will be managing

the community too.

Figure 3.1 - Shot of our discord community of 1.5k members

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3.2 Managing the collaboration with Brands & Recruiters PAN India

I have worked on the collaboration part too, where we have to connect with different

companies and recruiters to hire the students from our platform. I’ve successfully

targeted and completed 37 collaborations.

And with that I’ve targeted the industry professionals for being the mentor at our

virtual campus. They guide the students to learn and provide them the proper

mentorship.

In this span we had onboarded many big brands with us for both hiring and

mentorship. These big names helped the company to gain high rise in the competition.

Following are the brands which we have onboarded in this time span:-

● Siemens

● Appentus

● Barclays

● Chefkart

● SG Analytics

● Cisco

● Yellow.ai

● Grubstay and many more

3.3 Conducting webinars in colleges PAN India

I have handled the offline collaborations PAN India. We have managed to do Webinars

and seminars to raise awareness among students why learning should be that much

32
necessary and why you should be specialised in your domain of interest. Webinars give

us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our product is

valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a name with a

face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal relationships and have

real-time conversations.

Webinars help students in:-

Webinars Encourage Interaction Through Anonymity

There is something comforting about the anonymity that comes with webinars. For

starters, all students or seminar attendees interact with the teachers or presenters on

equal footing. This means there are plenty of people in any given webinar who may be

more willing and likely to participate than they would in a face-to-face class. This

improves constructive discussions in the chat sections of the webinars. With increased

interaction, students can achieve improved understanding of the contents of the

webinar.

Webinars Are an Effective Learning Experience

While this might seem counter-intuitive, the U.S. Department of Education conducted

studies on webinar effectiveness and found that students who attended online classes

had, on average, better performance than students who attended face-to-face classes.

There are plenty of elements that account for this kind of disparity in terms of

performance. For instance, online classes offer playback from the live recording, screen

sharing sessions, chats, file sharing, and many other features that bolster the learning

experience and keep the students more engaged in the material they are learning. When

engaged in a webinar, students are in a better place to effectively understand the lesson,

33
thereby performing appreciably better than those attending traditional classes.

Webinars Provide A Wide Variety of Lessons

Webinars increase the choice of courses students have. Many students are never able to

enrol in courses they would like to take, simply because those courses are not offered in

their educational institution and they cannot or are unwilling to change schools.

With webinars, students can take extra courses, regardless of the geographical

distance between where they live and the school offering the course. This helps

students broaden their skills, as well as their understanding of their field of interest.

This also allows students to attain new knowledge and skills that can supplement or

complement their main field of study.

Great Way of Networking

It seems a bit difficult for everyone to connect with each other in physical events.

However, this barrier gets eliminated in the webinars. People can ask questions,

participate in polls, and take part in other activities. This is a great way of engaging

with others, learning and growing.

Great Source of Knowledge & Upskilling

The biggest benefits of attending webinars are gaining knowledge and upskilling.

Webinars are great resources of information. As career counsellors, you can understand

industry trends, various career options available for students, different ways to help

students in their career journey and a lot more. The way content is explained in a

webinar is much more intimate than it could ever conceivably be in other kinds of

presentations.

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 These are like personal sessions where you can easily share your feedback, ask

questions, and get engaged with arbitrarily large audiences all at once. This is what

makes webinars unique forms of sessions.

Different webinar platforms come with various functionalities and features able to fill

interests and steer you in the right direction.

Learning From Industry Experts

One of the major benefits of webinars is that it does not limit your learning. You can

attend whatever session you want and at any time from any part of the globe. You are

not limited to just gaining knowledge from your country. You can learn from industry

experts all around the world. This makes webinars one of the best ways of updating

your knowledge and upskilling yourself.

By now we have conducted webinars on various topics like:-

1. Cyber Security:-

Key Takeaways from this webinar :-

● Phishing

● Ransomware

● Windows Vulnerabilities

● Crypto Currencies

● Supply Chain Attacks

2. Digital Marketing:-

Key Takeaways from this webinar :-

● Understand Digital Marketing Landscape

● Inspiring Digital Marketing Case Studies: Global & Local

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● Building a rewarding career in Digital Marketing Industry

● Live Exercises: Facebook Advertising & Google Analytics

3. Machine Learning:-

Key takeaways from this webinar:-

● Accelerate Inference For Deep Learning Models

● With The Explosive Growth In Demand For AI Skills, How To Be More

Employable

● The Use Of Augmented Genetic Algorithm

● A Primer On Building And Deploying Scalable Analytical Models In

Production

3.4 Handling the Lead Generation Campaign

1. To generate lead opportunities using secondary research.

2. Manage, nurture and convert leads into sales opportunities.

3. Identify strong potential prospects using initiative and creativity.

4. Route qualified and appropriate leads to the sales team for further

closure.

5. Work closely within a small sales & marketing team and develop

cooperative working relationships across functions.

6. Provide accurate and timely information as required to managers and

senior management.

7. Out reaching accounts using emails and other channels.

8. Proficient in the use of social media tools such as LinkedIn, Zoominfo,

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.

9. Adhere to company policies, procedures, culture, and business values.

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 10. Passionate and learn to research about the Hospitality and Light

industry

Figure 3.2 : Lead Generation Campaign Sheet

Strategies used:-

1) Create an incentive-based referral system:-

Word-of-mouth advertising is still as important as it’s ever been—plus, the ways in

which people spread the word about their favourite businesses have changed drastically

with technology. If anything, customer referral programs have become even more

useful among successful lead generation strategies, since they’re easier than ever to

quantify and track.

2) Broadcast advertising to your niche audience:-

Podcasts have become wildly popular in recent years and content creators need

advertisers, which means you can turn listeners into leads—possibly with even greater

potential than you could with a regular radio ad. Since podcasts typically focus on

specific themes, and listeners choose which ones to stream, you already have a good

idea of what this audience will find interesting and relevant to their lives.

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 Therefore, you can identify the podcasts that best speak to your target audience and

focus your lead generation strategy there.

3) Take a new approach to direct mail:-

By being selective with your direct mail efforts, you can invest more in the physical

item you’re sending out. Plus, you can offer better discounts, coupons, or other

enticements to get new leads to take the next step. You might think of direct mail as

your first foray into getting someone to go to your business website or call you, rather

than your final step in getting new clients.

4) Optimise your website and use CTAs.:-

We want customers to visit your store in-person, you might craft a call to action, or

CTA, that drives them to a “location” or “contact us” page. Conversely, if you want a

customer to make a purchase on your website, you’ll want to create a CTA driving

them to certain product pages, or maybe even a discount landing page for first-time

shoppers.

5) Learn search engine optimization:-

SEO continues to be one of the most successful lead generation strategies, especially

for online businesses, B2B businesses, and even B2C businesses. Of course, it’s not

always easy to understand and craft the perfect SEO strategy, however, the first step is

utilising the tools at your disposal (most website builders include SEO optimization

tools) and keeping search engine visibility top of mind.

6) Create and publish top-notch content:-

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Content-based lead generation marketing strategies allow you to increase your presence

in search as long as the content you create is well-optimised. The more high-quality

content you produce, the more you’re rewarded by search engines.

When it comes down to it, search engines give preference to websites that help

answer questions quickly and simply. For instance, if you create a blog post that

provides the who, what, where, and why of something your company is an expert on,

you’ll reap rewards by ranking well in search.

7) Get creative with social media:-

Social media organically can be one of the best lead generation strategies for startups,

especially in local markets, there are ways to get creative with these platforms that

might work better for your business.

To this point, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to target

very specific audiences with their paid ad solutions, as well as retarget audiences who

have interacted with your business before.

Many of these platforms also offer one-click email submission‚which allows users to

submit their information at the click of a button and gives businesses a simple way to

collect info on potential leads with minimal hassle.

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 Figure 3.3: LinkedIn Lead Campaigns Post

Figure 3.4: Instagram Lead Campaigns Creatives

Figure 3.5: Search Engine Optimization

40
 Figure 3.6: Email Lead Campaigns Mails

Figure 3.7: Whatsapp Lead Campaigns Sheet

Figure 3.8: Session for Digital Marketing

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Figure 3.9: LinkedIn Lead Campaigns Recruitment Partners

42
 CHAPTER IV - METHODOLOGY ADOPTED FOR SOLUTION

4.1 It good to be aware of methodologies and concepts

It can be very hard for me to keep a clear grasp of how all the different Methodologies,

concepts, tasks and buzzwords relate to each other and where to focus my attention.

This is a big problem for me as it affects the balance of my marketing and also service

delivery related activities. At times, I get a sort of vertigo and get very confused about

where I should focus my attention.

If I loose sight of our goals and principles I am likely to fail in the long term. If I

focus too much on the long term and miss out on the daily activities that keep our

marketing machine running, I fail immediately . To ensure I find a balance between

these two ways of thinking and working I have to be able to see the bigger picture. The

framework that I can place all these principles, tasks etc. into so that I can actually use

them to reach our goals.

At About Inbound, we focus heavily on knowledge and communication. Our clients

depend on us to give them clarity, quality and peace of mind, so in short, if I am not

clear about what I am doing or about how to apply the concepts we sell, I am kind of,

well, useless.

To combat these moments of marketing research "vertigo" I often try to order my

learning on paper or chat it through with Vourneen who is About Inbound's founder and

ultimate super expert. This ordering of thoughts helps me make sense of it all and has

over time allowed me to quickly grasp new concepts and approaches because I can

visualise where they "sit" in the jungle that is modern growth marketing. I also noticed

that many of our clients run into similar issues. They know many of the buzzwords and

definitions but can't quite connect them together, or they are unable to apply them

43
because they are too snowed under in their day-to-day tasks..

To help define some of the workings of a modern Growth strategy I decided to create

a series of posts around it. I hope they can help you in your quest to keep your

marketing growth stars aligned and make them work for you.

We want to drive awareness and capture interest to drive sales. We want our business

to grow. This growth should be exponential. In other words, the level of growth should

increase every year. to do this we need an approach that stimulates growth in all parts

of the business, not just a single department. This calls for a bigger vision than just our

departmental goals. We need to work together with all our colleagues across all

departments, especially any customer facing ones. Communication is key.

So how do you deal with this wider approach to successful business growth?

This is where methodologies and concepts come into play.

4.2 Methodology and how can it be used to reach your business goals

A methodology is a system to set goals and apply resources and tools across your

organisation so you can reach those goals. A methodology can be used to demonstrate a

concept and then give you the methods to apply it successfully.

In marketing, sales and other business growth methods, methodologies give you

guidance to define your goals for growth and the processes to achieve them. They help

to fit in everything from departments and individual job roles or tasks all the way to the

use of tools and services to achieve those goals.

44
4.3 Marketing sales and Software Providers use methodologies

Marketing and Sales Software companies use methodologies to provide an easy to

understand concept of their tools and how they can be used to achieve more success.

They want to give you the right methods and procedures to use their tools. They want

to educate you to apply them successfully. If they can achieve this, you will become a

long term proponent of their products and services. You will promote their brand and

their approach.

In Simon Sinek words:

"It's not what you do, but why you do what you do"

A methodology helps with the why.

Examples of methodologies used by Marketing service providers:

Hubspot heavily uses the term Inbound Methodology in their Knowledge Base and

marketing materials but all other modern Marketing and Sales Service providers use

Methodologies to support and explain their products and services. Salesforce has leaned

heavily on account based marketing (ABM) to define its marketing automation tools for

instance. Another example of a methodology is Conversational Marketing which is

used by Drift to provide context to its live chat and chat-bot automation tools.

4.4 Common concepts that underpin general Growth and Inbound Marketing

methodology:

It can be very hard to see through the noise and understand how and when to use the

right concepts with all the sources, angles and methodologies that are around today but

as a rule of thumb. all growth methodologies seen as successful in today's world

revolve around a few concepts.

45
4.4.1. Market One-to-One (1:1)

This concept revolves around the idea that we should communicate with our audiences

in a human and individual way to establish trust and a more personal relationship. See

the short explainer video for an example:

4.4.2. Use Demand Generation tactics

The concept of Demand generation describes the wider approach that is now needed to

generate demand for your products and services. This can be done by creating

awareness of your brand. Educating your audiences or becoming a thought leader on a

subject related to your business for instance. There are many forms of demand

generation and they can exist in different parts of the funnel. Lead generation is often

discussed in Marketing but demand can also be generated by Customer success, sales or

even product. Demand generation is used to describe the holistic approach to

generating business growth.

4.4.3. Focus on customer success to drive growth:

In recent times, the focus on customer success by businesses around the globe has seen

a huge increase. Customer success is the art of ensuring that a customer is successful

with your products or services from the moment they start using them and continue to

achieve success with them even when their needs evolve. This concept can be applied

to any business but is especially important in organisations that provide SAAS

subscription products because these depend on longer term customer loyalty to generate

income and become profitable over time.

Ensuring customer success should be a continuous process. A customer should be

assisted to fully understand how to adapt your product or service to their needs through

education and coaching. They should remain successful with products or services long

46
after they purchase them. This means that an organisation should evolve with it's

customers. Where additional services are beneficial they should be provided which can

also result in driving revenue. If customer success is done well, it will create brand

loyalty and might generate referrals which will make it another demand generation

tactic. Marketing can assist loyal and happy customers to become brand promoters.

People often confuse customer success with customer experience or customer service

as they all focus on providing for existing customers. Here are 2 interesting articles that

go into the differences between these 3

4.5 The main tasks that underpin most modern growth marketing

tactics:

There are hundreds of terms and particular tasks or procedures that can be part of a

methodology but once you take your time to read through the materials provided by

most marketing software providers, you will see that they all focus on doing the same

basic things or parts thereof:

4.5.1. Gathering and processing data:

Get and use data for marketing and sales purposes. This can be anything from

informing your conversations with customers to creating statistical marketing materials

and referencing facts to provide value. This data will be used to inform your activities

for all the following principles.

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4.5.2. Integration of business units behind a common goal:

Bringing marketing, sales and service departments together to create a unified approach

to allow them to send a coherent, tailored and consistent message to your leads,

prospects and customers based on your data.

4.5.3. Defining your ideal customer and their traits (e.g. creating and modifying

persona's)

Using data tools and resources to define who you are targeting your products and/or

services to and why. This will ensure that you target the right prospects and customers

for your services

4.5.4. Listening to your audiences: (e.g. social listening, lead intelligence, looking at

survey feedback, looking at interactions):

Using tools, data and procedures to listen to your audiences all the way from public

forums to looking at survey feedback from long lasting customers.

4.5.5. Sending the right messages and using the right channels for

communications:

Using your data, your definition of your customers and their level of interest/interaction

with your brand/stage in their buyers or customer journey to send them messages they

find helpful in a language they are comfortable with.

4.5.6. Capturing leads:

Using chat, forms, phone conversations, etc. to capture contact information from people

that might be interested in your products or services.

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4.5.7. Qualifying leads to see where they are in the their buyers journey and decide

on the next actions accordingly:

Using the information (data) about your customers to see if they are ready to buy a

product or just researching an idea. Based on these tasks you decide whether to move a

lead on to sales, hold them back and just keep them informed or if they are no longer

looking for a solution/wish to engage, stop communicating with them.

4.5.8. Nurturing: Keeping your leads and prospects aware that you are around

without annoying them and keeping your customers engaged and informed in a

supportive way.

Automation and gathered data is often used heavily to take care of the repetitive tasks

needed to nurture each individual lead.

A nurtured lead is more likely to buy. An informed customer is a happy customer and

a revenue driver. They are also a valuable asset for sales and marketing departments -

and can be used for case studies, referrals etc.

An example of Lead nurturing: sending your leads occasional messages with

information that they might find helpful that is in some way related to your brand,

product or service. The content should only directly promote your products or service

when the lead is ready to buy. Otherwise, the content should just be helpful or

educational.

4.6 The key resources in growth marketing:

In modern growth marketing concepts. Three key resources are defined:

People

49
Process

Technology

This term is often shortened to PPT.

This concept was first popularised by a security Expert named Bruce Schneier in 1999

to underpin his companies approach to Digital Security. It has been adapted and used in

several other IT management methodologies such as ITIL. These days it is often

mentioned in relation to digital marketing. Its a simple representation of resources but it

captures the need for a balance between strategy (People's ability to create a strategy/

answer the moral questions and apply it to accomplish their goals), How to implement

strategy (by using Processes), And how to map that to the right tools (technology):

Figure 4.1 : People Process Technology

4.6 Key Resources

I would be explaining what all tools and technologies are used while working in this

internship daily and where these tools were used.

Some of these tools are

● Slack

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● Trello

● Whimsical

● G Suite And many more

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4.6.1 - TRELLO

Figure 4.2 : Trello logo

Trello is a collaboration tool that organises your projects into boards. In one glance,

Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something

is in a process.

It's a project management and team collaboration tool. Trello has a similar appearance

to a board with sticky notes - projects and tasks can be organised into columns and

moved around easily to indicate workflow, project ownership, and status. Trello's

popularity largely comes from its simplicity.

Where we use it :

IN our company Trello is used on daily basis for Task Management and Manage Time

with proper workflow and boards to see all stats on which is missing and need to do on

Urgent basis.

It helps us in missing the deadline and also in managing the worK.

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4.6.2- MONDAY

Figure 4.3 a : Monday.com view

Monday.com is a Work Operating System (Work OS) that powers teams to run projects

and workflows with confidence. It’s a simple, but intuitive, Work.

OS for teams to shape workflows, adjust to shifting needs, create transparency,

connect collaboratively, and stop doing manual grunt work. monday.com makes

teamwork click. monday.com is super customisable and can be used for every use case.

It's a cloud-based work operating system offering a simplified way for you to manage

any team and any project while creating a more transparent work culture.

Monday.com is a platform used to assign the task to other teams in the organisation and

all the requirements and needs are posted there

53
 It helps in tracking the request and help us in proper time management too How

Monday.com looks like

Figure 4.4 : Monday

54
4.6.3 - SLACK

Figure 4.4 Slack

Slack is a messaging app for business that connects people to the information that they

need. By bringing people together to work as one unified team, Slack transforms the

way that organisations communicate.

It's meant for teams and workplaces can be used across multiple devices and

platforms, and is equipped with robust features that allow you to not only chat

one-on-one with associates but also in groups.

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4.6.5 - G SUITE

Figure 4.5 - GSuite for mail

G Suite work is a suite of web applications created by Google for businesses. Your

Goggle Workspace account will give you access to Gmail on your preferred domain

and 30GB of Google Drive storage per user.

Through G Suite, you will also have access to a number of powerful Google

applications: Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Hangouts, plus. Google

Workspace for Work gives you a professional email, online storage, shared calendars,

video meetings, and more. Google Apps makes collaboration simple and effective. You

will have the ability to share spreadsheets and documents, create video conferences

with Hangouts, and use instant messaging. You can also share calendars with others,

making meetings easy to plan.

Figure 4.6 : GSuite Structure

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4.6.6 - Agile and Scrum

Figure 4.6 : Agile Scrum

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that

helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of

betting everything on a "big bang" launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but

consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously

so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly

Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. Much like a rugby team (where

it gets its name) training for the big game, scrum encourages teams to learn through

experiences, self-organise while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and

losses to continuously improve. While the scrum I’m talking about is most frequently

used by software development teams, its principles and lessons can be applied to all

kinds of teamwork.

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 CHAPTER V - MY CONTRIBUTION & LEARNING

Growing revenue and profits is a core objective of most companies, and it is the

responsibility of every function to contribute to the pursuit of this goal. Yet, in recent

years technology startups have embraced a new role, Growth Manager — alternatively

Growth Hacker, Growth PM, or Head of Growth — that focuses on it exclusively. By

viewing product development and marketing as integrated functions, not silos, leading

tech companies like Facebook and Pinterest are rethinking their approach to driving

growth and achieving breakthrough results.

Yet, the Growth Manager role remains poorly understood, especially outside Silicon

Valley. As part of an entrepreneurial research effort for Harvard Business School, we

interviewed more than a dozen Growth Managers at fast-growing startups and explored

what they are doing to design a growth function within an organization.

The Growth Manager function typically lives at the intersection of marketing and

product development, and is focused on customer and user acquisition, activation,

retention, and upsell. The Growth Manager usually reports either to the CEO, the vice

president of Product Management, or the vice president of Marketing. They work

cross-functionally with engineering, design, analytics, product management, operations,

and marketing to design and execute growth initiatives.

As for responsibilities, the Growth Manager’s job has three core components: first, to

define the company’s growth plan, second, to coordinate and execute growth programs,

and third, to optimize the revenue funnel.

But before any of these things can take place, the Growth Manager needs to make

sure the right data infrastructure is in place.

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 Data is the fuel of the growth function and growth teams invest a significant share of

their resources to create the infrastructure that enables analysis of user behavior,

scientific experimentation, and targeted promotions. While many growth teams have

special requirements that compel them to build their own custom data infrastructure,

many choose to work with commercially available SaaS products. These include

everything from analytics tools like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, to A/B

testing tools like Oracle’s Maxymiser and Optimizely.

Growth Managers are typically responsible for selecting and integrating these

products into the company’s analytics framework and working either on their own or in

partnership with the analytics team to provide dashboards and testing tools as services

across the organization.

Once data is available, the Growth Manager must help the company define its growth

objective, typically by answering two core questions. First, at which layers of the

funnel should growth initiatives be focused? For instance, should resources go to user

acquisition or to combatting churn? Second, the Growth Manager needs to help the

company to quantify and understand progress against goals. This task is accomplished

through the selection of key performance indicators, and the development of reports on

these metrics for consumption across the organization.

Growth Managers also provide customer insight, by blending data with a deep

understanding of user needs, habits, and perceptions developed through targeted

interviews, usability studies, and customer feedback. Growth Managers utilize the data

they have to answer some of the troubling “whys” that a company may have. For

instance: Why are users dropping out of the sign up experience? Why don’t users come

back to the application after the initial download? Why aren’t users responding to

special offers? These insights are then fed back into the product team to help prioritize
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product priorities, which impacts the product roadmap, as discussed below.

Furthermore, the Growth Manager is responsible for prioritizing growth initiatives

and product changes. Ideas for initiatives to create growth originate in virtually all

functions in the organization. The Growth Manager is the catcher and champion for

product requests from outside the growth team. Further, the Growth Manager must

implement a framework for prioritizing growth-specific product improvements, and

organizing the testing rhythm.

Sean Ellis, founder of Growthhackers.com and former vice president of marketing at

LogMeIn, proposes a simple framework for prioritizing project ideas via ranking on

three core dimensions:

1. The impact of the change if it is successful

2. Confidence that the test will yield a successful result

3. Cost to execute the test.

Taken together, these three elements can help to negotiate priority across the pool of

ideas.

With a clearly defined growth objective, and a prioritized roadmap of ideas to test, a

Growth Manager turns their attention to designing and implementing tests. If the test

is to be conducted within the product, the Growth Manager leads a product

development process to implement the change. The process often begins with a Product

Requirements Document (PRD) or a summary slide presentation that articulates the

product changes needed. Next, the Growth Manager works with a cross functional team

including engineering, analytics, design, marketing, and product marketing to execute

the test.

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 If data is the fuel of growth, then analytics is its engine. The Growth Manager must

master statistical reasoning, understand how to design effective experiments, and

develop a quantitative intuition for interpreting user experience data. Effective Growth

Managers are conversant with data analysis and the best tools for retrieving,

manipulating, and visualizing data including tools like MySQL, Excel, R, and Tableau.

Growth Managers also need to be fluent in the full spectrum of acquisition channels at

their disposal. James Currier, founder of Ooga Labs, identifies three general types of

acquisition channels:

● Owned Media: Email, Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, Pinterest, Apps

● Paid: Ads (Mobile, Web, Video, TV, Radio, SEM, Affiliate), Sponsorships

● Earned Media: SEO, PR, Word of Mouth

Each channel has its own advantages, trade-offs, and idiosyncrasies. An intimate and

specific knowledge of the channels that are most effective in reaching a product’s target

audience is critical.

The Growth Manager also needs creativity, strategic thinking, and of course

leadership. The latter is particularly important since the Growth Manager must align all

market-facing functions to a shared growth objective without direct authority, and must

build a growth team whose culture is suited to the challenging and experimental nature

of the work.

Experience at numerous growing tech firms confirms that Growth Managers are

getting results across all parts of the user journey and at all levels of the funnel.

By comparing behavior of retained users versus those users who churned, the early

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Facebook growth team determined that a key driver of new user retention was finding

and connecting with at least 10 friends within the first two weeks after signup. With this

insight in hand, Facebook developed features to allow users to quickly see and connect

with friends who were already using the service.

The growth team at Pinterest was able to increase new user activation by more than

20% with an improved flow for new users. By changing the on-boarding experience —

from a text-intensive explanation of the service, followed by a generic feed of the most

popular content, to a visual explanation and personalized content feed based on a

survey of user interests — the team was able to better explain the value proposition and

train the user, which ultimately led to better conversion.

Expect the Growth Manager to become a standard function in the coming years. As

with many organizational innovations, what begins in startups migrates to larger

organizations that wish to operate in an entrepreneurial fashion.

I am responsible for building and maintaining Pregrad’s community both online and

offline and public perception. The job requires engaging audiences on a variety of

outlets including online forums, social media platforms, Discord, Slack, in-person

groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are. Since different digital spaces

have unique cultures and best practices, we are the consistent tone and voice of the

brand.

I have worked on the collaboration part too, where we have to connect with different

companies and recruiters to hire the students from our platform. I’ve successfully

targeted and completed 37 collaborations.

And with that I’ve targeted the industry professionals for being the mentor at our
62
virtual campus. They guide the students to learn and provide them the proper

mentorship.

I have handled the offline collaborations PAN India. We have managed to do

Webinars and seminars to raise awareness among students why learning should be that

much necessary and why you should be specialised in your domain of interest.

Webinars give us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our

product is valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a

name with a face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal

relationships and have real-time conversations.

To generate lead opportunities using secondary research. Manage, nurture and convert

leads into sales opportunities. Identify strong potential prospects using initiative and

creativity. Route qualified and appropriate leads to the sales team for further closure.

Work closely within a small sales & marketing team and develop cooperative working

relationships across functions. Provide accurate and timely information as required to

managers and senior management. Out reaching accounts using emails and other

channels.

I am responsible for building and maintaining Pregrad’s community both online and

offline and public perception. The job requires engaging audiences on a variety of

outlets including online forums, social media platforms, Discord, Slack, in-person

groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are. Since different digital spaces

have unique cultures and best practices, we are the consistent tone and voice of the

brand.

The virtual campus which we are dealing with is providing the students with the

opportunity to enhance themself before their graduation. As a community manager, all

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your messaging, content, and crisis management across networks should be prompt,

consistent with your brand, and empathetic to create a loyal and delighted community.

A community manager acts as the liaison between an organisation and its audience.

They act as the voice, tone, and moderator of the brand through community support,

content distribution, and digital engagement to build brand presence and trust, both

online and in-person.

It's important for community managers to be knowledgeable about and across the

business. Community managers should be able to rely on their experience with their

organization to confidently address their audience or tap into internal resources to

appropriately handle any issues that may arise. Beyond a working understanding of the

business, managers need to build productive, professional relationships both internally

and externally in order to be a more authentic and reliable brand ambassador.

In order to advocate for and preserve an organisation's brand, community managers

must have incredibly strong soft skills. Above all, empathy, good listening skills, and

adaptability are crucial to promoting favourable impressions of an organisation.

Beyond interpersonal skills, the best community managers are actively researching

trends and hot topics -- by engaging with the latest industry developments, community

managers are better able to connect with relevant audiences and provide them with the

most updated resources and best practices.

Community managers are responsible for building and maintaining a brand's

community -- both online and offline -- and public perception. The job requires

engaging audiences on a variety of outlets including online forums, social media

platforms, Slack, in-person groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are.

Since different digital spaces have unique cultures and best practices, community

managers must be the consistent tone and voice of the brand.

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 Building on the usefulness of a PR skill set, community managers must be vigilant of

their organisation's brand presence and assess the potential consequences of their

corporate communications. Brand presence includes consistency of voice across

platforms to keep the company on track in terms of target audience awareness and

engagement. Consumers should be able to recognize brand voices across pillars --

whether they're seeing a post on Instagram or a question on Quora.

Beyond direct interaction between the brand and its audience, community managers

also record and report the engagement they see on at least a monthly basis. Other teams

that create content operate mostly on the backend, so it's the community manager who

sees the response from consumers. They can help track whether followers are confused,

or what kinds of changes they are seeing within digital communities.

By building positive relationships with the members of your community -- whether

they have a positive impression of your brand or a negative one -- you're building a

reputable and trustworthy brand perception.

We have built a virtual campus with all the amenities which are there in a normal

university. We are managing the community by engaging the students, providing them

with the upskilling opportunities and providing them with the pre graduation

certificates in their specialised domains.

I’ve created the whole framework of the community on discord and will be managing

the community too.

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 Figure 5.1 - Shot of our discord community of 1.5k members

5.2 Managing the collaboration with Brands & Recruiters PAN India

I have worked on the collaboration part too, where we have to connect with different

companies and recruiters to hire the students from our platform. I’ve successfully

targeted and completed 37 collaborations.

And with that I’ve targeted the industry professionals for being the mentor at our

virtual campus. They guide the students to learn and provide them the proper

mentorship.

In this span we had onboarded many big brands with us for both hiring and

mentorship. These big names helped the company to gain high rise in the competition.

Following are the brands which we have onboarded in this time span:-

● Siemens

● Appentus
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● Barclays

● Chefkart

● SG Analytics

● Cisco

● Yellow.ai

● Grubstay and many more

5.3 Conducting webinars in colleges PAN India

I have handled the offline collaborations PAN India. We have managed to do Webinars

and seminars to raise awareness among students why learning should be that much

necessary and why you should be specialised in your domain of interest. Webinars give

us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our product is

valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a name with a

face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal relationships and have

real-time conversations.

How do these webinars help students?

Webinars Encourage Interaction Through Anonymity

There is something comforting about the anonymity that comes with webinars. For

starters, all students or seminar attendees interact with the teachers or presenters on

equal footing. This means there are plenty of people in any given webinar who may be

more willing and likely to participate than they would in a face-to-face class. This

improves constructive discussions in the chat sections of the webinars. With increased

interaction, students can achieve improved understanding of the contents of the

webinar.

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Webinars Are an Effective Learning Experience

While this might seem counter-intuitive, the U.S. Department of Education conducted

studies on webinar effectiveness and found that students who attended online classes

had, on average, better performance than students who attended face-to-face classes.

There are plenty of elements that account for this kind of disparity in terms of

performance. For instance, online classes offer playback from the live recording, screen

sharing sessions, chats, file sharing, and many other features that bolster the learning

experience and keep the students more engaged in the material they are learning. When

engaged in a webinar, students are in a better place to effectively understand the lesson,

thereby performing appreciably better than those attending traditional classes.

Webinars Provide A Wide Variety of Lessons

Webinars increase the choice of courses students have. Many students are never able to

enrol in courses they would like to take, simply because those courses are not offered in

their educational institution and they cannot or are unwilling to change schools.

With webinars, students can take extra courses, regardless of the geographical

distance between where they live and the school offering the course. This helps

students broaden their skills, as well as their understanding of their field of interest.

This also allows students to attain new knowledge and skills that can supplement or

complement their main field of study.

Great Way of Networking

It seems a bit difficult for everyone to connect with each other in physical events.

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However, this barrier gets eliminated in the webinars. People can ask questions,

participate in polls, and take part in other activities. This is a great way of engaging

with others, learning and growing.

Great Source of Knowledge & Upskilling

The biggest benefits of attending webinars are gaining knowledge and upskilling.

Webinars are great resources of information. As career counsellors, you can understand

industry trends, various career options available for students, different ways to help

students in their career journey and a lot more. The way content is explained in a

webinar is much more intimate than it could ever conceivably be in other kinds of

presentations.

These are like personal sessions where you can easily share your feedback, ask

questions, and get engaged with arbitrarily large audiences all at once. This is what

makes webinars unique forms of sessions.

Different webinar platforms come with various functionalities and features able to fill

interests and steer you in the right direction.

Learning From Industry Experts

One of the major benefits of webinars is that it does not limit your learning. You can

attend whatever session you want and at any time from any part of the globe. You are

not limited to just gaining knowledge from your country. You can learn from industry

experts all around the world. This makes webinars one of the best ways of updating

your knowledge and upskilling yourself.

By now we have conducted webinars on various topics like:-

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Cyber Security:-

Key Takeaways from this webinar :-

● Phishing

● Ransomware

● Windows Vulnerabilities

● Crypto Currencies

● Supply Chain Attacks

Digital Marketing:-

Key Takeaways from this webinar :-

● Understand Digital Marketing Landscape

● Inspiring Digital Marketing Case Studies: Global & Local

● Building a rewarding career in Digital Marketing Industry

● Live Exercises: Facebook Advertising & Google Analytics

Machine Learning:-

Key takeaways from this webinar:-

● Accelerate Inference For Deep Learning Models

● With The Explosive Growth In Demand For AI Skills, How To Be More

Employable

● The Use Of Augmented Genetic Algorithm

● A Primer On Building And Deploying Scalable Analytical Models In

Production

Handling the Lead Generation Campaign

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1. To generate lead opportunities using secondary research.

2. Manage, nurture and convert leads into sales opportunities.

3. Identify strong potential prospects using initiative and creativity.

4. Route qualified and appropriate leads to the sales team for further closure.

5. Work closely within a small sales & marketing team and develop cooperative

working relationships across functions.

6. Provide accurate and timely information as required to managers and senior

management.

7. Out reaching accounts using emails and other channels.

8. Proficient in the use of social media tools such as LinkedIn, Zoominfo, Twitter,

Facebook, Instagram etc.

9. Adhere to company policies, procedures, culture, and business values.

10. Passionate and learn to research about the Hospitality and Light industry

Figure 5.2 : Lead Generation Campaign Sheet

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Strategies used:-

Create an incentive-based referral system:-

Word-of-mouth advertising is still as important as it’s ever been—plus, the ways in

which people spread the word about their favourite businesses have changed drastically

with technology. If anything, customer referral programs have become even more

useful among successful lead generation strategies, since they’re easier than ever to

quantify and track.

Broadcast advertising to your niche audience:-

Podcasts have become wildly popular in recent years and content creators need

advertisers, which means you can turn listeners into leads—possibly with even greater

potential than you could with a regular radio ad. Since podcasts typically focus on

specific themes, and listeners choose which ones to stream, you already have a good

idea of what this audience will find interesting and relevant to their lives.

Therefore, you can identify the podcasts that best speak to your target audience and

focus your lead generation strategy there.

Take a new approach to direct mail:-

By being selective with your direct mail efforts, you can invest more in the physical

item you’re sending out. Plus, you can offer better discounts, coupons, or other

enticements to get new leads to take the next step. You might think of direct mail as

your first foray into getting someone to go to your business website or call you, rather

than your final step in getting new clients.

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Optimise your website and use CTAs.:-

We want customers to visit your store in-person, you might craft a call to action, or

CTA, that drives them to a “location” or “contact us” page. Conversely, if you want a

customer to make a purchase on your website, you’ll want to create a CTA driving

them to certain product pages, or maybe even a discount landing page for first-time

shoppers.

Learn search engine optimization:-

SEO continues to be one of the most successful lead generation strategies, especially

for online businesses, B2B businesses, and even B2C businesses. Of course, it’s not

always easy to understand and craft the perfect SEO strategy, however, the first step is

utilising the tools at your disposal (most website builders include SEO optimization

tools) and keeping search engine visibility top of mind.

Create and publish top-notch content:-

Content-based lead generation marketing strategies allow you to increase your presence

in search as long as the content you create is well-optimised. The more high-quality

content you produce, the more you’re rewarded by search engines.

When it comes down to it, search engines give preference to websites that help

answer questions quickly and simply. For instance, if you create a blog post that

provides the who, what, where, and why of something your company is an expert on,

you’ll reap rewards by ranking well in search.

Get creative with social media:-

Social media organically can be one of the best lead generation strategies for startups,

especially in local markets, there are ways to get creative with these platforms that

might work better for your business.

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 To this point, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to target

very specific audiences with their paid ad solutions, as well as retarget audiences who

have interacted with your business before.

Many of these platforms also offer one-click email submission‚which allows users to

submit their information at the click of a button and gives businesses a simple way to

collect info on potential leads with minimal hassle.

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5.4 Strategies are Essential to Propel Your Brand Forward

Growing a brand is difficult, period. The marketing field is moving at the speed of

light, new tools and strategies pop up every day prompting companies to look for

marketers with a holistic skill set that can take care of the entire user journey. This trend

has triggered the development of new marketer descriptions like T-shaped or

Full-Stack, and new marketing roles such as the Head of Growth, Growth Marketer,

Growth Manager, Growth PM, etc.

Figure 5.3 : Growth marketing Manager 101

As of now these roles are mostly observed in tech businesses where a website or

application is the primary driver of revenue. The Growth Marketing Manager is almost

always a very collaborative role that resides at the intersection of product development

and marketing.

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 “Growth” has also become a controversial word, namely because a few individuals

and agencies that rebranded themselves as “growth hackers” have abused it. They

promise quick tactics for growing users/revenue/followers that are often unscalable,

one-off wins, or even worse, end up hurting their clients. There are no silver bullets in

growth — it is a steady and gradual process searching for repeatable tactics that

optimize all metrics related to customers.

We dive below the surface with this article where our team at Coursalytics

interviewed Craig Zingerline — Serial Entrepreneur, Product & Growth Manager,

currently Chief Product Officer at Sandboxx — for a deeper insight into what the

successful role of a Growth Marketing Manager looks like.

Growing customers and revenue has always been the primary purpose of companies.

Today however, those at the top do not have the time and resources to be responsible

for maximising those metrics. That is how the role of the Growth Marketing Manager

came to be. It is a multifaceted role, or as Craig puts it “somebody with a lot of

expertise across a large variety of digital marketing channels, and someone who likely

has product management experience.”

One of the earliest companies to assemble a cross-functional growth team was

Pinterest. In the early days they increased new user activation by 20% by running

conversion experiments and optimising the user’s flow on their website. The Facebook

example is probably most famous, where the growth team uncovered by digging in

their retention data, that when a user connects with at least 10 friends over the first four

days after registering, the chances were he/she will stay engaged. With that in mind

they developed a number of features and notifications that serve suggestions and

76
reminders, ultimately solving their retention problem and growing to the behemoth they

are today.

The knowledge about growth has been massively popularised through marketing

communities, education and conferences with the help of leading marketers such as

Sean Ellis (Dropbox, LogMeIn) and Brian Balfour (HubSpot).

The main role of a Growth Marketing Manager has to do with identifying levers

across company operations that can deliver massive KPI growth. In other words, as

Craig puts it:

“Their key job is to look at every channel, every source, and even every step of the

buyer journey or user acquisition funnel and look for areas to grow.”

By cooperating with product engineering teams and marketing/sales professionals, the

Growth Marketing Manager sees the whole picture and is in the best position for

achieving breakthrough results.

Although considered crucial by many however, the Growth Manager’s role remains

widely misunderstood, especially outside Silicon Valley and the tech startup bubble.

This is why Craig Zingerline and fellow marketers are dedicated to provide more

education in the field and help marketers with the tools and frameworks they need to

design and implement a growth function and propel their brands & products forward.

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Responsibilities

“Growth marketing differs from traditional marketing in a couple of ways, namely, that

traditional or digital marketing teams are primarily focused on awareness and getting

people over to the app or website whereas growth teams are responsible (along with

product managers) for all metrics along the user journey.”

Essentially a Growth Manager function encompasses all stages of the user experience:

customer and user acquisition, activation, retention, and up-sell.

Also, the Growth Manager most commonly reports either to the CEO, Chief Growth

Officer, Head of Growth, VP of Product, or VP of Marketing. They work

cross-functionally with engineering, design, analytics, product management, operations,

and marketing to design and execute growth initiatives.

Before he/she executes any such initiatives however, a Growth Manager has to make

sure everything important is being tracked and there is an entire data infrastructure in

place. Data is pretty much the fuel of a growth engine. With great data available growth

marketers can analyse any segment and sub-segment of users and their actions. A great

data infrastructure allows to answer deep questions, such as:

● “Which country produced the most new paying users in August?”

● “What are common actions people who became paid subscribers completed

during their activation phase?” (Searching for that wow moment!)

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● “Can we get a list of users who are paid subscribers for over 2 years so we can

run a targeted promotion?”

● “Why don’t users come back after the initial download/registration?”

● “Why aren’t users responding to special offers?”

Growth Managers are responsible for the analytics stack and can build a custom

tracking & testing system or work with a selection of third-party tools such as Google

Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, etc. Sometimes Growth Managers will build very

insightful dashboards for their teams and superiors, so they can quickly see KPIs and

important user data in one place.

With the right data available, a Growth Manager sees at which stage potential

customers are dropping off at the highest rate. Perhaps fixing/optimizing a small part of

the user experience can unlock massive growth — that is the concept of levers and

leverage. Then he/she selects a target metric to try and improve. For example, should

resources go to acquiring new users or to improving engagement and retention? Most

probably the second because there is no point in flooding with traffic which doesn’t

convert and stay engaged.

The work of a Growth Marketing Management is organized into tests. With a clearly

defined target metric/objective to grow, and a prioritized backlog of ideas to test, he/she

begins executing these tests. If the test is to be performed inside the product, the

Growth Manager must collaborate with an agile development team for example to

implement the changes.

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● Lead the ideation and execution of product changes that drive growth,

partnering with Product Management, Engineering, Design, Content Strategy and Data

Science

● Establish shared vision across the company for growth product optimizations by

building consensus on priorities leading to major product improvements

● Define and analyze metrics that inform the success of products

● Communicate details, updates and implementations across all stakeholders and

teams with extreme attention to detail

● Communicates and simplifies concepts to the audience’s needs

Analytical Responsibilities:

● Apply your expertise in quantitative analysis, data mining, and the presentation

of data to see beyond the numbers and understand how our users interact with both our

consumer and business products, identify growth opportunities, and execute on projects

to drive growth and engagement

Product Growth Analysis:

● Understanding ecosystems, user behaviors, and long-term trends

● Identifying new levers to help move key metrics

● Proposing what to build in the product roadmap

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Data Driven Leadership:

● Influencing product teams through presentation of data-based recommendations

● Communicating state of business, experiment results, etc. to product teams

● Spreading best practices for growth with product teams to drive impact

Product Marketing Responsibilities:

● Understand the competitive landscape of products and Facebook’s relative

position to inform the product growth strategy and design

● Plan and lead cross-functional efforts to take known product optimizations and

implement them in other places

● Lead marketing efforts partnering with Product teams, to effectively promote

high retention experiences globally

● Drive multiple projects from strategy to execution in a fast-paced environment

in an organized way

● Work on offsite marketing channels like SEO, SEM, and email with product

teams to grow acquisition and improve retention by reaching people when they do not

yet have an account, or to bring people back

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5.5 Skills I Learned as Growth Marketing Managers

● Critical thinking needs to be at or near a 10. You’ll need to work with a cross

functional team and will likely be resource constrained and under a lot of pressure to

grow. Because of this, you’ll need to take in large amounts of data from multiple inputs

(founders, users, engineers, PMs, the market, acquisition sources, costs, etc.) and distil

that down into a clear vision and plan.

● Product skills. Understanding how to activate users along the user journey and

to get them to the next stage in the funnel is a critical aspect of growth marketing. If

you can’t get people to take your intended actions, then you’ll fail. A lot of this

foundation starts with having product skills that enable you to think about how to

develop the playbook to drive activation. This skill needs to be around an 8 or 9.

● Acquisition skills. This may be a 10 if you are responsible for marketing, or it

may be a 5 or 6 if you’re not. You’ll need to think about how content marketing, paid

acquisition, organic growth like SEO, and partnership/affiliate marketing all play a role

in growth. It’s highly likely you’ll at a minimum intersect with what marketing is

doing, and help drive acquisition.

● Experimentation. If you haven’t done much experimentation then don’t worry

— you can learn. But eventually you’ll want to be an expert — 7 or 8 on the scale. You

cannot be a perfectionist and expect things to always work with growth marketing. In

fact, much of what you will work on will fail. To excel as a growth marketer, you need

to be hypothesis driven and growth minded. You need to look at most aspects of growth

through an experimentation lens. And once something works, then you double down.

● Prioritization. You’ll need to be ruthless about prioritization of experiments

while also running multiple simultaneous efforts across the growth marketing spectrum

in order to succeed. You’ll need a system for prioritization, and will become an expert

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at sussing out what to do when. This skill will be developed over time, so starting as a 3

or 4 and working up to a 6 or 7 will be key

Besides dabbling with tools and tactics, what can a Growth Marketing Manager do to

improve his growth mentality, creativity and process?

Talk to everyone: colleagues from different departments, users, growth experts in

other companies and mentors. Try to understand some of their approaches to tasks and

challenges. Figuring out their thought process will immensely help your daily

initiatives and reaching your goals.

Attending Meetups, conferences, online and offline courses, there are many outlets

that offer education and help for Growth Marketing Managers. If you are interested in

an in-person course and are based somewhere on the East coast (or are willing to

travel), Craig Zingerline and his colleague Fabian Geryhalter — renowned brand

strategist, are putting on a 1-day Masterclass that will teach you everything you need to

validate your brand and growth strategy within hours.Why not create your own web

store or service offering and try to get customers to it in your spare time. This will keep

your mind fresh and open thinking about user pain points, solutions and building

funnels to your product or service.

Dig through data, find patterns and try to answer important questions about your

business. Follow the thread wherever it leads you and learn new skills along the way.

To truly master growth you will need to get down to work and start iterating.

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5.6 How I Implement Growth Marketing in Practice

It is fundamental for a Growth Marketing Manager to have an overall growth strategy

and process in place in order to deliver shining results.

We turn to Craig, who explains there are 8 primary steps to running a great growth

organization:

1. Define your foundations of growth. Look at what growth means to your

company, and get the basic growth tools in place.

2. Build a Growth framework and your basic strategy and plan from which to

grow on.

3. Put an Organic growth (referrals, SEO, content marketing) plan together.

4. Put a Paid Acquisition growth plan together.

5. Put an activation and intent plan together.

6. Do a deep dive on retention, including goals for retention.

7. Build your initial experiments.

8. Work on a growth roadmapping session with your founder(s) or product

manager

Is the Growth Marketing Manager role necessary for every organization as the

Harvard Business Review claims for example? Arguably, it is not ideal for every stage

of a company’s lifecycle. We ask Craig to expand more on this:

“Growth works best for companies who have reached some sense of product market

fit. Before that point, trying to accelerate growth is likely a waste of time. You’ll need

to have a steady stream of users and a few ideas on areas you think you can scale up

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your growth initiatives. If you are just starting out, figure out how you get some

traction before investing in the growth person or team.

Assuming you have product market fit, if you are a founder or part of a small startup

and you have no marketing team yet, start with a growth marketer and build around

them. If you have a small marketing team but are mostly focused on acquisition, hire a

growth marketer to augment what they are doing.”

The fact is growth means scale and there is no reason to scale something that has no

market yet. Figure out a desirable product/service, then look to hire growth

professionals.

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 CONCLUSION

With everything revealed so far, is the Growth Marketing Manager to become

ubiquitous in the near future? Is it going to replace traditional marketing roles? Or is it

going to be only a distinct branch of specific types of companies? No one knows the

future but we turn to Craig yet another time to try and get an insider’s view on the

matter:

“I think growth marketing is the future of marketing, and it’s deeply connected to both

product management and engineering. In fact, most traditional growth teams are

composed of a product manager, engineer(s), growth marketer, and maybe a designer.

This is a growing field that will continue to upend traditional marketing, especially as

more and more channel saturation happens and companies need to get ever more

creative in their customer acquisition and activation strategies. Therefore, I believe

you’ll see more and more growth marketers and growth managers outside of San

Francisco and Silicon Valley. This is already true in cities like LA, Boston, Washington

DC, and international cities like Berlin, Paris, London and more. It’s a great time to be

in this role.

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 REFRENCES

1. For Methologies -

https://www.aboutinbound.com/blog/the-pillars-of-a-successful-marketing-growth-str

ategy-part-1-methodologies-and-common-concepts-0

2. For Domain knowledge -

https://www.wrike.com/marketing-guide/marketing-management/

3. For Contribution - https://hbr.org/2016/02/every-company-needs-a-growth-manager

4. For learnings - https://hbr.org/2016/02/every-company-needs-a-growth-manager

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