You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get a calendar invite for an all-hands meeting—with no warning or context? I got one of those in 2018, mere months after I started at data.world as their first growth marketing and demand generation hire.
For a web analytics analyst or a data-driven marketer, these are words to live by: “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Optimization isn’t about educated guesses and hunches, no matter how many years you’ve been in the industry. It’s about doing the research, asking the right questions, digging for clues in problem areas, paying attention to the signs when they appear, and running smart A/B tests.
Web analytics analysis is a big part of that. It helps separate the optimizers from just another person with an opinion.
Expecting a laundry list of skills or tactics? Don’t.
“Tactics are a dime a dozen,” says GrowthTribe’s David Arnoux, “and what works for me won’t work for you. In the end, it’s all about having a growth engine and running as many (quality) experiments as possible.”
We asked Arnoux and other growth experts what actually works, what matters most, and why so many fall short.
Four things came up over and over again.
If you’re an active podcast listener, you likely use popular podcast platforms (i.e. “podcatchers”) like iTunes, Soundcloud, and Google Podcasts to download or stream one of more than 1 million podcasts available today.
This article is a podcast roadmap to get you from passive listener to active host. I’m sharing my learnings as a five-year podcast co-host and agency owner who has helped develop podcast strategies for clients.
“Rare is the business that has a formal disaster plan, let alone one that covers a global Black Swan event.”
Tim Stewart, trsdigital
An article on growth and marketing in the middle of a crisis—the current one or any other—can seem tone deaf. But nothing gets better if we stand still.
No hiring process in the world is designed to hire the best and brightest.
I asked more than a dozen successful agency CEOs to share how they’ve navigated critical moments—getting started, landing (and keeping) clients, scaling teams, and marketing their agency.
I love running growth teams.
It’s everything I could want from a job. It directly impacts the company, is fairly autonomous, works great with a few high-caliber folks, and involves a ton of A/B tests.
I’ve spent years running these teams—but I don’t know if I’ll ever build one again. I doubt that I’ll even have a growth team at any company I’m managing in the future.
“If you cannot measure it,” declared Lord Kelvin, “you cannot improve it.” Perhaps SaaS companies have taken this advice too literally.
Many SaaS companies launch a product-led growth model—but never update it. When the executive team calls me and asks why they aren’t converting users into customers, I tell them to buy a plant. Seriously.
If they don’t water the plant, it’s going to wither and die. If they water it and give it sunlight, it’ll grow. Everyone knows how the system works. Yet, even though we know what to do, millions of plants still die. Why? Nobody takes ownership.