Crashing into growth marketing: a CEO journey. Part 1: growth marketing foundations.
This is the first post of many to document my journey as early-stage startup CEO through the growth marketing minidegree by CXL Institute — a 12-week online program about the practicalities of growth marketing.
Why am I taking a growth marketing course for 100+ hours in 3 months?
Short answer: I’m a CEO of an early stage startup. COVID totally messed up our early go-to-market strategy and we’re re-launching our new concept without a full time marketing person. Instead of task management for large events, Zelos is now a task management app for communities and gig work, letting people managers launch private talent marketplaces within their trusted circle. Lots of changes, so I gotta step up my game and figure this out myself.
Longer answer: Zelos launched the public beta product in late October 2019, and our team spent some time on direct sales to ensure a good pipeline of events and festivals to adopt our software in the upcoming year. But 2020 didn’t turn out to be a great festival summer. Come early March, all of our clients cancelled their contracts due to the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down all major public gatherings. What a wonderful challenge for us as an early stage company, right?
As this black swan force majeure slapped us in the face, I had to renegotiate most of our employee contracts. And now we’re going for our 2.0 product launch in 2021 with a ton of experience, user data and client contracts, but without a full time marketing person on the team (due to the crazy circumstances, our CMO needs to juggle multiple responsibilities part-time). It’s time to unleash the founder insanity.
As the non-technical founder, I’m leveling up to carry the weight of re-aligning our marketing strategy for product-led-growth when launching Zelos 2.0.
Also, I was not happy with the level of engagement and support I was able to provide to my team during our first launch. Yes, I was majorly occupied with fundraising and other types of crisis management (regular founder things), but I also didn’t have a clue about how marketing is done for a B2B SaaS business and pretty much let our CMO run wild. Not cool.
Disclaimer: I have before done similar growth sprints of learning in other areas like agile product management and UX. I’ve been a general manager for a digital content agency in my past, so I have some skills in producing marketing assets. I’ve boosted some Facebook posts to promote my husband’s novels. I’ve collaborated with our CMO on marketing strategy and feedbacked individual experiments. But I’ve never been strategically responsible for direct marketing activities without professional supervision. This is what I’m here to learn.
Section 1: Growth marketing foundations.
The first week of the course is a painful lecture for me. It’s tough to go over the very basics of what you should always thoroughly consider when you’ve just crashed and burned with the first home-made soap box derby car that you built in one night with zero instructions. (Well, it wasn’t as bad and we hit an exceptionally unusual flying tree called COVID, but I do love to exaggerate).
I’m mildly inspired by the opening section about growth mindset although it mainly covers the strategies on how to get a job as a growth marketer. I might consider this as a career option once I sell this startup to Google. As we continue with growth processes. I make one large note in my journal:
marketer perspective IS NOT consumer perspective
I remember several occasions in my life when I needed to feedback a marketing idea, experiment or campaign, and I couldn’t snap out of the consumer perspective. It was very organic to approach from the side of: Would I want to see this kind of ad? Would I convert on this kind of landing page? I underline the words “marketer perspective” twice. Nobody cares if you like the ad or if you’d click on anything. Shut up and look at data. Your opinion does not matter. Bad CEO! Shoo!
Although a lot of the material covered in the course is targeted at marketing employees in a large enterprise, not much of it seems to touch office hierarchies or other corporate-specific work environment stuff. I’m well able to ignore the rare example where you have 15 people on a marketing team, or where you are recommended to schedule meetings with designers, copywriters and UX professionals like they’re on payroll and readily available. The core ideas and examples are still extremely relevant without alienating this one-man-band (or more like one-and-a-half-women band) that is our marketing department.
At the 100th mention of “experiment a lot and just try a lot of things” I get a heavy flashback to one of our early investor meetings where we had to present our progress. We weren’t doing majorly well with our financial KPIs, so we tried to compensate with presenting a things-done report instead. It took me an hour and a half to go through all the stuff we’d tried over three months, and give an overview of what worked and what didn’t. And we got a reaction of “Wow, I’d have never bothered with all of that myself”. That set me back a lot back then, thinking I should have possessed some insights about what works and what doesn’t before trying. I’ve now learned that not all investors are (or need to be) your trusted mentors — especially the early angels who contribute when you’re still super confused. And that you should really choose which advice you take, it’s probably a good idea not to take marketing advice from someone who isn’t into marketing!
The user-centric marketing chapter gets to actual business. I write down lots of notes, mostly about definitions and relevant lingo — great to have the basics in place. I finally understand what part of an experiment is an independent variable and which is the dependent variable. I overflow our team chat with links about different testing formats — the five-second test, the first-click test. I message our CTO with an extensive description of the card sorting exercise like it’s a solution to everything — remember how we managed to create impossible menu structures that only technical people could navigate? Here comes our salvation!
On the bottom of my notes I write in capital letters:
USER CENTRIC APPROACH = AGILE
So much of what I’m hearing resonates directly with the agile manifesto.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Responding to change over following a plan.
In a way it’s the same with user-centric anything, whether it’s software development or content marketing. When you think about the user / customer / person of interest, the same rules apply. You cannot come up with your own game plan and processes and expect stuff to work in any context.
This chapter has a multiple choice test in the end. I’m really bad at multiple choice tests! I tend to overanalyze the questions and give creative answers — well, in SOME context this one could be the right answer as well! You need 90% correct of 30 questions to pass the test, and you can only take it once every 6 hours. My first score is 80%. I try again the next day, my score is 87%.The third time I finally pass, but probably only due to diligent screenshotting of my failed scores and checking I that do give the exact same answers to what I got right.
The final chapter of the first section is “Identifying and amplifying growth channels”, a general overview of channels and activities that relate to growth marketing. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to analyze each for our own case study.
Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click (also known as SEM and PPC — it will take me some time to learn all these new abbreviations, as there’s so many in each chapter!) — I don’t remember experimenting with these channels, but I circle this as a to-do. Targeting people who are already searching for a solution seems a great channel for our solution.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — I know that our CMO has worked on this. I have no idea what state our website is in. I circle this in my notes as a to-do for analysis.
Social / display ads — we tried this at some point, with not much success. I’m not sure. We’re B2B. The lecture said to focus on a few good channels only. I’ll just leave this be.
Email marketing — we tried this a lot at some point, with mediocre or low success. I write WE ARE TIRED in my notes, and then realise a professional marketer would use some more professional wording. Like “low conversion rate”, or even more likely some abbreviation like LCR (yeah, I made this one up myself)
Content marketing — I’m fairly sure this has been going well for us as we’ve kept our blog and social media pretty active. But yet again, I don’t know for sure. I circle this and write FIGURE OUT LATER to motivate myself. Ha! But as they said, it’s good to focus. One thing at a time, maybe two!
As the course goes into deeper details about each, I focus on the selected to-dos from above: SEM and SEO, and write down a fairly detailed battle plan to check our website and keywords.
Here’s my list:
Review on-page SEO for each page on our site:
- Title: does it have the keyword + our brand name?
- Meta description: does it exist and does it make sense?
- URL: does it include the keyword?
- Keyword on page: is it there?
- Header tags: is there a single H1 on page?
- Image alt text: does it include keywords?
Looking at my list, I realise I don’t really have an idea what our keywords are. FIGURE IT OUT, I write next to my list. I know we have a document in our shared folder, I’ve helped the team brainstorm and prioritise keywords. I’m not sure if it’s up to date. I’m definitely sure the keywords have radically changed during our startup pivots.
The next video helps me make a new list:
Research keywords:
- Assess competitors
- Determine search volumes
- Prioritise
There’s a list of tools to use. Figure it out, I read from my notes. Figure it out. You have the whole weekend. Be ready for actual growth experiments next week.