Then we'll talk about start up growth marketing and I'll share a few templates with you which you can apply directly to your company or your business, um your blog, whatever you're working on growth. Marketing is really important nowadays, mainly because of the growing competition and growing user expectations.

Today, we have um so many competitors popping up left and right. At the same time, we as users um expect so much more from brands. We want great user experience on the website. We want amazing product experience. Um We definitely want some personalization but not too much. So things are getting really complicated for brands today. So getting into growth marketing is definitely the right time. Now, what is exactly growth marketing? I really like to refer back to this methodology formulated by uh the growth tribe from Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

So they came up with this methodology saying OK, growth marketing actually is a mix of different theories. It includes data and testing. It does include some creative marketing. It does talk a lot about automation and at the same time, refers back to behavioral psychology, all of these things together form growth marketing concept. It is a part of marketing, which is a little bit more technical, but at the same time, it does have some similarities with digital marketing. It's different in a way that digital marketing usually focuses on building brand awareness, getting people to sign up but are missing the part that comes after it, which is usually customer retention, bringing in referrals and actually keeping up and generating that revenue growth.

Marketing concept actually focuses on the whole cycle. So it starts from acquiring a user converting them, but then also looking at delighting them after they have signed up, bringing up those referrals in place and making sure you have that recurring revenue and gross channel.

We use very similar methodology for growth marketing. Uh We have a six step process, it starts from trigger goes down to awareness consideration, conversion, delight and advocate. Now what do actually each of those steps mean? Imagine um I'm gonna go by, let's say shoes, trigger would be the step where OK, I'm might not be interested in shoes yet, but at some point in the future, I might still go and buy them. So trigger is when you don't really are looking for anything, you're not considering anything yet, but there is definitely a chance for it in the future. Awareness is ok. I must probably need to buy shoes, but I'm not going anywhere yet. I'm not exploring anything yet. It's just like I have a need to fulfill consideration is ok Uh I definitely need to go buy some and maybe discounts are coming up. So I'm gonna go explore, compare a few options. See where is the best um option for me conversion? I'm ready to buy. So I would either go into the store or I'll check online and purchase something. Delight is ok. I have received my package. How happy am I with that? Am I gonna leave a review? Um Am I gonna tell my friends about it? Which also leads to the advocate is ok. Are you happy with the product or the service that you have received? And how willing are you to become an ambassador for it? Are you willing to share your experience with the others?

There are different channels and content opportunities for different steps of this journey. So for trigger things that could work well are like podcasts, partnerships, different communities pr could be a good way. Um Video advertising could also be a good way for awareness stage.

It's a lot about content marketing could be social media. It's a lot about education. Consideration is all about me comparing different options and alternatives. So you definitely want to be present where the person is looking at comparison sites where they're reading reviews.

Um Seo search engine optimization is a big deal because a lot of people would actually search in Google or even Amazon or Pinterest other websites depending on what business you're in. Um And also making sure that you apply those website trust elements and have a good fa Q section conversion. Um could be lead magnets, for example, some downloadable resources where I would leave, let's say some of my personal information such as an email or first name in return for something, let's say discount code or um maybe I'm downloading an ebook or something like that. Remarketing opportunities could be one of them having a live chat on your website, could be one of them and so on for delight is more about retention. So you definitely wanna consider something like support, making sure that people have good support via email, via chat. Maybe you have video library tutorials to make them feel comfortable using your solution. If it's an online platform of any kind um at women tech network, they have member only community, which is also a great way for delight. Um could be online events such as this one as well. Um Could be also challenge campaigns, a lot of apps, um user focused apps.

You have challenge campaigns, for example, to make sure you keep on your productivity or if it's a mindfulness app or anything like this is really working well. In most of the cases for advocate stage of um the funnel, which is the last piece here. It's all about um making sure that people tell their friends about their great experience. Hopefully they had great experience. Um So you could fit in some referral friend programs, ambassador programs have a way to make it easy for them to share their experience with the rest.

I wanna share a case study with you. But also um if you want us to look back at your own website or your business, please drop a link in the comments and you're gonna get to it in a moment and you can also see um and discuss your actual case study too. Um So in CEC case C is actually a platform for personalized ecommerce um experience. So it's using artificial intelligence to personalize your experience on the website uh for your website visitors to increase conversions. So that's kind of what they do. Um They are a new platform so they don't know much about their competition or um their market yet. Um So what they did is uh they use gross channel to identify OK, competitors who their customer profiles are and customer decision journeys. So I want to share with you this case study as their new company and they also agreed to um basically share their experience here. Um It looks like their competitors are doing a lot of things on search, search engine optimization. At the same time, they are really empowering partnerships and are really getting a lot of content out there in terms of content marketing, publishing different resources for users to engage with.

Now, this is a different strategy than when C was doing when they were mainly pushing out Facebook and Google advertisements. When we look at the personas that Kbe thought that they wanted to target, they were initially just going for shop owners. Um And basically anyone who has some kind of a store and they wanted to improve online experience of their store. There are two other personas that they didn't think about. One is the sales people who are in ecommerce space who were opening their own store. So people who were going to open it in the future and were considering a good stack from the beginning. And another person is that they completely didn't consider and thought were actually their competitors are the agencies. So they thought that ok, marketing agencies, they also provide good website experience for our users. So that was probably our competitors. On the contrary, a lot of the competitors were actually partnering with those agencies who would purchase multiple packages of their solution and resell them to their end customers in that way, having 20 agencies would also multiply by 10, the number of customers from each of the agencies.

So this was a great growth opportunity for them in a growth hack. And I'll show you how exactly you can identify those personas too here. Um You see a link, um It's a bit link um to download our persona template, it's completely free. Um And I'll walk you through it in a second. Um So I hope you still see my screen here is the persona template in the meantime, maybe we can also check if you guys have put any interesting websites here. Ok, I see one. ok, so we have something interesting from Kenneth I Gary, um which looks like strategy video calls, um, book a session. Ok. This looks like a great website. Um, small business videos. Yeah, we can definitely dive into this. Let me walk you through in a moment about via personas and maybe we can apply to Kenneth Iri as an as a case study. Um Maybe Kenneth can even tell us who are you targeting today in terms of your customers? Um And we can take it from there. Um, trying to learn more about what is the birth is exactly about um it experts and small business owners. Ok. Yeah, Kenneth, maybe you can tell in just a few words, um who are you targeting today? And what are you trying to sell? Um I think that would be great starting point and we can definitely use it as a case study. Your website looks amazing by the way, small business owners. Ok. Are you targeting a specific geographic area? What kind of small business owners?

How many people is it solo, um, entrepreneurs? Is it people with 50 employees, less than 50 employees? Uh try to be a little bit more specific. It's one of the keys by the way to, to getting a good ideal customer profile. So if you are looking at Kenneth um website, right? Here everyone. And um for those who missed the slide, here is the link to the persona template. I'm gonna put it right here for you guys, sessions with small business owners to develop vision, mission strategy and roadmap for growth focuses on recommending digital techniques to micro businesses, size of businesses is less than 10. OK. This is perfect. We should partner up.

All right, I'll, I'll continue sharing my screen. Um There we go. Ok. For those who already downloaded the template, it will look something like this and what you can do, you can, um, make a copy of the file and try your presentation, you can customize it to your own needs. Um So it includes some information what's inside and a little bit of a guide. So, um things that you definitely wanna consider when building out your persona are ok, apart from the demographic demographics is for example, OK, what type of business or consumer am I targeting?

So, in niggerous uh case it is small business owners, um most probably with 10 or less uh employees, it looks like it's uh global, I guess. Um, focus. Um And this would be the demographic profile. Now, we would want to definitely understand what is the behavioral and psychographic profile of your potential customers. What are their goals? You can definitely do this um by having a few interviews or a survey with your um existing customers or you can also run on a few assumptions.

Um and look up uh some information online. The way we do it at Gross Channel is we automate the process by connecting to the social networks to identify demographic profile. And then we scan through the profiles to identify what their interests are, what kind of content they engage with. Um to really understand these attributes. Uh You could do it to an extent manually. So you can try definitely um if you want to automate it, um you can also consider uh gross channel. So here we have goals then definitely wanna understand. OK, what other challenges? What are they trying to solve? This will really help you to form your content on your website and really bring people closer to the conversion stage of the customer journey. What and who influences their decision is really important because this way if you can trigger and put your content and talk about your business on the channels that they mostly are influenced by, in that case, you have much more chances of success for your own business too.

Decision criteria. What makes them buy? Is it um a sale? Is it a good price? Are these referrals? Is it the case that within the same industry focus? Um or is it like a friend, friend's recommendation is good enough? So definitely decision criteria is something to consider here.

What are the KPIS? What are they trying to achieve? And how are they going to measure the effectiveness of your product or service. So, um, I guess in, um, in the case that we're looking at here at Kenneth, um, so it might be something along the lines of, um, ok, have my sales actually increased in the last three months, um, in the case of shoes? I mean, was that comfortable and enough? And how long did they last? And, and did they look pretty? So those could be, uh, one of the things likes and dislikes. So what do I like? That could be an additional attribute, additional value add for the product or service? So let's say for Kenneth, it could be. Ok, let's say it's a great support if I need them. Um And they, they would be there if, let's say their response rate maybe is um, 24 hours max, maybe something like this. What do I don't like? Ok, let's say I have worked with another consultant before and I haven't seen any results in the first three months, but I spent, I don't know, let's say $50,000 in this case, let's say I see already results and I only spent less than that. So that's definitely um, an advantage there. So what are those type of things? And from there, you can even build a case study for your own products, especially if you talk to existing customers, if you can identify those points.

One is you can build your d customer profile to make it easier for you to attract new customers. And second, you can build a great case study with your existing customers. Here is how it could look like. This is a persona snippet from our dashboard. But at the same time, uh time, you can use this template. So there are a few um sticky notes here to make it easier for you to follow. So let's say here uh would be your persona name, a short bio to make it easy for you to relate to the person, the pain points, the influence. So you can basically just fill in the template. Here is the sample. Um And here is an empty version and you can use this at your own convenience and it's completely free. So um I'll pass on to the next session. Um Continue this. OK. We walk through this next is the channels. Channels is a part of the customer decision journey as well as channels, content is also a very important attribute here in Quebec's situation, they were looking specifically at the awareness consideration and conversion. So for the awareness, um we identified different channels that were the most appropriate for them.

This was youtube videos, it was Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest events, pr and podcasts. And the focus of this old channels for the awareness stage was a lot about education. So they really needed to educate user about how personalization can help um increase their sales, increase their conversion on their website for their own customers. There was a lot about education. But the consideration phase is when user, users compare different alternatives and when they really um look at reviews, ask friends and colleagues, there were different set of recommendations. So here was a lot about partnerships, different forums and Q and A sites. Um It was a lot about search engine optimization, different directories and aggregators. And the focus here was on social proof. So building up case studies, testimonials getting good ratings, displaying those on your website, displaying partnerships on your website to give more credibility to your own service at the conversion stage. Um This is where people would be ready to buy in Quebec's case. This was whatsapp uh which is um a chat option um which is pretty popular, I think in the in Europe and um overall. So in Asia, I think in Africa most probably as well in Latin America.

I haven't seen it being so popular here in uh in North America, but it's definitely a big channel, linkedin and Zing as well. Zen is an alternative to linkedin in Germany. Germany was one of their target markets, email uh website and landing pages as well as notifications and special offers. All of those were important channels for the conversion stage and the focus here was a lot about forms and building up more forms, more opportunities for people to convert on the website, being it for the newsletter, for some downloadable materials or uh for free specials those were different opportunities there.

And I'll walk you through a few examples from the competition for the C case. And here it was um social proof was one of them definitely something that they were missing. And here is an example from the case study um logos that you can display on your website of your current customers, testimonials with ratings and a very important element are other logos that people already trust, for example, Shopify or Wordpress or Magenta. So all of those people actually trust much more than maybe your own service. And in that case, having their logo and some kind of credibility from those platforms gives you definitely a a boost in the credibility from your own prospects. Then customer stories again with photos definitely helps much more than without the photos and their actual testimonials and then where they work. What's their position? Partnership is definitely a big opportunity. So um in Kabak s case, there were many partnership opportunities.

So there are um a platform for personalizing your website experience, what kind of website so they do work with Shopify, but they definitely did not put it on their website. Partners did. So. So they would display what type of platforms they work with, what kind of integrations do they have. So there are also partner opportunities that you can definitely display on your website and people already use them and trust them. They will also trust your service much more and then they also display their agency partners in that case, uh also potential customers. And um another missing point for for ce that was which they improved later on lead magnets. Um So it could be a quick analysis, could be a special report, uh could be other like white papers or um templates, step by step guides, checklist, infographics, you name, it could be so many different opportunities to actually get some kind of uh leads in place from uh in return for a very small piece of content and then clear value.

So make sure the value is very clear. So what can a customer expect when using your product or service? Is it revenue? How much is it, uh more emails, how many and so on? So definitely try to measure every thing and look back at the KPIS of the personas that there are important for them. So what are the KPIS which are important for them? And in that case, you can refer it back on your landing page and present. OK. What are the expected results that people can see from using your product or service? You can do download the customer decision journey template with Bitly WTGC and then um C DJ stands for customer decision journey. I'll put the link right now here in the chat as well. So uh it's easy for you. Um Just give me a second and this will help you map your customer decision journey. It's very simple right here is the link. I hope you got it. So, um if you got the link, you will be looking at the customer decision journey while you're downloading it. Um I'll quickly go through um Kenneth example for the customer decision journey. So I don't know your competitors. Um but definitely like look at some of your competition and see what are the different elements that they put on their website that trigger the conversion. Um You can also use some of the free tools um that are available to see where the traffic is coming from.

What are the top back links and top referring domains for the website to identify some of the channels. And at the same time, just um look and see what are the different conversion points that they offer and what kind of content they offer in their website to see. OK, what are the different opportunities for you to? Um I see that you have a newsletter uh subscription and a chat and book a session uh which is pretty good. Um On your home page, you have separate testimonials page, which is also great. Um I must probably I missing some um social proof on the home page itself. Um So definitely suggest um putting in some maybe um ebooks or um testimonials case studies um on the home page itself somewhere close to conversion point. So if you want them to book that session, make it a little bit more prominent because if I'm scrolling down, I don't see anything regarding booking a session with you anymore. So you might want to include maybe a button in your top navigation and when you scroll down, just keep it sticky there. So that at any point of time, if I'm ready to click on that button, it's easy for me to find it. Um You have book session, it's kind of hard for me to understand. Um There's your books uh that you offer it looks like.

So um and I would maybe change then the title to like our published books or something like that and link them to something because it's um I can't click on them for some reason and you must probably want people to like read more or buy them or something like that. Um So that's another opportunity there. Um Overall, I really like how clean is your website. So this is definitely great. I don't see it that often. So it's, it's amazing. Um But yeah, there are some opportunities that you can definitely identify by looking at a few competitor websites and, and just even from the session today, like publishing more case studies, making sure that the partners and clients are displayed in a more prominent way. Um A lot of people will visit the home page but will not go to other pages. So you definitely want to have like a snippet, at least of your most prominent partners and maybe most prominent customers with the best testimonials you have on your home page to make um a bigger uh impact and improve your conversion. So, let's see if you have some questions here. Um hm What tools can you use to analyze the competitors? Traffic. Google Analytics. No, you cannot use Google analytics to analyze competitors traffic. Unfortunately, um We also have actually um a quick tool that you can use for that.

Um You can identify back links um and also get um kind of your own website score and see how you're doing. Um So here is a sample uh audit that you can use. You can also use other tools like SCM rush. I think their free version is limited. Um But it also gives some good insights there. I'm putting it um in chat for you guys and Google Analytics is very good for your own website. So you would need to put in of course, like um a small code on your own website for Google Analytics to work. Um But Google analytics is definitely great source for analyzing your own traffic. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with um with competitors. Um OK. Now let me share my screen again and we jump into looking at the customer journey template. I have it pulled right here. I hope you guys managed to download it. So here we have um again, what's on site, a small guide in terms of OK, uh different elements which are important and we walk through each of the steps already in the beginning of the session about trigger awareness and other steps of the funnel. So you should be already familiar. This is a small snippet of how a customer decision journey could look like um how to use a template. But here is an empty template for you and you have journey steps at the top. Um You can definitely get user comments.

It's all about getting more information from your customers. You can do either interviews surveys or do your own research. Online user comments would be, what is the information um that how people feel at different steps of the decision? Journey? What is their process like? How did they search?

How did they find you? Let's say you have a customer, let's say Kenneth has a customer and one of the questions you might wanna ask is how did you hear about, you know, our firm who referred you or where did you see um our company? What made you buy? Like uh was it the customer reviews? Was it a case study or was it just a few conversations um on the sales page? So definitely like what made you buy? Like what triggered to make that decision? Um So those are some of the questions that you definitely wanna ask people. And this would basically refer back to the consideration phase and awareness stage where um basically they would be looking at different solutions and learning more about them for trigger. You definitely wanna ask.

OK, what is the challenge that you were experiencing before you started using our product or service? What is it? Um What was your pain point? What were you trying to solve? What was your goal? So those are some of the things that you definitely wanna learn for the conversion. Um It's definitely something that you should be able to track directly. So you should be able to track by your CRM or marketing automation solution where exactly they converted? Uh And what was their attribution like? Um So if you use tools such as hubspot, which is what I use and I really enjoyed, it gives like a whole timeline of where the user came from, what they did on the website in the past 90 days, which is pretty nice. Um There are so many other tools which are cheaper um or like other alternatives um in the market, like user.com is also a pretty good one if you are a SAS or an e commerce business. Um Delight is definitely talking with your existing customers and see like what other things can we do like? Do you enjoy your product or service experience? What could be better um advocate is more about them referring?

So, um basically, have you, you know, um shared your experience with any of your friends, would you like to why or why not? Uh what are your preferred channels to do? So, so this is the type of information you might want to ask. Um So customer pain points would go here. User questions would go here, actions, those these are the actions for you to take to make sure you fulfill different steps of the journey. Customer experience would go in here. So basically, I would usually rate it ok, from very bad to very great or again sad or something like this. So basically, emotions. Um Here is the main slide I would call it. So these are the channels that are important for different steps of the journey from based on your research um content. What are the important content opportunities? KPIS. So what are the important metrics that we wanna track to measure the effectiveness of our campaign on different steps of this journey for trigger? It could be uh maybe video views or a number of followers for awareness. It might be website visits for consideration, it might be your keyword ranking. Um Conversion is most probably your conversion rates. Number of leads, uh number of customers delight is most probably more about your turn.

Um advocate is most probably more about kind of the referrals uh that you are getting. So that's uh the template. I hope you uh make a good use of it. Um We'll just move on to the next part. Let's see. What do we have here? Yes. So just a few closing remarks. Um Once you work through your customer decision journey and your persona template, you start to work through it and definitely make sure that you track everything. So make sure that you implement that Google Analytics, make sure that you implement some sort of heat map on your website heat map. It will allow you to see where the people spend most of the time interacting on your website and can really help you improve your user experience on your website. You can use tools like hot Jar um or any like crazy or anything similar. And you definitely wanna make sure that you allocate your resources to things that have been proven to work. So you look at the data points and not only your assumptions or ideas and really try to refer back to the data. So this is really important. A lot of us spend a lot of time focusing on things that maybe have very little probability to work just because we believe in them. But then looking at the data oftentimes is much more preferred because that gives you just more probability of, of success.

So this is just one thing that I wanna add at the end. It's a lot about testing optimizing learning and repeating. So make sure you test different variations. So let's say I if Kenneth in here is gonna be applying uh maybe another conversion element or social proof element on his website before making a complete change. If you have, let's say a decent number of visitors to your website. What you might wanna do is you might wanna do an A B test and you can run it with free tools such as Google optimize with easily creating a second version with and without the case study uh element, you will testing it optimizing means we learn from what we are testing and we optimize the experience as we go along.

So definitely also put down the learnings that you have taken from it. Um I think if you just do one A B test most probably sounds all very obvious. But if you do 10 of those at a time could be on different website pages. It could be also for your email campaigns for your social campaigns. So in that case, you definitely want to keep track of everything that you have learned and make sure you keep on testing and optimizing everything and look at the data points to show as a proof of the performance, what has worked better than the other option. So let's say if you're looking to improve the conversion rates with this specific component, you should be comparing the conversion rates of A test and B test to make prominent results and outcome. Um A few resources for inspiration here before we close off. Um So Growth Library is our own marketplace with different tools to help you um execute on your marketing work. Growth Tribe Academy is a great um academy. It's in the Netherlands, but they also have, I think a few other branches and a few other countries. They also offer online education. If you want to learn more about growth hacking, they have amazing courses.

They also have a lot of free um blog posts, um different downloadable materials and videos on youtube to, to learn from marketing examples.com is a great inspiration for anyone who loves branding and copywriting. Um So it's um great inspiration for that. Um And growth marketing tactics is also our own collection of uh growth marketing tactics. We have about, I think around 230 of them different ideas to things that you can do to improve your own um marketing experiences. We also have two communities that we welcome you to join growth hacking strategies on linkedin and Growth channel talk and Slack, whichever one you prefer in terms of channels, we are oftentimes different resources, new trends, new strategies for you to consider. And um thanks everyone for joining my session today. If you have any questions, shoot them down in the comments and uh let's have a look what we have there. You can also uh email me on Marina at growth channel dot IO or follow me on Twitter at Marina size. Um Our website is growth channel dot IO if you feel like you are working on a marketing plan, but the whole research phase might be too uh complicated for you or it takes too much time uh or resources, you can also automate the process with artificial intelligence.

That's what cross channel does. So it automates the process for you in a short period of time at a very affordable cost. Um So if you wanna check that out, um I would gladly see you there.