Demystifying word of mouth: the importance of growth marketing in mass market penetration strategies
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In the world of digital product development, it is increasingly important to have a digital growth strategy or growth strategy in the early stages of development and even from the definition of the product’s value proposition.
Product marketing and a strategy of rapid market penetration are critical to success. And this has not changed, even despite the speed of adoption we are seeing in services such as Chat GPT, which reached 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million in 2 months, or Threads, which reached 100 million users in 5 days, although in this case it was the result of a good growth strategy.
These products offer a novel and unique solution, which is why they have been able to penetrate the market so quickly. Despite not having a growth campaign, they have the visibility provided by the media, which has echoed their solutions because of their impact on society. Apart from these exceptions, the reality is that delegating the growth of any digital product to word of mouth is very risky.
‘Growth marketing’: an essential piece for competitive success
Many years ago, when the world was much more analogical, a professor told me, “If you want to set up a good business, identify a good business idea that is growing slowly, copy it and invest in making it grow geographically and with recognition.” This is one of the bases of the proliferation of franchises and something very well known in the business world.
This ingenious practice (or that mistake by the entrepreneur who generated the idea) is what happens when you expect your product to grow by word of mouth. Maintaining a constant growth dynamic throughout the year, with a fully dedicated specialized team, is an essential part of being successful in the competitive world of digital products and services for the mass market.
When I talk about growth marketing I am talking about initiatives that seek to accelerate the adoption of digital products and services throughout the business cycle: acquisition, activation, retention, recommendation and value generation.
To achieve this, levers such as digital marketing, optimization of the user experience with A/B testing (CRO in your case), UX/UI of key processes, MGM (member gets a member), SEO, data analysis, community management (social networks, emailing, etc.) or definition of the customer journey of experience and communications to the user are used. Each of these is a broad field of work and every day there are more options and solutions to explore and test in the day-to-day dynamics of the organization.
Key elements of growth marketing
From my point of view, there are three key elements of growth marketing: trial and error, always on, and data is king.
Trial and error
The day-to-day life of a growth team is to test, measure, correct, and test again. Constant iteration with measurement at the center is the dynamic of any of the disciplines that work for the growth of a digital business.
Always on
In the past, a very common marketing strategy was to plan a limited number of campaigns during the year and make large investments in brand awareness at those times, with periods between campaigns when hardly anything was heard from the brand. These peaks and valleys were the most common timelines for big brands that had the resources to invest in massive brand awareness.
In the new digital context, where we have a greater capacity for segmentation, much more surgical actions must be considered throughout the year. Not so much to maintain notoriety (which is also important), but because now we can work on a communication dynamic more focused on performance marketing, that is to say, commercial or business performance.
All these dynamics are more commercial than marketing (with the traditional brand marketing concept). They seek to attract the attention of the audience in their digital interactions or in the experience of our own product to communicate something to them and propose a digital action that generates value. These dynamics must be considered and reviewed on a daily basis throughout the year, as there is always a market we can capture and there are always customers we must retain.
Data in king
All decisions that can be made with data should be made with data. The great change that the digital world has brought to marketing is that we no longer have to rely on intuition or biased focus groups that have always been done. The great change in digital marketing is that now we can objectify and test before investing.
The decisive role of the growth team in the early stages of product definition
Many technology companies still focus their initial efforts on launching a good product (which is very important) without considering the technological architecture and developments that will be needed to grow that product. What’s more, there are still those who believe that the product can be a success simply because it is a good product and that it will never need digital growth actions.
The reality is that any digital business is going to need developments and to incorporate tools that make it possible to implement growth actions and, for this, the most efficient and pragmatic thing is to take this into account from the beginning. For this reason, the team in charge of growth should be involved in the early stages of product definition and propose the growth strategy at the same time and together with the product managers. Events, labeling, SDKs, marketing automation, A/B testing, attribution… These are just some of the minimum essential elements that should be incorporated into the first versions of any functional requirement document for a digital product.
The importance of applying customer feedback
The possibility of providing the feedback from customers on an ongoing basis to product managers is an additional valuable element that generates growth dynamics for an organization that markets digital products and services for the mass market.
By monitoring customers’ behavior and reactions to the value proposition on a daily basis and reviewing user opinions in the various existing media, the product team can quickly adapt its roadmap or even its experience approaches to meet market demands. This information that the growth actions return is very useful if it is processed properly and helps to understand users better and faster.
For all these reasons, I believe that the strategy that makes sense is not to rely on word of mouth as a lever for growth, and to assume in the financial and technological approach that products need to boost their growth with growth-oriented actions. Something quite obvious a priori, but not as widespread as it should be in technology companies
Director global de e-commerce, martech & growth en Telefónica.
