In our previous blog, we discussed “what Growth Hacking actually means” and now let us introduce you to its fully grown form – Growth Engineering. Well, both the words represent the same motive that is – Growth.

If we go by the facts, Growth hacking is just the beginning of a full-proof growth strategy. So, what comes next? You would have guessed it till now! Yes, it is Growth Engineering – the elder sibling of growth hacking. Till the time Sean Ellis introduced the buzzword in the marketing world, people wondered it to be something very casual. And the weird truth is – some of the marketers are still unaware of this new phenomenon.

Through this detailed article, we want to eliminate the lack of information and introduce the marketers with the buzzword of Growth.

Before we proceed with the facts and doings of growth engineering, you must possess a complete understanding of what Growth hacking is all about. So, if you are a startup, here are a few great tips for you :

To Whom It Applies To

Startups, founders, entrepreneurs, and lead generators, whoever is trying to jumpstart a business or trying to boost the leads, growth engineering is the best path to follow. Customer’s need, your focus on the motive, lead generation and many more essentials of businesses are targeted under the process of growth engineering. To be more specific – Growth Engineering is not just for startups.

What Is Growth Engineering?

Growth engineering is the fully elevated form of growth hacking that focuses on a completely improvised growth strategy. It is more of a way to describe the clever ways of solving problems and boosting the empowering women growth of a venture. Or, we can also say that it is an improved form of growth hacking itself.

People usually don’t get the idea of growth hacking and when you say engineering, they get it easily. Well, there is no issue if you get the engineering word easily. Think it the way it goes for you.

A Dreaming Thought – What If?

Perhaps things would have been much easier if Sean Ellis had used the word Growth Engineering instead of Growth Hacking. Although, the hierarchy would have disappeared, yet it would have caused less chaos in the future.

Well, why are we even discussing it? It is a worthless discussion as the term has already been coined and now, growth hacking and engineering is counted as siblings of which Growth engineering comes first.

Who Is A Growth Engineer?

A growth engineer is a growth hacker, web engineer, marketer, as well as the decision maker. It’s like compiling the whole marketing task on yourself.

Being a growth hacker, their first role is to determine the goal and make a strategic plan to sell the products. As a web engineer, they focus on the tools and techniques used in the foundation of the web application. On the third phase of their action, they act as an excellent marketer who talks about the value of the product in the audience.

Taken as a whole, a growth engineer is a decision-maker who decides on all the marketing aspects of the business and rampant the growth.

Some of the business persons also claim that it is hard to find an excellent growth engineer. Let’s see why is it difficult to hire a good growth engineer?

Why You Need It?

Acknowledge the fact that in order to take your business to new heights, growth engineering is a must for your business. For a better view on its need, read how it can help the startups to grow.

Your competitors might have already started leveraging the tricks of growth engineering and of course, you don’t want to stay out of the race. So, better gear up with the tricks and tweaks of Growth engineering:

1. Getting Visitors

Whether it is specifically about growth engineering or any other growth process, the first thing that we focus on is building audiences. And this, of course, is a way to improve the web presence of the business.
So, how do you plan to accomplish this daunting task?

Well, here are the 3 P’s of getting more of the visitors: PULL, PUSH, and PRODUCT. Entice them, bribe them or attract them with the real value products. The ultimate motive is bringing the users to your website.

• Pulling the Visitors

The first way to get the visitors is to pull them. For this, you need to offer something that they find hard to refuse. It is more like incentivizing them towards your services. Take the example of a blog that offers a thorough review of health products. People will automatically come to such website after every new launch.

The bottom line is – you don’t have to reach out to the customers, they will come to you willingly. Blogging, Ebooks, Guides, Podcasting, Infographics, Webinars, Social Media is some of the best ways to pull the audience to the website.

• Pushing The Visitors

Coming towards the next method of gaining visitors, here we have an aggressive way of bringing the customers.

We call it “Pushing the Visitors”! This is rather an aggressive form of gaining visitors. Paid ads are the best example to elaborate this phenomenon. Whether it is Google Marketing or YouTube Marketing, each time you browse these platforms, there is an unavoidable ad to look for. The central idea behind this is – pushing the visitors towards your products, whenever they visit Google or YouTube.

The third and final way of retaining the visitors is the product itself. The simple idea behind this is – all those customers who use your product will obviously discuss it with their friends and this will generate traffic to your website.

Also read:

6 Best Growth Hacks to Retain Your Customers without Paying Much

6 Top Tips for Knowing Whether You Should Start Your Own Business

MVP Guide – TURNING ASSUMPTIONS INTO FACTS.

The crux is “product” doesn’t depend on the distribution method rather it relies on the redefinition of the product.

For a deeper insight in the process have a look at timeless ideas for gaining more visitors.

2. Activating Visitors

Succeeded with the first goal of Growth Engineering, it’s the time to look forward. Suppose you have pulled thousand visitors to your website, yet a huge problem lies behind this success.

Any guesses of what we are talking about?

You have a thousand visitors on your website, yet the poor part is they are still “visitors”. If you stop here, then there are chances that the bounce rate starts blooming So, your next goal will be activating these users and making them stay on your website.

Activation refers to guiding the customers towards the product usage. So, before you start, here are some short goals to achieve:

1. Extract their email address
2. Make them sign up to your website
3. Engage them with comments and posts
4. Catch their eyes with some engaging videos
5. Make them buy something

These goals can vary depending on the niche of your business. For an example, if you are a blogger, you might need the email addresses of the visitors to inform them about the upcoming posts. Whereas, if you are selling something, you will try to make the visitors buy things online. So, the relevancy of the goals will be decided in accordance with the objective of the business.

Some of the factors affecting the accessibility of these goals are:

• Landing Pages:

Landing pages are the first source of communication between the users and your services. The way you represent your services determines the further lead generation. The designing of the landing page is the determining factor of the visitor activation. Emotional imagery, headlines, and subheadings are a few things that need to be added to the landing pages.

Moving ahead, if we talk about the Don’ts of landing pages, then the first one in the list is – Limit the navigation. Your aim would have been clear till now and rather than annoying the visitors, you need to focus on luring them to your website. The excess of the navigational element will distract the users and can cause a higher bounce rate. Instead of diverting them, make them focus on the products.

Given below is the perfect anatomy of a landing page:

Adding to this, don’t let the language act as a barrier, instead focus on a tone that the users find easier to understand and follow.

• Pricing Strategy

Pricing is perhaps the first thing that users look for and this is a great way to attract the users. To start with, you have to offer some great discount to the users. The “first user benefits” is something that everyone looks for. So, start by giving a great deal on the first purchase and move ahead with a hierarchical deal structure.

Here is a quick example of the offers:

Well, this is an exciting offer and will surely coerce the users to buy something!

3. Data Mining

A survey suggested that 86% of the B2B marketing is leveraging content to boost the traffic and leads.

Unfortunately, only 28% of it impacts the lead generation positively. The only reason behind this is the lack of user data. There are some businesses which utilise expert data engineering services and have the data they gather analysed so that they can improve their conversation rates and make their processes as efficient as possible. This is a great way to keep on top of customer acquisition as well as ensure the business if functioning as it should, although not everyone thinks about using external resources. Unaware of the user’s view and values, websites keep following irrelevant marketing strategies and end up with a loss of investment.

For more digital marketing facts click here.

This is what data mining represents:

Data mining proves to be an effective way to escape such situation. Especially when it is about growth engineering, a complete knowledge of the customers needs and expectation is necessary.

Also read:

The Importance of Business Analytic Tools in Making Business Easier

The Definitive Guide To Growth Engineering

Originally, data mining is the recording of the visitors’ activities.

Whenever the visitor interacts with your website or the products, their characteristics are noted down and studied for the product and service reviews. The data collected under this process includes:

• Demographic Data

It will include demographics like age, home address, income, computer ownership, home ownership, etc.

• Visitor’s Personal Attributes

Personality attribute plays an important role in understanding the requirements of the visitors. Some of the majorly tracked attributes are: impulsive buying tendency, strong interest in local issues, early adopters, area of interest, etc.

• Visitor’s System Attributes

Modem speed, operating system, system configuration are some of the attributes are calculated under the Visitor’s system attributes

Adding to all the above given data, history of purchase, response to advertising, preference information, and user feedback are some other factors that need to be determined.

Here is well-defined process of data mining:

Talking about the data mining tools, there are some very effective data mining tools available in the market. Just get one that is suitable for your business and start leveraging the high-end customer details.

Some of the best picks for 2016 is listed below:

• Angoss KnowledgeSTUDIO
• The IBM SPSS Modeler
• KNIME or Konstanz Information Miner
• The Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Service
• The Oracle Data Mining
• Orange
• The RapidMiner Studio
• The SAS Enterprise Miner

Get an elaborated view on the top data mining software available in the market.

4. Trend Analysis

Growth engineering is more about the trends and user demands!

Trend analysis offers deep insight to the company’s marketing, administration, and investment activities. While talking about trends analysis, we can’t forget the well-said quote from John Ralston Saul.

“With the past, we can see trajectories into the future – both catastrophic and creative projections”

Trend analysis is the exclusive process of comparing the business data over a fixed period of time. It is the most subtle way to understand the ongoing trends of the market. Once you have predicted the outcomes of the current business practices, the optimization of the business strategy gets easier.

Moreover, if it is done in the perfect way, it will give a thorough idea of taking your business in the right direction. Moving ahead, let’s see how it will benefit in the growth engineering:

• Acknowledgment of the flourishing areas of the business so that it can be duplicated for further improvement.
• The identification of under-performing areas
• Evidence to inform the decision-making
• Changing trends of the customer needs and behavior.
• Price change and the cost drivers for the specific segment.
• In-depth analysis of global economic trends.

A clear display of benefits from trend analysis.

So, we have a thorough list of how we can be benefited by trend analysis in Growth Engineering. The next thing of concern is the analytic tools leveraged by the growth engineers. Depending on the area of uses, these analytic tools have been divided into 3 parts.

• General Analytic
Want to extract device data, geography data, bounce data, and certain common metrics? Google Analytics is the best option for these usages. The good news is – it is free of cost and delivers powerful and reliable results. However, if you are looking beyond the demographic and bounce data, then better go for the next suitable option.

• People Based Analytic
In the hoard of overcoming the drawbacks of Google analytic tools, Growth Engineers came with more developed tools and the second part of the series is placed in the category of event/people based analytic. So, get the answer to questions like:

• Which group is buying what feature?
• The common engagement of different customers

Well, these are mere examples, the events analytic tools have Hercules power and it can answer all your questions. Whenever you install an event based analytic tool on your website, a script is attached to each event on the website. Well, this is just a minor difference between Google analytic and event based analytic, yet it gives rise to various new opportunities.

• Niche Analytics

Being specific about the online businesses, the niche specific analytic have come into existence. The main goal is to assist the marketing in accordance with the business niche. Whether it is about mobile apps, startups, and e-commerce, there is a worthy analytic tool for all the existing niche.

5. Testing

Growth engineering isn’t something that can be learned overnight, it will take a decent amount of effort in moving ahead in growth hacking. So, while you experiment with the new methodologies of growth engineering, don’t forget to get indulged in regular testing.

The Key Mantra of Growth engineering is “Don’t stop Testing Don’t stop growing”

The process of growth engineering is lengthy and time taking and while you proceed ahead, keeping a track of the testing results will keep you stuck with the objective. Test the proposed solution and try to gain a thorough view of the objective.

So, while you are planning your growth tactics, do keep an eye on the growing businesses and their strategies. Here, is a quick look of what I learned from some of the start-ups:

After these two consecutiverticles, we hope you are well aware of the trending word “Growth Hacking” and ‘Growth Engineering”. So, the next time you plan to prepare a marketing strategy, don’t forget to have a quick look into this article.