In this blog, we’re going to explore the business of a molecule from a growth marketing perspective.
Here are the top learnings you can use from COVID-19 as a growth marketer:
Finding a Product-market fit
Start in a small place. With a specific audience to test your market. Profile the audience to see who fits the best with your offering.
The metrics, in this case, would be the number of conversions (infections) to people approached (based on the location).
We can expand once we understand this small group of the audience better.
Using Customer Behavior for Growth
Identify simple customer actions or daily user behavior to find channels of growth through the customer referral touch-points.
Try to find touchpoints that are natural to the customer to reduce the threshold of creating referral loops.
Simple customer behaviors like handshakes and take our business a long way if used correctly.
Learn from social media apps how they leverage such actions to create viral loops in the user’s brain.
We just need to target the lungs, not even the brain!
Viral Mechanics and Viral Loops
A perfect term for our business 🙂 Program growth into the system itself: self-multiply based on initial resources deployed rather than building new resources from scratch each time.
Starting from the animal to human phase, again and again, is as wasteful as starting a new campaign from scratch each time rather than duplicating the learnings of others and your own experiments to scale the campaign.
Focus on Key Ratios over Vanity Numbers
The ultimate conversion rate = the death rate. Focus on that metric instead of just awareness metrics (like news coverage).
Metrics like the number of infections are as good as add-to-carts or free demo signups.
They can be high but not always beneficial to the business bottom line.
Expand to different markets for Geographical diversification
Identify new geographies as they may have a better conversion rate (in terms of both contacts to infections and infections to deaths) compared to others.
Testing different geographies make sure you are getting the highest ROI on spreading the molecule business.
This is even better if it’s done through viral mechanics so the customer can take the business across borders.
Create Audience Segments and Identify the Highest Converting Segments
It’s important to nurture and spread in the right segments and multiply the efforts of the campaigns in those segments.
For example, if young children and old people convert better, focus more budgets there.
This is even better if done through viral loops. A segmentation-based strategy is key to optimize this effort for ROI.
Be Channel Independent
Experiment with multiple channels and touchpoints, especially in the early stage. Surfaces, Air, Water, Groceries, Food, Meat, and Seafood – don’t be emotional about a single channel.
Find where your audience hangs out more and target all those channels. Measure ROI and then optimize.
Leverage User Psychology Habit Loops
Identify customer’s weaknesses and use those as channels of growth. This could be their lack of hygiene or nature of protesting, gathering publicly, ignoring health instructions, hating their governments, starting new movements every day.
Use these as channels of growth – this works across the board from mobile app growth to COVID growth. User psychology and especially their weak points and the easy targets to create habit loops.
These are 8 learnings from COVID for growth marketers. If you would like to add more points, feel free to share them with us.
If you’re getting too serious about this analogy then remember you, me, and the entire human species might not exist but the fundamentals will remain.
The growth process is a part of nature. The entire evolution is a result of multiple growth experiments.
So take your species a little more lightly than you do and try to see the positive learnings to improve your growth marketing process.
