I want to talk about a solution that is increasingly common in our market and wrap it in a methodology called the Growth Team. This is the approach we have implemented in digital agency Portland.
As a co-author of the hopox service and an Agile & Lean Marketing evangelist in Russia, I was lucky to communicate with many web studios and digital agencies, to automate the work process in them. There is something in common in how processes are changing now and we can already talk about a trend, but first, let's write down the main problems that are relevant for most agencies in the Internet marketing market:
How to jump out of the wheel? How to deal with high-margin interesting projects? How to communicate with the customer in order to be able to tweak his business to the created processes? How to reduce the share of salaries in the company's turnover and create a scalable process for generating non-standard strategies?
Conversations that the future of digital agencies belongs to consulting has been going on for a long time. Especially after the cancellation of the commission for advertising in Direct, how else to make money on Direct besides consulting?
I will tell you about a solution that is partially already used in our market and is fully applied in the western one. The methodology initially changed the marketing departments of large Internet companies like Twitter, Dropbox or SkyScanner, separating activities related to the growth of product metrics and the company as a whole into a separate division and team. This is how the concept of Growth Team and the position of VP of Growth, Head of Growth, etc. appeared for the first time.
The focus of the methodology is the formation and work of the Growth Team to test growth hypotheses in short iterations. For our ear, it would be more accustomed to explain it by combining Performance Marketing plus Agile. In world practice, this is a combination of three areas at once: Agile Marketing, Lean Startup and Data-Driven Marketing.
By projecting the Growth Team onto Internet agencies, it may seem that we are creating an anti-crisis team to manage the customer's Internet marketing. Perhaps it is. So, closer to the methodology.
Principle of operation and stages of implementation:
1. We form a Growth Team around each complex project from active employees of various departments of the agency, recruiting into one team all the expertise necessary for the project. Competencies that are missing in the agency can be easily filled by calling an expert to work hourly or in a friendly manner. If possible, the Growth Team should have an analyst (responsible for project data and metrics) and a technical specialist. The Growth Team should have a representative of the customer, the customer, or better - the founder of the business.
2. Set the time and period of meetings for the Growth Team, once a week or two. Maybe even once a month depends on the project and the resources of the team, but it's important to remember that sprint length greatly affects growth rate. In fact, with periodic meetings we launch Agile Marketing, which states in the manifest:
3. Meeting of the Growth Team to plan actions for the next sprint. If you haven't found anything special in the methodology up to this point, now is the time to thin out.
In subsequent sprints, the first meeting point should be conclusions on the hypotheses of the previous sprint.
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