How a growth agency can help businesses thrive even through tough times
The term “Growth” as a department for a business has become a trending movement, especially amongst startups. The confusion lies as growth overlaps traditional business functions like sales and marketing. In this article, we’ll explore what exactly growth means, and how it can help your business achieve its goals in a lean, systematic approach.
What is Growth?
Growth titles such as “Growth Lead”, ‘Growth Marketer” or “Director of Growth” has become popular thanks to the startup industry, which prioritised growing the company X amount of times. Startups place a heavy emphasis on growth to determine whether their product or service retains traction pleasing investors. So what does growth actually mean? Arguably, some might say the number of users or the number of locations opened. However, if this is at the expense of other metrics, this could cause fatal moves as could be seen in the case of WeWork or Theranos.
Growth departments look at the business holistically and focus on how to optimise sales, marketing and product in a data-led approach. They need to understand how the business operates on all fronts to determine inefficiencies and growth opportunities. Growth employees can spot vanity metrics, which are metrics such as follower count that don’t actually tell you how well your business is doing. They understand that growth comes from looking at your funnel and identifying the key metrics at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
How is Growth different from Sales, Marketing and Product Development?
Experienced growth employees are disciplined in marketing, sales and product development. Their rapid testing and experimentation techniques, allows them to identify which channels are working and which are draining your resources. With this approach, they can find the best strategy to help your business grow.
In simple terms, growth takes on a data-led approach, whereas marketing takes on a creative-led approach. Marketing specialises in driving top-of-the-funnel leads and passes them on to the sales department responsible for converting those leads into paying customers. Even with a growth team, marketing and sales departments remain an essential part of the business.
Traditional marketers specialise in finding consumer segments and raising brand awareness with a finished product. Traditional sales ensure a smooth process from lead to consumer. Consider your growth employee as an extension to your marketing, sales and product development as they spend time analysing your metrics from these departments. Growth employees are on the rise for businesses of all sizes as they listen to consumer demands and help with product development ensuring product-market fit.
A Different Set of Skills
Startups and small businesses often don’t have the resources required to hire multiple employees, therefore they have leveraged growth teams to reach their goals. People specialising in growth often have these common traits:
Analytical: As the basis for growth is data-led, it comes as no surprise that people need to master analytical skills allowing them to read data and determine which opportunities can maximise their resources.
Entrepreneurial: While no growth employee can master all fields, they must have an entrepreneurial mindset whereby they understand how your business works from the inside out.
Creative: While traditional marketers may be more creative in terms of design, growth employees are creative in finding solutions to problems. They understand that there are multiple solutions to a problem, and use their creative skills to determine the best solution.
A Data-Led Approach to Work
Optimising your growth requires extensive analysis of your key metrics. Each department may have its own set of metrics, however, growth takes on the metrics that matter to your business the most.
As an example, in traditional marketing - one might look at blog traffic, follower count and email open rate. Growth marketers look at the metrics that impact acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, also known as the pirate metrics (AARRR). They take the most important numbers from your sales and marketing activities and define their own growth metrics. These could look like this:
Acquisition: Which channels are my customers coming from?
Activation: How do we make our customers engage with our product or service?
Retention: Are our customers coming back to use our product again?
Revenue: How do we maximise our revenue per client?
Referral: Are our customers referring our business to others?
These metrics are then converted into a Growth Tracking sheet, allowing you and your growth team to quickly identify where the bottlenecks are in your business and whether you are improving these metrics over time. Whatever your metrics may be, they should truly reflect your buyer’s journey.
Stages of Growth
Each business goes through its stages of growth and there is a time when you need a traditional marketer, for example with larger businesses looking for a wider reach, and there is a time when you need a growth marketer, for smaller businesses looking to grow at a faster pace.
In the chart below, we can see the business phases of growth. Startups don’t need to hire growth employees if they haven’t found a solution to a problem in the market thus yet. Growth employees are only required once this has been found, as these people can help scale the business.
For smaller businesses, growth is also essential and the model above can apply as well. Competition arises, inflation occurs, and a reduction of costs might be desired. Becoming stagnant results in a survival game that most don’t outlive. Slower growth may be more desirable for such firms, yet the metrics remain in many cases the same.
What is Tashi Hati, a Transformational Growth Agency?
A growth agency helps companies restructure their business to optimise for growth and in turn increase revenues and profits. Our agency uses the principles of psychology, marketing, sales, data analytics and technology to ensure growth at a pace that your resources can handle. Our services embrace both a creative-led marketing approach and a data-led growth approach allowing your business to receive the best of both worlds. Our services will ensure your business transforms into a sustainable, growing firm that offers a valuable solution to the needs of the market.
How can a growth agency help your business?
Hiring can be a tough job, with many hours spent on vetting the right candidates, training employees and making sure they are satisfied in their roles. Not all businesses have the time or resources to make this happen, therefore Tashi Hati offers startups and service providers such as restaurants, insurance companies and SaaS businesses an alternative solution.
Our international team of talents specialise in the following fields:
Copywriting: Effectively communicate your message to your target audience so that it resonates with them.
Design: Improve your brand perception making your products and services easier to understand.
User Experience: Create an enjoyable experience that meets the needs and expectations of your audience.
Production: Engage your audience with cinematic-quality content across any digital platform.
Digital Tools: Stay competitive by leveraging the latest technological tools to improve operational efficiency and productivity.
Strategy: Set a clear direction by prioritising your efforts and aligning your team for maximum growth.
Together, we found that for companies to grow successfully they first need to establish a credible online presence and simplify their business model so that their value proposition is clearly identified by their audience. Our service plans are flexible and on-demand making it easy to integrate with almost all businesses.
If you’re ready to transform your business and grow even in the most turbulent of times, schedule a call with one of our team members and we’d be happy to discuss whether we’re able to meet your needs.