Faq

We become an invaluable extension of your own sales and marketing team

  • What is the difference between growth marketing and traditional sales and marketing?

    Nothing and everything at the same time. The foundation principles of sales and marketing have never changed. We’re still selling to humans (for now 😜). The process by which you approach sales and marketing is constantly changing, and in the last generation the pace has picked up exponentially. Universities aren’t keeping up and new yardsticks are constantly being defined by Silicon Valley startups and growth teams.

      Marketing traditionally:

    • has generally not been data-driven
    • emphasised copy and creativity over insights and hard analysis
    • spends months preparing a campaign and then doesn’t track the results
    • is stuck in hierarchical structures not able to collaborate
    • is highly correlated with the amount of money spent on advertising
    • failed to create valuable customer feedback loops

      Growth marketing:

    • lives and breaths vast amounts of data
    • seeks insights from deep analysis to create ah-hah moments
    • tests ideas quickly, measures everything, then doubles down on the best ideas
    • leverages cross-functional teams (designers, developers, data analysts, marketing specialists, content specialists etc.) to create game-changing ideas
    • thrives in resource constrained environments where money is finite and time is of the essence
    • is a continuous process of customer driven experimentation and development
  • What do you get from a regular marketing agency?
    • Most marketing agencies solve a specialised need for you: seo, sem, design, advertising etc.
    • They will sell you what they specialise in regardless of whether it will be effective for your business and without knowing anything about your customers. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
    • Further to this, they exploit the information asymmetry between themselves and you. You’re there for their help and they end up helping themselves.
    • Whilst they specialise in only a few areas they are happy to sell you anything as long as it leads to more billings.
  • How is hmG different?
    • We’re not a product you pick out from the marketing bag of tactics; we’re the company that purpose designs the size, shape and contents of the bag, for you and your customer.
    • We don’t start the process by telling you the solution; we get to know your former, current and future customers intimately.
    • We apply insights, creativity and analysis with scientific rigour to transform your sales and marketing results.
    • If we can’t help you we’ll tell you early on before we’ve taken any money from you. And yes, this is real, we regularly turn away businesses that want to work with us.
  • What services do we offer?

    We work with companies on an ongoing basis to build their customer relationships at scale. This can incorporate a range of channels that include messages, conversational bots, platforms, engineering as marketing, unconventional PR, channel development, SEO/SEM and social.

    Often before we can seriously focus on accelerating growth, we need to establish a base line level of insight across the customer life cycle. Anyone can collect data. We work with you to understand the markets in which you operate and your sales, marketing and technology strategies to ensure we implement systems that are truly fit for purpose. After all, we’re going to be using them alongside you.

    We can also create a digital presence from the ground up where it’s required.

  • How do we work?

    We work in cross-functional teams because it’s essential that we can execute on all of our own ideas. Every test that we run has to be proven to contribute to growth in a meaningful way. For statistic buffs, this means each test has to be statistically significant and be within a 99% confidence interval. In other words, there is only 1 chance in a 100 that we could be wrong about the outcome of the test. There is always a strong correlation between the number of tests that are run in a particular period and the level of growth that is achieved.

  • Don’t I need a marketing plan first?

    No, but it’s a useful input to our process. It’s helpful to be clear about your business objectives for at least the next 12 months. Don’t let this become a stumbling block to prevent you taking action though. We can help you work through this as part of the discovery phase very quickly.

  • Don’t I need to hire someone to manage the marketing function before I start working with you?

    No. Someone in your team will need to be designated to work with us and that person ideally would be part of the marketing team going forward. This could be one of the founders.

    We prefer to work with you on an ongoing basis. This generally prevents or delays the need for additional hires until the business achieves the growth to support it. It's also costly to assemble your own cross-functional team until you have reached certain sales and profitability milestones.

  • Do I really need a growth marketing team?

    To a certain extent growth is a company wide objective and as a result, everyone’s role and responsibility. It’s also everyone’s responsibility not to spend money unnecessarily but you have a finance team to measure, understand and improve the flow of capital in and out of the business to make sure that doesn’t happen. So why not have a team with the responsibility to measure, understand and improve the flow of customers in and out of your products and business? That’s the role we fulfil.

  • Do we primarily rely on paid channels?

    Quite the opposite and this distinguishes us from most other agencies who require both a fixed monthly commitment for their services and an ad budget on top. It’s not that we believe there is no value in paid channels, we may use paid advertising to test or support an initiative. We just prefer to spend our client’s money creating assets that continue to attract new customers over time. There are so many less annoying ways to gain exposure and it forces us to be more creative.

  • Which stage of the funnel do we focus on?

    The whole thing. Unless you have visibility across the entire customer journey you can’t ensure you’re going after the areas that will deliver the greatest impact for the least amount of effort. Many agencies will try to fix a conversion problem by pooring more leads on the fire because they don’t look at the whole journey. This will prove to be a very costly ‘FIX’ because it's usually accompanied with even more advertising spend.

  • What’s the difference between digital marketing and growth marketing?

    Digital marketing teams limit their focus to customer acquisition and primarily paid channels and are usually composed of non-technical people that often rely on developers, designers, and data scientists to implement their ideas. The rest of the customer journey (activation, retention, referrals and revenue) is only paid lip service. Contracting with a digital agency in this way creates competing interests between the agency and the client which makes for some horrible outcomes.

    Growth marketing teams concentrate on driving rapid growth by creating and sustaining valuable relationships across the lifecycle of the customer. They are able to operate independently, executing and evaluating their own ideas drawing on in-built product, marketing and technical expertise. They are quantums more effective because they don’t believe in exhaustive planning, only agile processes.

  • What results can we expect to see?

    We work with every one of our clients to ensure that the investment that they’re making in us is going to be amply rewarded with additional profitable growth in the short, medium and long term. Generally big successes in growth marketing come from a series of small wins compounded over time (e.g. a 3% improvement in conversion rate per month nets a 42.6% improvement over a year).

  • What systems do we use?

    We’re not wedded to any system, in the same way that we are not wedded to any particular channel. The systems we deploy depend on the particular client that we we’re working for and what they need to achieve. However, we do have strong preferences. Some of the systems we have experience with include Salesforce, Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot, Autopilot, Intercom, Domo, Heap Analytics, Optimizely, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

    Our priority is to employ systems that democratise the collection and analysis of large data sets to facilitate data driven decision making across a company. Anyone can warehouse data. It’s driving better customer outcomes, and therefore client outcomes, that's the hard part.

  • What’s so important about cross-functional teams and how can they be effective?

    Small cross-functional teams (up to 7) consist of skill sets that are usually found across a range of shared services' functions within a company (product, marketing, IT, R&D, data, finance). They are able to operate autonomously, executing and evaluating their own ideas. On their own, these teams can be just as ineffective as any other structure. It’s only when these teams adopt agile work practices that they’re able to transcend normal productivity metrics.

  • What does agile mean?

    The term “Agile” was created in 2001 by a group of sixteen leaders in software development in what has become known as the “Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. This manifesto was then developed into a framework called “Scrum". The Scrum framework sets out how these teams can work in a series of “Sprints”, usually a week in duration, to complete a project in less time and with more accuracy than any other known method of working.