How my Unsuccessful Growth Marketing Strategies shaped my Career

All of us talk about our successful campaigns, projects, growth hacks but the truth is there are at minimum 10 unsuccessful/failed thoughts/experiments/strategies in order for one to succeed. Here I am going to write about some of the growth marketing strategies I implemented in my career which, well, were among the former. However, there were lessons learnt from each which helped me grow.

Forcing the platform choice on consumer — During 2013–14, there was a mad rush to get users to install app. Turned out to be a wrong strategy as business dropped by 60% and users started opting for competitor’s services. Lesson Learnt — be platform agnostic for your user, always

Working on single key metric — While it is good to have a focused approach while outlining your growth strategies, it is equally imperative to keep business’ north star metric in mind. I learned the hard way that my acquisition and engagement strategies while were increasing users and my DAUs & MAUs, they were not resulting in necessary business growth. Lesson Learnt — always keep an eye on business metric and work with product teams to understand the drop-offs.

One should follow the industry metrics — For a new growth marketer, it is always a practice followed across geographies/industries to follow the industry standard metric. While this is also supported by numerous researches and studies done by marketing research companies, truth is, your metric will always be different from industry defined ones. Not denying that one should not look at it but arrive at your standard metric based on your business. To quote an example, CAC for healthcare industry in India is typically in the range of 500–700 INR, but does it mean it holds true for all players operating in the field? No. Lesson Learnt — You should look at your LTV, at a bare minimum divide it by 3 and that should be your maximum CAC.

Going with the group — let’s be honest, we all have at some point or other, have gone with an idea which we discussed among a group of 15–20 people and the majority agreed. While it may have worked for some of us, most of the time it doesn’t. Let me explain with an example, for an OTT business, we were discussing in a group on the engagement strategy during primetime on weekends. During that time, The Kapil Sharma Show had the highest TRP and majority of us agreed to go ahead with it. We did the hard work of getting the show on our platform and started the GTM, well, it backfired!! Our DAU actually dropped. Lesson Learnt — (1) always and always go by DATA. (2) In business it is said — think global, act local but in India, it is, think national, act regional. Having learnt the lesson, during another project of adding new feature on app to increase adoption and top of the funnel, before starting to work on the feature, I went by data(more on data in my next blog). Sent out a CLM campaign to gauge user intent, here was the result —

Bias towards one platform — This one holds largely true for performance marketers. We tend to believe and to some extent rightly so, that Google Search has the best CVR and as a rule of thumb, maximum budget allocation should happen there(been guilty too). While it might hold true for some business but it is critical to look at the maximum scope of each platform. You must have got it by now that I don’t design my strategies without DATA, yes that is the keyword. Lesson Learnt — look at the maximum reach/search volume/audience you can get on each platform. Derive the complete funnel taking assumptions on CTR and CVR(do this for each step of the funnel). This will provide you the maximum scope of each platform. If Google Search is only able to give you 30% of your target metric, add new platforms. Do the same math and arrive at budgets and cost metrics.

I hope some of my unsuccessful growth strategies and the lessons learnt from them will help you in your future endeavors. Should you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, feel free to comment or email me. Would like to hear your POV on strategies which didn’t work but helped you grow. Concluding the blog with a quote of Richard Branson

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Cheers!