Growth Experimentation
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Growth isn’t a playbook with answers, it’s a mindset
Growth is a combination of clean data infrastructure, great customer experiences, and rapid experimentation. It requires an understanding of all stages of the customer journey and how to leverage them. Whilst there are best-practice approaches that are applicable across businesses, there is no out-of-the-box solution that will get you there. Growth is about enabling the right team, with the right culture and the right tools. You have to centralise processes, keep teams aligned and build a culture that values experimentation. In our experience, businesses who are in need of better growth methodology observe one of the following mentalities internally:
- Siloed teams: Company departments don’t have the same view on customer data, miscommunicate and compete rather than collaborate. Sales is purely sales, marketing is purely marketing etc.
- Fear of failure: Experiments to generate insight and learning are not valued. Instead of innovating, the same old strategies are relied on.
Growth is less about ‘hacking’ & ‘optimising,’ and more about culture & process
There are a number of common mistakes companies make when working on their agile growth culture:
- Businesses often mistake A/B testing on their website for growth experiments. This is not the case majority of the time, as most don’t have sufficient traffic to do micro optimisations in a meaningful timeframe. Focus should be on high-impact experiments.
- Businesses think experiments must be successful at all costs. Often, this leads to the ‘shifting of goal-posts’ mid-campaign in order to show success; minimising opportunity for learning.
- Businesses think they need long planning cycles for campaigns, with high production values. High cost campaigns lead to high production values which lead to higher ad spend to justify the investment—a vicious cycle.
- Businesses suffer paralysis by analysis. Afraid of making mistakes, employees pass decisions up the chain, slowing down the speed with which they can be made.
- Businesses have insufficient analytics infrastructure to measure test performance. The inability to measure the performance of experiments effectively slows down any experimentation culture.
Companies held back by these hurdles struggle to implement a build-measure-learn cycle that let’s them grow their understanding of customers, markets and trends at high speed. On one end, start-ups don’t have the luxury of relying on institution knowledge that has been created over years or even decades—to survive they need to learn much faster. On the other end, the business landscape for established corporates is changing rapidly—whether it’s marketing channels, the competitive environment, or consumer preferences, they need to stay on-top of these changes.
Build out the culture, processes and tools you need to grow your business
The team at ikaros are experts in growth experimentation, having built and led growth teams within small start-ups, hyper-growth scale-ups and established corporate companies. We can advise on:
- Building growth culture
- Building a full time growth team
- Tailoring processes to suit your team & business, including Kanban, experimentation tracking and personalised growth methodologies
- Skills and tools required across marketing, copywriting, analytics, engineering and product.
FAQs
Can I do this myself?
Yes. There are plenty of resources out there, including our own blog, that provide guidelines from which you can find best-practice tools, and build out your own internal growth process/culture. However, with your own ikaros growth expert in residence, you have the benefit of our experience. Having built and led numerous high-performing growth teams for scale-ups & established corporates, we can tailor a framework specifically to your industry, team preference and business culture.
Do I need a growth team for this to work?
No we can work with your existing sales, marketing and product teams to deliver growth for the business. In saying this, we can also help establish an internal growth team if necessary.