Lecture Notes on Growth Marketing

Introduction

• Speaker shares enthusiasm for the course content.
• Background in Physics from Cambridge; transitioned to online marketing.

Early Career in Online Marketing

• Started with SEO in the 1990s.
• Created a successful niche website on paper airplanes.
• Developed a cocktail website that became the largest in the UK, gained experience in SEO with the launch of Google.
• Began learning about online marketing with Google AdWords, focusing on reselling paid clicks.

Key Learnings from Experience

• Transition from physics to marketing.
• Importance of product retention for growth.
• Retention is crucial for sustaining growth and product market fit.

Retention and Growth

• Retention curve analysis: vital for understanding if a product will succeed. Businesses should aim for a retention curve that flattens out.
• Examples of successful products (e.g., Facebook, Airbnb) that emphasize retention.
• Importance of knowing what good retention looks like based on industry benchmarks.

Dimensional Reasoning

• Use of dimensional reasoning in physics to analyze problems can be applied in marketing.
• Retention rates can be estimated by comparing user counts and active users across different services.

Operating for Growth

• North Star metric: defining what key metric the entire company should focus on.
• Emphasize the importance of a strong product-market fit before pursuing growth tactics.
• Example of how Facebook focused on monthly active users as a measure of success.

Magic Moment and User Engagement

• Understanding the magic moment when users feel the need to return to the platform (like seeing friends on Facebook).
• The significance of getting users to this magic moment quickly to improve retention.

Tactics for Growth

• Internationalization: Learning from Facebook's late entry into non-English speaking markets.
• Virality: Understanding how to create viral products through word-of-mouth and incentives (e.g., Hotmail and PayPal).
  • Framework: Assess payload, conversion rate, and frequency of invitations.

SEO Strategies

• Importance of keyword research and targeting the right search terms.
• Build valuable backlinks and internal linking for SEO performance.

Email, SMS, and Push Notifications

• Email is becoming less relevant for younger audiences; focus on SMS and push notifications.
• Ensure deliverability and relevance in messaging.
• Use triggered campaigns to engage users effectively.

Conclusion

• Emphasis on execution and rapid learning from experiments.
• "A good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow." - General Patton.
• Growth is a continuous effort and should be prioritized across the organization.