Show Notes
Hello, welcome to the bottom skills podcast. I am Mike Parsons, the CEO of quality and we are starting a brand new series for a brand new year. To welcome into 2021. We are going to discuss the top three skills that product people are going to need. Now let's talk about 20, 21st. I mean, it was crazy, very unpredictable fires, riots.
COVID elections, you name it. It was pretty crazy. And with all of that new uncertainty and that change, there was definitely some broad themes that I think largely affect. Most people working in those sort of knowledge worker roles. So I think that, um, you know, obviously working virtually and, uh, you know, quarantine was a particularly [
00:01:00] timely skill that we've needed to develop.
And I think that's going to continue into 2021. We needed to be a bit more agile or needed to be good at, you know, Accepting some uncertainties, um, um, doubts. And we were presented with a whole new series of problems. So we need to be able to think critically and learn along the way. And these are what I call very broad themes that I think apply to not only product people, but to.
People, uh, in business in general. Now, what I thought would be very interesting is to double click in and really zoom into, okay, what are the skills they're going to be most required for product people? When we'd say product people, we were talking about designers, developers, creators, and entrepreneurs, people who are trying to build brand new products and bring them to the world.
So I am going to present you today with the first of three, and I really hope to get [
00:02:00] your feedback on this. Tell me what you think. Because we're going to be making masterclasses really deep courses on each of these three skills that we think are essential for 2021. All right. Let's get into the first one.
And that is growth marketing. Now growth marketing is really Tivoli new over the last five or 10 years. And, uh, for someone like myself who spent a great deal of time in the advertising world, it was. Really a breakthrough. Uh, when you know, it was all of the marketing, uh, skills and practices of a digital world, what kind of collected into this banner, this marquee of growth market.
It was kind of super helpful in pulling it all together. And here's why, because as marketing and advertising experts, we generally focused on very traditional metrics. Reach and frequency, [
00:03:00] basically get your brand, get your message out there and try and grab the attention of as many people as possible.
Now, what happened after you got their attention was not really in the consideration? Yes. There was some direct marketing, uh, agencies and experts, but. They were much smaller than the traditional brand advertising television, uh, ad making people. So. Here's the thing with growth marketing growth marketing is about the full funnel.
It is about the end to end journey of the user from when you don't know them to when they are so keen to tell the world about you. And that is a full and complete journey. It's a full funnel. And traditionally in advertising and marketing, we had a real focus on just the first two. And that's why it is so [
00:04:00] important to put our heads into the world of growth marketing and break it down.
Now, just for this show, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you an introduction just to the funnel and give you a kind of sense of what it might be. And I'm really keen to hear back from you what you'd like me to include in the masterclass, because I'm really excited about this proposition. Okay.
So let's talk about the funnel, the. Growth marketing funnel is built up of two major parts. Some people like to include five steps in the funnel or six. I'm going to give you the full six. And this is famously called the pirate metrics because it's three, A's followed by three RS. So it's nice and easy to remember.
So here we go. Uh, first part of the growth marketing funnel is all about awareness. This is the beginning. This is making sure you reach enough people. [
00:05:00] Then we go to acquisition. We, you know, we've got to acquire them, but just because we've acquired them, brought them to us. We still need to do the third step.
We do. We need to activate them. We need to get them to do something with us. Then we need to get them to do a transaction with us. That's where we step into this kind of second area is called revenue. And as we build this relationship and we provide a product and a service to them, we then need to. Next step part five, we need to retain them.
Okay. So this far we've got awareness, acquisition and activation. That's the top of the funnel. The bottom of the funnel is obviously revenue and retention, but there's one more referral and referral is obviously all about people introducing your product or service to others. So. Here's the interesting thing.
What you need to do is open your mind and think about the growth marketing funnel as this complete journey, this [
00:06:00] complete journey from awareness right through to referral. So I'm going to give you six questions. Uh, that relate to each of these steps, which will help you get a little bit more of a sense of what we mean in this funnel.
Okay. So awareness, if you're sitting around with your colleagues and saying, how's our awareness, we'd be asking how many people are we reaching? How many people are seeing us and hearing about us? Are we in the right directories? Are we on Google? Are we. There in the universe, whatever, uh, awareness, touch points that might be relevant, then obviously where it starts to get really intense listing is where you actually start to acquire them.
And for example, let's use an example of bringing them to your website. That's a classic question of what you might ask us. How are we doing on acquisition? Which is like how many people were getting to the website. We look at our reach and look at our acquisition. There's a very important thing that there's a rate of conversion.
[
00:07:00] All the people that know us, how many of them are we getting to our website? In this example, it's a very good acquisition question. And then obviously activation huge, because this is where you would ask the question, how many people take the first and important. Step or activity with us. This might be a trial.
This might be a booking, a meeting, a service, an onboarding, whatever your activation mechanism is, that's really important. And so what you would do here is you would look at your funnel, look at your total awareness, ask. How many of those people are coming to our website, that gives us a sense of acquisition.
And then how many of those people take the first step and then we've got activation covered. So that's the three A's, that's the R F um, the, a part of these pirate metrics that you used in growth marketing. Now, if you've got the three A's, it's followed by those three other [
00:08:00] ares, and that therefore gives you that big Hardy har pirate metric now.
Let's get into what those are. So first thing is following up from activation is how many people actually start paying for our service? How, how, and when do they pay, how much do they pay? These are the key revenue questions. And then obviously once you start having. Uh, your customers and people paying, you need to work out.
How many of them are coming back for a second, third, fourth, fifth time. How are you retaining your customers? That's obviously the fifth and important part of the funnel. And then at the last part of the funnel, which almost starts to. Kind of loop the process back to the beginning again is how many people refer their friends and their colleagues and their network to your business.
Because if you're getting a really good referral rate, then you're in business because that brings people to your website who [
00:09:00] activate you start purchasing from you. So they have it. That is just the tip of the iceberg for growth marketing. It's a super important, uh, piece of the puzzle because here's why, if you have built a product, you will have poured so much energy effort, time, money, and resources into building the product.
And you cannot afford for it to be the best kept secret in the world. You've got to get out there and start building engagement with customers. You have to really start driving people through that funnel and converting at each step. So, this is why all good product builders need to have this growth marketing mindset doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be a growth marketer, but what's really important, I believe is that the difference between product and marketing is narrowing.
It's actually getting closer and [
00:10:00] closer, because if you think about some of those key ideas that we discussed, how many people are taking the first step, how many people come back another time? How much do they pay? Are they referring people you could say, well, have these marketing questions or are they.
Product questions. So the lines are blurring. So even if you're a serious engineer, developer or architect, it's incredibly powerful to have this frame. This lens is a view to how to make the product successful. Because obviously the more people we get, the more value we can give to users, the more value we can give to the business itself.
All right. That was a quick dash through the world of growth marketing. We're going to be launching a course on growth marketing. So make sure if you enjoyed this podcast, jump over to bottom-up dot IO, where you're going to find it 16 free courses right now that you can take. So anyone who's a product person jump over there.
There are lots [
00:11:00] of free courses, and we're really looking forward to your feedback on the growth marketing. Alright, that's a wrap. Bottom up skills.