Many startup founders, investors, and marketing leaders get caught up in the whirlwind of rapid growth. It’s easy to fall for the idea that there’s a silver bullet, one simple trick that will send your metrics soaring. Because of this, growth tactics that don’t work are actually fairly common.
But seasoned growth professionals will tell you that sustainable growth is rarely about quick fixes. It is the outcome of identifying the growth tactics that don’t work and simply avoiding them. This list of items is based on experience.
Table Of Contents:
- Ignoring Product-Market Fit Before Scaling
- Relying on Growth Teams to Fix a Declining Business
- The Redesign Trap: Rethinking Rebrands for Growth
- Copying the Competition Won’t Yield Results
- The “Unique Problem” Mindset: Seek External Insights and Expertise
- The Wrong Channels: Focus on Earned, Not Just Paid
- The Experimentation Paradox: Don’t Test Everything
- DIY Growth is A Big Weakness, Find The Experts.
- Common Growth Strategy Time-Wasters
- Always Be Innovating in Growth: Don’t Stop Improving
- Growth Tactics That Don’t Work: A Case Study Example.
- Conclusion
Ignoring Product-Market Fit Before Scaling
One of the biggest growth tactics that don’t work is a trap of hiring a Head of Growth too early. Before you even think about a dedicated growth team, you need solid product-market fit.
It needs a solution that not only attracts customers but also keeps them coming back. Without this, you probably should not start investing in a Growth hire just yet.
How to Determine Product-Market Fit
A simple gauge for you can be that there is decent retention with your first few thousand users. Growth experts point to the Sean Ellis test: “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” If a significant percentage respond “very disappointed,” it is more than likely your product has the ability to satisfy the demands of a larger audience.
The mistake is thinking a growth hire can somehow magically create product-market fit. They’re there to amplify what’s already working, not build the initial foundation.
Relying on Growth Teams to Fix a Declining Business
Growth teams work best when they’re scaling something that already is proving value. They amplify success. This cannot reverse declining product-market fit, it takes identifying foundational weaknesses and solving for that.
If your business is facing bigger problems, you must identify them and address them strategically. It can seem tempting to believe that a team that focuses exclusively on user acquisition, funnel conversions, upsells, etc., will do that automatically. However, a deep understanding of marketing funnels and processes makes you less susceptible to this miscalculation.
Focus On The Foundational Issues First
Take the time and energy you’re expending and work to address the fundamental weaknesses head-on. Some key weaknesses can include poor marketing messaging or a core product that needs improvements.
Growth can improve outcomes in situations of slight or stalled gains. When the decline has begun, there must be another cause that needs to be addressed first.
The Redesign Trap: Rethinking Rebrands for Growth
A sleek new website or a complete brand overhaul might seem like the solution. Almost every experienced growth marketer warns against this. A redesign will help in very few circumstances, when executed perfectly, and as part of a much longer strategy.
This new branding does not mean more people are discovering you or valuing your messaging or product than they did before. A rebrand may be necessary for reasons aligning with marketing and audience growth. However, it must be treated strategically as the starting point rather than the end goal.
Any business, especially early startups, need to have realistic expectations. Metrics should be planned to return back to par. The rebrand then needs even more strategic investment.
Don’t Expect Overnight Miracles
Be prepared for a dip in performance, at least initially. Then you should give your team sufficient runway—at least three to six months—to optimize the new experience.
Copying the Competition Won’t Yield Results
It’s tempting to look at a successful competitor and think, “Let’s just do what they’re doing.” The trap here is that it means there is no understanding of what leads to their conclusions. Business owners understand the need to differentiate themselves.
What you see might be an experiment, or a long-neglected flow, or even something specifically targeted to their user base that doesn’t work with yours. Instead, view competitor analysis as inspiration, but never for the ultimate answers.
Be careful, though, as benchmarks from the competition can also lead to bad choices. The formulas for calculating “averages” often use completely different measures. Not every benchmark applies to every organization and how they interpret specific measures.
Focus on What is Actually Going to Bring You Value
Here are the top four sources:
- Competitive intelligence platforms.
- Independent experts and advisors.
- Thought leaders, publications, and journals.
- Internal knowledge hubs.
The “Unique Problem” Mindset: Seek External Insights and Expertise
Today’s growth landscape has a lot of “one-size-fits-all” advice, especially on social media. Much of it comes from specific cases and won’t work for everyone. We must avoid shortcuts and get serious about hiring the right Growth Marketer with true domain-level experience.
Almost every problem that you encounter as a startup has been faced (and ideally solved) by someone else. Thinking your situation is completely unique, you may miss the valuable opportunity to connect with others for answers. Instead of getting stuck in this mindset, seek input from experienced advisors to save yourself valuable time and resources.
Look Outside the Organization
Consult with people who have experience solving problems in the industry and those relevant to your circumstances. Reach out to peers in your business network.
Consider an outside growth consulting agency, at least on an advisory basis, for help when your situation benefits. Don’t try to go it alone when expert advice can make a huge difference in avoiding dead ends.
The Wrong Channels: Focus on Earned, Not Just Paid
As tempting as it is to pour money into paid search (SEM) and paid social, that money doesn’t stay in the company. And, it does nothing to set your brand up for long-term viability. While paid channels can provide a short-term boost, they aren’t a sustainable growth strategy.
Prioritizing building owned and earned channels provides much more enduring effects. Concentrate on viral strategies, getting people talking, and promoting user-generated content. People, not bots, clicks, or likes, can become your advocates.
By building brand advocacy among customers, you’ll reduce dependencies on 3rd party apps.
Prioritize Sustainable Strategies
Focus your efforts on:
- Virality: Referral strategies like Dropbox.
- Word of Mouth: Content that sparks discussions.
- User-Generated Content (UGC): Testimonials.
This is not cheaper; it will require work and expertise. However, it is more sustainable in the long run.
The Experimentation Paradox: Don’t Test Everything
A/B testing is valuable, but it just doesn’t add value for testing everything. This seems counterintuitive, and the very mantra of any data-driven marketing strategy. It’s crucial to avoid running extensive data experiments on the wrong measures and taking limited resources away from other strategic gains.
If a change is low-risk and you need to make quick iterations, you should rely more on understanding best-in-class models and proven processes. You can always use pre- and post-analysis as a safety check, if necessary, on existing customers.
Over-analyzing data becomes an expensive endeavor, focusing on changes that will substantially impact key business objectives. Do not spend countless hours and precious resources on minor tweaks that offer negligible returns.
Key Situations Where Less Testing is Actually Okay
Here are some guidelines for making testing determinations:
- You can see outcomes using smaller, and shorter, studies when you are looking for obvious impact.
- When changes being done have very low-risk factors, they can be rolled out on a trial basis without long-term impacts on conversion flows.
- A common approach for when traffic-to-conversion volume ratios are low is the implementation of basic, foundational practices.
When resources are limited and time is a key priority, this allows rapid progress. Quick growth goals data measurement helps monitor impacts. However, a standard should always be maintained: move fast but take measurements often, especially during the early stages of startup growth when testing models are more flexible.
DIY Growth is A Big Weakness, Find The Experts.
Sometimes, people and companies try to handle growth loops independently and miss out on insights from other models, data insights from better reporting, and experts with domain-level understandings. Hire advisors and experts.
Find Advisors With Relevant Skills
Search people out in your network, search websites, and find firms who specialize. Or, reach out to a third-party advisory for temporary CMO consulting or a Marketing firm.
Having a partner with insights, knowledge, or experiences you don’t have can take your firm further. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, leverage the expertise of those who’ve already navigated similar challenges in your industry.
Common Growth Strategy Time-Wasters
Growth expert Elena Verna has worked for some incredibly high-value tech brands. She’s also helped build up businesses and worked directly for Venture-Capital organizations to advise portfolio brands. She knows business strategy, and she’s found numerous smaller, “optimization” strategies that often do not create value.
Here are four:
- Color optimization: Button and font color optimization testing often get implemented with A/B testing. There are certain scenarios where they are useful, but with testing, you cannot isolate user interactions, and the outcome to any change so it becomes statistically insignificant.
- Third-party signups: Providing “options” has implications both psychologically and even statistically when comparing testing scenarios. Their effectiveness for achieving true goals should be reviewed more strategically for if it benefits conversion funnel completion.
- One email wonders: Email strategies are the core of a successful funnel. Email is used for retargeting, brand lift, driving a better sales pipeline, and countless other strategic benefits for an effective, fully designed email marketing campaign, so one email won’t give the data you want. Don’t expect a single work email to transform your business.
- Removing friction: Every firm needs to do this, but if not executed to support resolving clear and validated weaknesses found with the product, it will lead to more weaknesses. There are instances when *some* friction creates stronger buying behavior.
Always Be Innovating in Growth: Don’t Stop Improving
Growth is an investment and, if done strategically, one that delivers more ROI the more strategically you execute. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor; it requires constant monitoring, adaptation, and a willingness to explore new approaches.
Here are two approaches to put focus on. This requires investing about 25% of your capital in new loop growth and also allowing the time it needs to be implemented properly;
- Expect that any gains already seen will start showing reduced effectiveness at around a year to a year-and-a-half from when started.
- Add newer strategies at stages. Focus on bringing in channels slowly as opposed to overhauling everything. This is where “evolution” of your brand strategies gets prioritized instead of trying too much change at one-time.
Growth strategies for many firms don’t begin seeing clear metrics to guide decisions for between half-a-year and a year-and-a-half. Anticipate for a period with data and metrics but not complete ability to move off all data points you have available yet.
Growth Tactics That Don’t Work: A Case Study Example.
In the SaaS world, there are lessons in terms of what has helped a successful SaaS brand achieve massive and rapid gains. A lot can be learned from taking some time to look through some of the practices and efforts the company has executed along the way.
Here’s one example:
Slack’s Focus on User Feedback (Rather Than Copying)
Slack has proven that effective messaging applications give huge boosts for businesses seeking ways to stay agile and have the tools to support strong teamwork. How they grew involved more than simple testing.
The process for making refinements did rely on collecting, reviewing, and incorporating input from the users. By that, they grew faster from knowing and responding, as opposed to testing against similar brands and working off of generalized numbers without a true context.
Here’s the takeaway: The initial years they were getting a massive 15-30k suggestions per month from app users, an enormous amount. That level of volume also leads to high levels of responsibility to measure and make adjustments based on that information. Slack worked the processes effectively to focus business growth initiatives based on customer requests.
Conclusion on Growth Tactics That Don’t Work
Getting a business to grow and gain traction relies more on creating clear value for the intended target audience that matches your brand-specific market than trying short-term fixes. Short term fixes also never work for delivering.
To achieve true long term results, business owners have to consider growth tactics that don’t work and what makes the most sense to move towards. The shared information comes from the best minds in Growth Marketing, the top industry resources, and thought leaders.
Avoid complete reliance on any growth approach, and put time and money into what works best. In doing this, your long-term business trajectory shifts more favorably. Stay flexible, use your research, but focus on true, relevant goals that lead your target to connect better with your offer, don’t test endlessly but get to improving.
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