Growth hacking vs Chief Growth Officer
Growth hacking was originally applied to startups that needed to build awareness and acceptance but lacked budgets to do so. The quick fix was to put a few youngsters good at Facebook and they will produce something.
The CGO fuses sales, marketing and IT functions in a company, thus reporting to the CEO. Why is it necessary –here are some scenarios.
Scenarios where CGOs become necessary
- Sales teams have a target to achieve and hence may not think of partnerships and channels to grow indirectly
- Marketing teams are not tech experts and lack the ammunition to harness the tools available in the market such as martech or CDPs
- IT teams are siloed and cannot fully comprehend the business drivers. In some cases like media companies, there is no product team to play the bridge between engineering and business
Hence CGOs are mushrooming in Series C +companies and traditional companies to provide the classical hockey stick growth and make it scalable and automated .
CGOs provide customer centric and scale centric thinking together
In such cases the CGO applies customer centric and scale centric thinking to see the best way to grow by focusing on where the puck is going to bet on the growth opportunities that don’t need hiring more sales staff or more marketing budget. By investing in the right martech automation and data tooling , they can accelerate the growth and the CEO can focus on employee engagement and external engagement. CEOs can also make better sense of the budgeting asks posed by marketing and IT teams.
CGOs are able to stitch data analytics and multiple functions together
Analytics tools have now become essential for companies to add their marketing tech to take full advantage of the data. Martech i.e marketing technology becomes the key for organizations to meet and exceed customer expectations. Marketing technologies allow an organization to analyze customer data and make connections in real time. With access to more data than ever, marketers can now unlock data that most well-funded organizations only a few years ago.
CGO is a position that includes marketing, business development, sales, product work, external partnerships, and even assistance with recruitment and corporate culture. They have to transfer agile thinking , open up the culture to think bigger and better and deploy the tools fast with support of multi-functional teams.
Envision and Build the MarTech Stack for the organization
Marketers need the MarTech stack to bridge the gap in customer expectations; automate and optimize the interaction of customers with brands in social networks. Companies that successfully implement MarTech have created and implemented best practices that enable technology marketing to achieve goals consistently and predictably
The 4 Ts of Growth : Tools, Team , Tactics and Tenacity delivered by Spectra
Spectra plays the role of a CGO by bringing in a growth hacking DNA -by focusing on the customer journey, channels and partnership development and the right tools for marketing and sales – revtech and martech tool evaluation. We call it the 4 Ts of growth – tools, team , tactics and tenacity. We drive growth marketing initiatives, and partnerships with a focus on sustainable improvements to your tech, process and people
Tools: Envision and Build the MarTech Stack for the organization
Marketers need the MarTech stack to bridge the gap in customer expectations; automate and optimize the interaction of customers with brands in social networks. Companies that successfully implement MarTech have created and implemented best practices that enable technology marketing to achieve goals consistently and predictably
Team: Work with the team to generate results consistently and build customer centricity top down and bottoms up
Business leaders are beginning to see marketing as a catalyst for creating sustainable growth fueled by a passionate focus on the end consumer. Growth that is in tune with the best practices of the digital world; is needed to make marketing successful
Many companies are supplementing or replacing the role of a CMO with a CGO to make sure the focus on other elements of marketing beyond brand communication are not neglected and there is a way to drive multi-channel and omni-channel thinking.
Tenacity and Tactics : Dig Deep , Fail fast, Don't give up
While marketers are always trying to drive growth, they need to influence many parts of the organization to make it happen. Anyone who has been in marketing for a while knows that figuring out how to spend less on advertising and other expenses can be part of the job. Moving from generic marketing policies to cutting out digital noise
Dig deep , rinse and repeat , benchmarking , obsessions over results is a continuous process , an organization can do with a helping hand here and leverage the best practices to make hypergrowth happen.