Growth Hacking For Dummies
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Webster’s Dictionary defines an audit as “a methodical examination and review.” Though you typically hear of it in the context of taxes, in the growth hacking context, the intent is much the same. A growth audit, then, is just an exploration of your current growth strategy undertaken in order to understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

The whole point of such a growth hacking analysis should be to help identify how your business grows today and potential areas of opportunity (or trouble) in the future. It should allow you to “zoom out” and ask bigger questions about why you do the things you do and whether they’re still the right things to continue doing. You may just find that conditions have changed since the initial setup — meaning that you no longer need to do things a certain way.

If you’re familiar with the five interconnected phases known as Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, or DMAIC, used as part of Lean Six Sigma initiatives, the intent of a growth audit is similar, where you analyze a specific process for waste and inefficiency and put in place mechanisms to improve it moving forward.

If you’re the first growth hire, performing an audit is imperative to your success. It can take some time to get all the information you need, given how mature the data culture of your organization is. You may also need to spend time convincing key stakeholders, including your boss and even the CEO, about the importance of this activity on future growth hacking campaigns.

Growth requires buy-in at the highest levels, and generating support for this activity is as important as running weekly tests.

You want to learn three main outcomes as a result of this growth audit:
  • What’s the current state of growth of the business?
  • What key numbers is the business measuring?
  • What is the business using to measure these numbers?

Assessing the current state of growth of your business

Think of this assessment like you would an annual health checkup. As part of this, you want to understand the answers to these questions:
  • What is the North Star Metric (NSM), and what is its trend?

You may find that the company you’ve joined hasn’t identified this yet, and you may have to talk to the executive team to help them understand the importance of this metric and the need to define one.

As part of this assessment, you also need to investigate revenue growth. Logically, if you’ve picked the right NSM, you should see a correlation to revenue growth as well.

  • What are the main forces behind its current trend?

The cause(s) may be changes within acquisition channels or it may have something to do with the product, which is something you need to determine. You will have to start to gain a handle on the growth hacking model for the business to understand the big picture of what the customer journey looks like and conversion rates at each stage.

Exploring key business measurements for growth hacking

As you answer questions regarding key business measurements, you start to get a deeper look at the growth model and understand all the numbers the business believes to be important. This will be, by definition, a detailed look at the customer journey.

Retention rate, customer growth rate, and annual contract/order volumes should be among the key numbers you look at here, and they will all bear some correlation to your North Star Metric (NSM).

As you dig into the numbers, you will likely need to understand the history behind them as well. This will mean deeper conversations with key stakeholders to find out how they arrived at those numbers.

If the organization has a history of running tests, you’ll also want to dig into past objectives and see which tests were run. These objectives and tests should map to hypotheses to grow numbers the business says it cares about. As a result, you'll also gain an appreciation for what the growth process — however informal — has been so far. You’ll also learn about any existing challenges in executing the growth process, whether those are related to people resources or other matters.

Evaluating the tools that businesses can use to measure their numbers for growth hacking

As a by-product of learning key numbers, you’ll start to be able to answer questions about the growth stack of the company— all the tools used for growth-related activities across the customer journey, in other words.

You will of course learn about all the tools in use. But you should ask other questions, like these:

  • Are these tools integrated in some way to provide comprehensive reporting, or is reporting done on an individual basis?
  • Do the tools provide a complete picture of the customer journey, or are there gaps?
  • How much detail is in the data from each tool?
  • Can you trust the data?
  • Do you see any discrepancies?
Without asking questions like these, you will never know whether you have opportunities to influence the health of the data the company relies on. It helps to be systematic about this. Don’t forget to document these questions and their answers in a central document so that you have you a comprehensive view of your next growth hacking steps.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Anuj Adhiya learned growth hacking as a community moderator and then Director of Engagement and Analytics at GrowthHackers (founded by Sean Ellis, who coined "growth hacking"). He's mentored and coached a number of startups on the growth methodology at Harvard Innovation Labs & Seedstars. He's currently the VP of Growth at Jamber.

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