Growth Marketing 101 with Nicole Liu

In our latest Giants Weekly session, we were joined by Kin Fertility founder Nicole Liu to shed light on the science of growth marketing. Here, Nicole unpacks what is growth marketing, what metrics are important and what strategies early stage startups can explore.

Watch Nicoles’s presentation in full below, or read on for her unbounded wisdom condensed into our key takeaways.

What is Growth Marketing?

“Being a growth marketer is like being a scientist” says Nicole.” It’s all about data-driven experimentation, feedback loops and constant iteration. There are three ways it differs from conventional marketing:

1. Goals: You measure all funnel metrics (especially Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC)
2. Teams: Teams are cross-functional (engineers, marketers & product managers) as opposed to just the creatives
3. Process: Instead of a set budget, you actively adjust spend when something is or isn’t working

As Nicole explains, the best description of growth marketing is through framing it through its objectives:

• Harvest attention: Capture audience’s attention and drive engagement.
• Create frictionless customer experience: Turn attention into trust with an experience that solves key customer problems.
• Add value and monetise: Turn trust into insight by iterating on feedback.

Metrics You Should Care About

So what should you measure when you use growth marketing? The two key metrics are Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value ( LTV). It’ the relationship between CAC/LTV that drives how fast your business can grow sustainably.

The higher your LTV, the more you can afford to spend on CAC. Just as the more efficient you get your CAC, the more you can spend to grow. Knowing these metrics enables you to double down on channels that are efficient and pull out of channels that aren't. In growth marketing, budget is no longer a set amount, it’s dynamic and changes based on the CAC/LTV relationship.

Some say the golden rule is that LTV shouldn’t be 3x CAC, but Nicole points out that it is too context specific. All that matters is that growth is sustainable.

Growth Marketing Strategies

So you want to be a growth marketer? You don’t need to be a creative whiz or even come from a marketing background. You just need to have a learning mentality and be prepared to test and learn new things.

The first step is to build mechanisms for fast feedback loops, this will allow you to try different experiments.

“No one will tell you how to market your product better than your customers will.”
Nicole Liu

Use your customer insights to begin testing what you think your key unique value propositions are in a low cost way.

1. Choose 1-2 key channels where your target market is most likely to find you
2. Launch direct messaging campaigns with a focus on each of your value propositions
3. Measure what’s working and what isn’t
4. Get early feedback from customers about what resonates and what doesn’t
   

At Kin Fertility, every product review goes to a Slack channel with every employee in the company. Nicole advocates for this because customer feedback can be used to inform every part of the business from the core product to landing pages to emails.

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