As mentioned in Chapter 3,
The Research phase should give us:
- Metrics to be focused on
- Data from any past experiments executed on those metrics
- Target audience and user personas
- List of competitors with similar marketing audiences
- Potential growth marketing channels
To understand the above, we need to go through the following steps:
- Deep dive into the existing data to find valuable data points
- Questionnaires with the startup founders and teams to dig for both qualitative and quantitative data
- Collecting all the data along with observations in a growth marketing research template
The Research Phase usually starts with a questionnaire.
This is a pre-growth marketing phase that involves a questionnaire to be filled by the founder or business owner or key decision-maker.
Questions vary from business to business and are designed based on the first interaction with the business. They may be different for each business based on their requirements and where they’re currently at in their startup or business phase.
With time, experience, and lots and lots of DATA, your gut feeling guides you to ask the right questions to your clients which then leads you to the right growth experiments.
A “right” growth experiment, here, refers to one that helps you achieve the desired OMTM and is scalable either by automation or by integration. (More on this in the Integration phase chapter)
One key output of the research phase is that it gives us the OMTM we need to focus on and some clarity on what data based research can help us get there.
In Chapter 5, we will take a deeper look into the Ideation Phase of growth marketing.