Applying growth hacking techniques on an enterprise software data startup

Abstract

This project focuses on how to implement growth hacking techniques to an enterprise software data start-up in order to determine which channels will be the most effective for their marketing strategy. We first define the problem faced by Soda Data: that they do not know which channels they should pursue for their marketing efforts and how should their marketing strategy be further developed going forward. We then further explain relevant literature regarding digital marketing, specifically in the B2B context. From the examination of literature, we found that social media marketing in the B2B context mostly focuses on using the medium for creating more one-to-one customer relationships in order to acquire more customers in the sales process. We further delved into the world of growth hacking: a marketing strategy used by start-ups for quick growth that is largely undeveloped in the academic literature. In order to solve the problems faced by Soda Data, we also developed a methodology based on growth hacking techniques which combine different types of methodologies, but in our case both design thinking and scrum for designing our experiments and running multiple iterations for testing each channel for effectiveness. We specifically used media richness theory and organizational media control theory in order to study which channels would be selected and to see if this theory can explain the results. For certain experiments, we also used A/B testing in order to see whether a certain message or design worked better with a target group. We divided our project into three stages: pre-conference, conference and post-conference stages. During the pre-conference stage, we tested channels related to two of the consumer personas of Soda Data: the data steward and the data engineer. We created a landing page and tried to get visitors to this page. We tested three different types of messaging and two different layouts of landing pages. During the conference phase, we gave support to the CEO of Soda Data while he attended a conference which had a mixed public of data practitioners. This also provided a channel to generate leads for the business. We developed a series of advertisements, connected with fellow attendees on LinkedIn, created a community on Slack and monitored social media activity live. In the post-conference stage, we tested an additional email campaign as a follow-up to the contacts gathered at the conference. We also started to develop a long-term marketing strategy using SEO and keywords on Google. From our experiments, we found that LinkedIn and emailing resulted in the highest response rate of 44% and 30.2% respectively. This reflects the current literature on social media B2B marketing which shows that B2B businesses largely focus on professional social media channels, and our results show that these channels are also more effective than the mass communication channels. Our results also indicate that organizationally controlled channels were the most effective. This could be because of the increased personal and one-to-one nature of B2B businesses, they need to more tightly control what the message is and to whom it is delivered. Based on these results, we also propose a growth hacking marketing funnel strategy. Our strategy focuses on the successful channels and driving potential leads into customers. This will serve as a marketing strategy guide for Soda Data going forward.