15 Articles on Growth and Marketing You Should Know About
Growth marketing continues to move at breakneck speeds. So how do you keep up with all of the new case studies and playbooks?
Well, we’ve put together a list of 15 articles on growth and marketing that you can start with.
In this list we have everything from building your growth engine and new customer acquisition strategies to founder stories on churn reduction.
Enjoy the articles!
1. How HelpScout Keeps Churn Rate Below 1%
Help Scout is a customer help desk software with over 6000 customers. While most startups at such scale find it difficult to keep churn rate below 3%, Help Scout has managed to keep it below 1%. Learn how they approach customer success and customer acquisition in this interview.
2. The First Step to Building a Growth Machine
Brian Balfour the CMO of HubSpot breaks down his process for building a growth machine. He believes a growth machine is built to produce an ever growing engaged user base. With the machine processing the tactics and the process making the machine. Bottom line: “Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse. You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine. “
3. Customer Development for Startups: What I Learned Talking to 500 Customers in 4 Weeks
Alex Turnbull shows us his process for gathering one-to-one customer feedback from 500 customers in 4 weeks. He uses a combination of Join.me, Doodle and Skype to connect with his customers. He also goes over the 7 big wins he uncovered from getting this qualitative feedback and how it will shape the future of Groove.
4. Customer Churn Can Kill Your Startup
Tom Blomfield goes over the key characteristics of SaaS businesses with low churn. He explains that some industries can combat churn by taking advantage of certain types of consumer behavior like creating an emotional response with your product positioning and brand.
5. Optimize Content for Lead Generation
Nate Desmond goes over how to approach a leaky lead acquisition funnel by increasing exposure, reducing friction and increasing incentive. Tactics include adding downloadable content to the end of blog posts and creating your own podcast.
6. 3 Little Changes to Increase Average Revenue Per Account by 296%
Matthieu Vaxelaire goes over his strategy for changing Mentions’ pricing structure which lead to a huge increase ARPA. Tactics include unbundling features and stopping promotion of their free plan.
7. Is my Startup Burn Rate Normal?
Danielle Morrill started a great conversation on Medium that goes over the startup burn rates of her company MatterMark as well as Buffer, AdEspresso and others. This financial transparency is an interesting trend that many startups are taking part in.
8. How to Use Text to Help with Retention
Ashli Norton goes over how you can use automated SMS to battle customer retention and churn. By monitoring customer activity and billing cycles you can increase customer happiness and get quality feedback about your product.
9. How to do an In-depth Content Audit
The team at Buffer break down the framework for conducting a comprehensive content audit of your sites’ blog. “When your archives are bursting with content, it could very well be time for a look back to see what has worked and what could be made even better.”
10. HowAboutWe Founder Shares His Thoughts on Startup Growth Strategies
Aaron Schildkrout gives us a detailed analysis of the growth strategy for howaboutwe. He covers the problems that most consumer-focused startups encounter and what he’s learned using different customer acquisition channels.
11. Y-Combinator Startup School Interactive Notes
A well-designed collection of quotes from this years Startup School. Here’s a couple notable quotes from Jawbone Founder Hosain Rahman, “Ruthlessly focus on what you’re trying to solve.” and Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom “Be relentless, everyone will tell you your idea is wrong.”.
12. Before You Plan the Product Road-Map
Des Traynor breaks down how they approach product feature audits. Including the user behavior analysis they use to understand why a feature isn’t being used and what you can do about it.
13. Financing the Unicorn Club
Tomasz Tunguz goes over the key financing attributes of venture-backed startups with billion-dollar valuations. An interesting analysis that shows consumer companies have a median valuation 67% higher than enterprise companies.
14. How To Use Side-Projects To Increase Traffic and Conversions
Mikael Cho shows us how the strategy of developing side projects like Unsplash, LaunchThisYear, HowMuchDoesAnAppCost and MoodBoard. He also shows the ROI they’ve received from the projects and how it leads to conversions on their main site Crew.
15. Interview with Jesse Farmer Former CTO of Everlane and Founder of CodeUnion
On this episode of GrowthEverywhere Jesse Farmer explains his experience growing Everlane and his new venture CodeUnion. CodeUnion helps people learn programming by pairing students with mentors for intensive 7-hour per day courses.