Siddharth Bharath

Date: August 23, 2017 Name: How to identify your top growth channels that will hit your marketing goals Presenter: Siddharth Bharath Successful entrepreneurs need to identify their growth opportunities for their businesses. Moreover, they can focus the right resources at the right target. Vancouver Growth Hackers meetup invites Siddharth Bharath, the Vice President of Growth at Thinkific, to discuss the strategies to discover the top growth channels for any business. In this presentation, Siddharth Bharath will share his personal 5 step system to determine the growth channels. In addition, entrepreneurs will learn how to prioritize and determine where to focus their resources, hit their targets and expand their team. Siddharth Bharath is the Vice President of Growth at Thinkific. He helps many young entrepreneurs to start their new business and provide innovative solutions to their business problems. He was the Marketing Manager for LemonStand and the Founder of The Adventure Inc, and Treadalong. Currently, he is also the Content Marketing Consultant for Siddharth Bharath Marketing, where he focuses on content marketing for business owners. “I’m full of shit, but its good shit” Bharath believes finding the right growth channel is essential for any business. Many entrepreneurs are using the wrong approaches. In addition, Bharath realizes there is a way to tie in the framework and processes to reach growth goals. In business, many entrepreneurs receive conflicting advices from too many different options. To achieve growth, many entrepreneurs are having the shiny object syndrome, which causes them to keep switching different marketing strategies. They do not give enough channel time. Because of changes, many current skills are not leading to the right goals and marketing trends are not identified in advance. Many entrepreneurs are placing them in situations with a lack of research based on what they think they need. They are ignoring obvious ROI. Bharath indicates there is a need to systemize the way to identify high ROI. He designs a 5-step system to help entrepreneurs. Step #1: Customer Persona It is important for entrepreneurs to understand who they are selling to and where are their customers online. Entrepreneurs need to look for their background, demographic, identifiers, goals and challenges. They also need to identify how their customers help others, their real quotes, their common objections, marketing message, elevator pitch and their social message. Bharath identifies the major problem with research is that it does not tell the mental state of the customer at current moment. It is hard to tell if they are ready to buy. Therefore, timing is important factor to be relevant. Step #2: Customer Journey Bharath believes there are 5 steps in any customer journey.

1. Unaware
2. Problem Aware
3. Solution Aware
4. Product Aware
5. Decision

Entrepreneurs need to understand each channel that triggers the customer from one stage to another. Example of the channels are blogs, video, articles, friends influence, or story. It is important to understand customer’s mindset; be in their shoes and walk their journey. Entrepreneurs can help customer build their persona’s journey. By understand each step, entrepreneurs will know how ready their customers are willing to purchase. In addition, entrepreneurs can create the most relevant channels to help customers through their journey. Step #3: Bullseye Once entrepreneurs discover their highest ROI channels, they need to do resource optimization. Bharath wants entrepreneurs to take all the channels and categorize them into 3 different sections inner circle, promising, and long shot. Entrepreneurs will start their work in the inner circle section immediately. The key is to create fast results for customers to move from solution aware to product aware. One channel can affect multiple stages, so scalability is something entrepreneurs need to consider. Other things Bharath wants entrepreneurs to consider are cost, time, money, human capital, and speed of traction. Step #4: Experiments During this step, entrepreneurs still need to make assumptions. They need to test their channels before invest. Bharath shares a process called “High Temp Testing Growth Process”. It starts from unbridled ideation, prioritize backlog, launch tests, capture growth and repeat back to unbridled ideation. This is a cycle process. Bharath suggests entrepreneurs to start with a theory, execute quick test and then gather results. If the result is valid, it is time to scale up. If the result is invalid, it is time to begin another channel. Step #5: Scaling After entrepreneurs narrow down the right channels, they need to scale up. Bharath provides 3 options: automate, outsource, and hire. Entrepreneurs should automate repeatable tasks, such as lead identification. They should outsource all non-brand tasks, such as link building. Lastly, they will hire brand-related tasks, such as content or partnership. “Action beats perfection” Questions and Answers After the task of lead identification, Bharath will categorize them into different lists based on what information they can find. These should be automated. Entrepreneurs need to test as much channel as possible. To track experiments, Bharath will use Google Docs online and share them with other teammates. They will document their hypothesis, execution, results, learning outcomes, and action to go forward. During the experiment level, Bharath will stick to the channel until there is a result. Blog can take a while to test, so Bharath suggests entrepreneurs to do advertisement experiment with the title to see if people are willing to click it. When the testing shows that there is no problem with the copy, it normally means there is a problem in the message. If there is no traffic, it is the channel. Bharath indicates the best way to know the right channel is to analyze the audience during the stage of customer research. See what triggers them to go to the next step.