Why Growth Experiments Matter

What is a Growth Experiment?

A growth experiment or a growth test is a structured test of a hypothesis that is designed to generate learnings about how to grow a business. Experiments should be designed to answer specific questions, and the results should be used to inform decisions about what actions to take next in order to grow the business.

5 Reasons to Run Growth Experiments

You've generated a list of growth ideas, prioritized them, and now you're ready to execute. But reframing growth ideas as experiments requires an extra step. Instead of taking ideas straight from planning to execution, you need a testing plan. But if your team is resource constrained, why does this additional step matter?

Avoid Confirmation Bias

Documenting a hypothesis and defining success metrics before launching an experiment is one of the best ways to mitigate confirmation bias. When you’re moving quickly, it’s all too easy to misremember why you decided to test a specific tactic or channel, or misinterpret the results of a test. Having a detailed growth experiment to refer to is a simple way to improve your team’s decision hygiene.

Lower Barrier to Entry

Running growth experiments is more budget conscious than traditional marketing, because each marketing dollar is allocated to learning AND growth. Consider designing ‘Minimum Viable Experiments’ — i.e. what’s the leanest way to test whether this idea or channel will perform? Instead of launching a multi-channel ad campaign, start with a small test to de-risk the concept, creative, or messaging.

Flywheel Effect

Whether Experiments validate or invalidate a hypothesis, what you learn informs future experiments, and nothing is wasted. There are no failed experiments when the emphasis is on learning instead of outputs.

Reduce Risk

Each experiment you launch reduces the risk and uncertainty in your business model. Without a learning plan, you may still run successful campaigns and reduce risk over time, but you’re more likely to skip the step of documenting learnings, and lose the benefit of insights drawn from each campaign or tactic.

Promote a Growth Mindset

Finally, when marketing is focused on running experiments instead of executing campaigns, this builds a culture of experimentation and promotes a growth mindset. Executing campaigns and tactics are a vehicle not only for business growth, but also audience insights, operational efficiencies, skillset improvements, and team building.

Whether you’re just getting your growth engine started, or shifting away from traditional marketing planning to a more iterative approach, it’s never too late to apply an experimentation approach to your growth planning.

If you’re struggling to get started, try my Growth Experiment Canvas template in Google Slides. Inspired by Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas, it’s a quick and easy way to start outlining your first growth experiment, collaborate with your team, keep track of your hypothesis, and compile ideas and links for inspiration. Feel free to create a copy, share, and adapt for your next experiment.

Questions?

Still have questions about launching your first experiment? Looking for additional support? Email me at meredith@springframe.co anytime.