How does user operation find growth targets?

This article uses the basic growth equation mentioned in the book "Growth Hacker" and combines the author's work experience to explain the necessity of setting clear growth goals and how to set them, and puts forward several things that should be paid attention to when setting growth goals.

When it comes to growth, the first word that comes to mind is probably “growth hacker.” This is a word that has been mentioned frequently in the past two years, especially now that the price of traffic has increased a lot compared to before.

How to achieve growth more effectively is an issue that companies and teams are very concerned about. Based on my own work experience, the author will explain how I actually achieve growth.

I believe that the first step in executing growth is to set clear growth goals.

What is the growth target?

The growth target itself is a modifier-modifier phrase. We add the word "的" in the middle and it becomes "the growth target". Growth is used to modify the target, and the target is further interpreted as an object and a subject is added.

Therefore, the interpretation of growth goals is: the object of growth that the team subjectively wants to achieve.

Take actual work as an example: the business I work for is particularly dependent on the conversion rate of landing pages. After combining other factors, improving the conversion rate of landing pages is set as the team's growth goal.

Here, the landing page conversion rate is what the team wants to achieve growth.

Why do you need to set clear growth targets?

A clear growth target can bring benefits in three ways:

1. Keep the team focused during execution. In actual work, there are usually various interference factors. Clear goals can help the team eliminate interference and stay focused during the execution process.
2. Provide a fulcrum for the team's next work. Setting growth goals is equivalent to determining the direction of work, which makes it easier for the team to break down the work;
3. Establish common understanding among the team and reduce disputes. Growth work requires teamwork. A clear goal can enable team members to have the same understanding, collaborate better at work, and improve efficiency.

Taking the improvement of landing page conversion rate as an example, it corresponds to user activation in the AARRR model. After clarifying the growth target, it brings us the following benefits in our work:

• Let the traffic acquisition team know that we will work closely together to drive growth targets.
• Let other relevant teams know the next growth focus and provide support in advance;
• Our team members started from the factors that affect page conversion rate, split them up, and continuously verified the hypothesis through experiments to ultimately achieve our goal.

The AARRR model is an abbreviation of the words Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Refer. It is an important model to describe the user life cycle of a product.

User activation: refers to converting acquired users into real users through this step.

Different products have different definitions of activation. For example, for products with strong account ties, user registration can be considered activation; while for tool-type products, users who use core functions can be counted as activations.

How to find growth targets?

To achieve overall sustained growth, multiple related factors are usually required to interact and grow together. The process of determining growth targets is to identify the multiple factors that affect growth and then select the factors that need attention.

We can determine the specific implementation through two steps:

1. Develop your own basic growth equation based on your business;
2. Based on the current situation of the product, select the growth target from the basic growth equation.

How do you create your own basic growth equation?

Here we need to explain what the basic growth equation is?

In "Growth Hacker", the author mentions the basic growth equation: all key factors related to growth are reflected in this equation, and these factors combined drive the company's growth.

In other words, this equation is a collection of your core growth levers.

In addition, in my understanding, formulating your own basic growth equation has another function: it allows growth personnel to have a "big picture view" and not bring negative impacts to the overall situation for the sake of growth in a certain link.

How do you specifically formulate your own basic growth equation?

From the definition we know that the final output of the equation is “the company’s growth”.

That is: company growth = XX factor + XX factor

• Determine what growth is at the company level;
• Break down the factors that affect company growth and follow the principle of mutual independence.

There are generally two types of growth at the company level: user growth and revenue growth.

The main revenue model of the company I work for is to charge service fees from teacher-signed users.

There are two main sources of users: one is users acquired through online traffic, and the other is users introduced by word of mouth.

The business process of the two types of users is shown in the figure:

Online traffic users:

Word of mouth referral users:

In business, company-level growth is defined as revenue growth. Next, we will break down the factors that affect the company's revenue.

Company income = teacher signing service fee = number of users Teacher signing rate Average service fee = (number of traffic users + number of word-of-mouth users) Teacher signing rate Average service fee = (traffic page conversion rate Customer return visit conversion rate + number of word-of-mouth users) Teacher signing rate Average service fee

Here we assume that the signing rates of various channels are the same, but in reality they are different.

From this, we developed a basic growth equation based on our own business.

How do you find your growth target in the basic growth equation?

First, determine if there is already a factor in the equation that needs to be improved? If so, give it priority.

For example, in the early days, through the collected past data, we found that our page conversion rate had significantly lowered the final value of the entire equation. At this time, the page conversion rate was naturally our first growth target.

Secondly, give priority to factors that provide better input-output ratios.

Resources are always limited. Prioritizing factors with better input-output ratios can improve the growth of the entire equation faster and allow us to spend less time verifying the results.

Things to keep in mind when setting growth targets

Growth goals should be clear and measurable

As a growth target, it must be able to be digitized.

Taking the author’s business as an example, when determining growth goals, we cannot just say “increase page conversion rate”, but we must clearly specify how much we want to increase it to, so that we can measure the effectiveness of the subsequent work.

How to digitize the goal and how much to define it needs to be decided based on actual conditions.

Growth goals are agreed upon by the team

Growth requires teamwork. A recognized goal will make it easier to advance execution in subsequent work and better achieve our goals.

Growth targets should be dynamic

The stage of a product is constantly changing, so the growth targets will also change constantly. In actual work, timely adjustments should be made, and sometimes it is even necessary to focus on several goals at the same time (focus does not mean specific execution).

I personally recommend focusing on several goals at the same time, so that the growth team can pay more attention to the overall situation.

Don’t ignore the impact of current growth targets on other aspects

Growth is never a single link, but a whole. We should not negatively affect other links in order to grow a certain link.

Here is an extreme example:

In order to improve the page conversion rate, the methods used are divorced from actual business, such as giving a 100 yuan red envelope for leaving a mobile phone number, without verifying the authenticity of the mobile phone number. In this way, the page conversion rate may be significantly improved.

However, if the customer service in the next link cannot be converted and the labor efficiency is greatly reduced, the gain will not outweigh the loss.

Author: Nan

Source: South