At Orange Pegs, experimentation is at the core of everything we do. Experimentation allows our clients to make informed marketing decisions that drive real growth by helping us identify the data that matters — and what might need more testing.
This year is actually a milestone for Orange Pegs as our company celebrates its tenth anniversary! Beyond celebrating this important benchmark, our growth marketing experts recognize how essential it is to also take inventory. Over this past decade, we’ve conducted thousands of experiments, worked with hundreds of clients, and helped influence millions of dollars of revenue.
OP Takes Inventory of Some of Our Biggest Growth Marketing Lessons Learned
What have we learned over the last ten years? Some of the biggest things that come to mind include:
- Prioritizing experiments based on how impactful they will be to your North Star will significantly impact your growth marketing efforts.
- Setting a frame of time in which to run your experiments ensures momentum always stays high — prioritizing analysis, optimization, and pivots to new experiments are crucial for growth!
- A healthy balance of acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral experiments sets the framework for a sustainable growth marketing foundation that lasts.
- More money spent does not necessarily mean more results.
- More leads do not necessarily mean better quality leads.
Most importantly, we reinforced something we already knew at Orange Pegs: There truly are NO losses in growth marketing — only insight gained, strategies adjusted, and lessons learned.
Establishing an Effective Growth Marketing Process Critical to Program Success
Mastering the many lessons learned when running a growth marketing company is critical — but it’s only half of what’s needed to drive better client outcomes. True success comes when knowledge influences the overall process, and that doesn’t always happen. Often, even the most insightful growth marketing agencies can understand how important these elements of growth are — but still don’t always have a proper growth marketing process in place.
Plus, with so much experimentation involved, how do you determine exactly how and where to make your next decision?
At Orange Pegs, we’ve developed a tool to combat this exact problem that we believe is the key to overcoming marketing roadblocks, stagnant growth, and ‘analysis paralysis’ on the road to achieving more of your North Star metric.
Developed by Orange Pegs’ team of growth marketing experts, Catalyst™ helps businesses and agencies track experiments and data to inform data-driven, actionable decisions.
Without a framework for making decisions influenced by data, marketing falls into a pitfall of guesswork — and, at Orange Pegs, we don’t believe in guessing. We prioritize answering essential questions at the core of successful growth strategies throughout the entire process. Core questions like:
- Should we keep testing this?
- Is this a high priority?
- How long should I let this experiment run?
- How impactful will this experiment be to my North Star goal?
- Is this experiment successful for what we set out to measure? OR — did it tell us something else?
Once we can answer those questions by looking at the data, we can simplify subsequent decision-making and ultimately increase better results.
Data-Informed Decision-Making With an Agile Mindset
We know that data-informed decisions drive more successful outcomes and support sustainable growth.
Along those same lines, adopting and regularly putting into practice an agile mindset can be another missing piece holding you back from achieving growth.
An Agile mindset means different things in different industries. In Growth Marketing, agility means assessing results, determining a strategy in response to the data, choosing a set time frame for the next steps of that experiment, then optimizing based on that strategy — and doing it all over again in the next sprint.
This brings us to the next point — agile marketers typically work in two-week sprints and consider every experiment a learning opportunity. By using set sprints, we can eliminate stagnation and always be iterating, always searching for even more data to support our claims.
Without a sprint in place, we’ve found that marketers get stuck in the same patterns of process over and over again without looking toward more growth.
Agile marketing means that your business can respond quickly to economic shifts and industry changes, increase the ability to scale, and adopt overall flexibility and adaptability.
With Catalyst™, an agile process comes naturally.
The Catalyst™ for Your Business or Your Clients' Business Growth
Remember: everything you are experimenting with influences your North Star Metric — the most important measurement of your business success.
Where traditional digital marketing tactics rely on surface or vanity metrics but do little to actually influence revenue in a sustainable way, growth experimentation has a direct impact on your North Star.
When executed properly, experimentation goes beyond surface measurements to provide deeper and more meaningful marketing wins.
Adopting the Catalyst™ tool and mindset is an adjustment. It is not like traditional marketing. But we’re super proud of that.
Here’s how it works:
All experiments are added to the Catalyst™ tool and sorted by where in the funnel they lie:
- Aquisition: lead generation/gathering of leads
- Activation: activating those leads and turning them into customers or purchases
- Revenue: experiments that directly generate revenue
- Retention: experiments geared toward keeping existing customers engaged and active
- Referral: anything that contributes to referral opportunities
We sort our experiments this way to make sure a healthy balance of experiments is realized.
Next, experiments are sorted by what stage of the funnel they are in:
- Benchmark: a brand new experiment
- Optimization: an optimization on a past experiment
- Validation: an experiment to validate our hypothesis on the success of something
- Standardization: an experiment we’ve determined to work well and that we will continue to run
The type of experiment comes next — is this a paid ad? A marketing landing page? A sales coaching experiment?
Finally — and arguably most importantly — we rank our experiments based on:
- Impact: to our North Star
- Confidence: where in the cycle this lies and how confident we are that it will work
- Ease of Execution: determined by the type of experiment and how heavy a lift that experiment will be
This ranking system is called the ICE System. By using an ICE System, we can clearly determine which exact experiments we should prioritize that will have the biggest impact on our marketing efforts.
The final step to this process is filling in details and effectively choosing exactly what those next steps look like. Think of Catalyst™ as your data-driven decision machine.
Trust the Process
With Catalyst™, all of your actions are driven by real data and are strategic in nature. Every move you make has purposeful reasoning behind it — nothing is done on a whim.
When done properly, the potential for growth and success is exponentially higher and the process of deciding the next steps in your strategy actually becomes easier because Catalyst™ is doing all the heavy lifting for you.
You may also notice that meetings are more efficient and your marketing budget stays on track, both happy side effects!
Catalyst™ was created to help achieve more frequent and more successful North Star wins. Trust the process and use the tools to streamline your marketing decisions and see clear results faster!
Schedule a Free Call With Our Team of Growth Marketers Today
Schedule a call with Orange Pegs' team of growth marketers today to learn more about leveraging the power of Catalyst™ in your online marketing campaigns.
Learn more about the agile prioritization model known as ICE and get a copy of Catalyst when you sign up for the Experimental Marketing Strategy course:
