Designing a Team to Align With The Goal

Thomas expertly explains that understanding the structure and scale of a company ultimately defines the kind of team to put together for each stage of the growth funnel. The key here is to identify one metric that matters for every step forward you take in the growth funnel and dedicate a team to improve that metric constantly.

The three most important stages of the growth funnel that Thomas identifies, along with their respective KPIs, are:

• The brand awareness stage. Here, the cost-per-awareness metric defines how efficient your strategies are for this stage of the growth funnel. The team you build for this stage needs to get more people to know the brand.
• The conversion stage. Here, you are trying to get the visitors to turn into your customers. Metrics like cost per sale or cost per subscriber are the KPI. A team dedicated to fine-tuning these metrics to the goal of your business is what will drive growth.
• The retention stage. At this stage, you need to create a team that focuses on consumer engagement through media like emails.

It all boils down to “the experience you are trying to give to your customer, therefore what kind of team should you have, and then what goal should they be aligned around so that everybody knows what their job and target is,” Thomas says.

Matthias adds that having a clear idea of the company mission and vision helps tailor strategies around them, which ultimately helps create cohesive teams.

Retaining Customers

“It depends on the core emotion that you are trying to elicit and how you can continue to give that feeling to people,” emphasizes Thomas.

A lot of it is defined by the company and its products – what is the thing that you’re selling, and what emotion it evokes in the buyers. You want to keep triggering that emotion in your customers as you engage with them if you wish to improve retention.

You can leverage three ways to deliver this experience to your consumer: trigger emails, your products, and paid advertisements. Personalizing the content tailored around this emotion to customer needs and preferences creates a favorable environment for sales and retention.

User Activation 

Matthias deftly explains how user encouragement to start using the services of a brand relies heavily on building trust. Thus, activation is ultimately achieved through a three-step process, of which building trust in the customers is the first one.

The second step constitutes identifying the friction the customer faces in his experience with the brand and working towards smoothing it out. The third step highlights Matthias, accelerating the time to value, which is crucial in a customer’s journey with a brand. How long should a customer engage with your brand until the advertised value is delivered to him? The lesser this time, the better the activation would be.

Timing the delivery of engagement elements to the customer is a tricky aspect a brand must perfect through studying consumer behavior and expectations. User research, Matthias stresses, is the way to do that. “Going out there and talking with your users is going to help you learn how you can apply the feedback to the user experience throughout their brand journey to promote trust.”

The Key Takeaway

“Growth should come from the product – you shouldn’t force growth into the product,” Matthias states. Instead, focusing every effort into creating a product and crafting an incredible journey towards it and with it for the customer ultimately impacts how the people love it.

Thomas adds to the same principle by mentioning that caring for your brand and its products at a personal level creates visible and apparent value as day to the customers. It is the collective effort that drives growth, not an individual or a single team or two. The whole brand functions as a single entity – it is the people and the organization’s culture that helps it grow.