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Marketing is all about the numbers

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Kevin Sandlin

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Tonight we got a special treat at our #DGM2 class: Maria Joyner of Synapp.io laid down the growth hacking truth on the class, setting the bar very high for our next three guest speakers. Who knew that Synapp.io was her first salaried job? The key to Maria’s success?

“Find a startup that’s killing it, and take credit for all their success.”

As a growth hacker, here’s what Maria has done since starting work at Synapp.io:

  • email marketing
  • rebranding the Synapp.io web site
  • relaunch the web site
  • a/b testing
  • building out the support team
  • Moving into the new office
  • interviews for a sh**load of new employees
  • product management
  • API integration for partners
  • work with web site designers 
  • write cookbooks
  • learn basic HTML and markdown

What the heck does any of that have to do with digital marketing? Everything, and segmentation. That’s startup life. If you work for a huge company, you’ll do one of these things. At a startup, you’ll do all these and more. Learning basic coding is very helpful to anyone in a startup, but specifically for a growth hacker.

So we’re now in our 4th week of Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, and these new marketers are rapidly learning that “digital marketing” is far less about fun web sites, apps, and banner ads, and far more about the numbers, and Maria helped drive that home with a thorough talk on customer segmentation.

Last week, we slogged through a couple of sessions of Google Analytics. Now that we’ve slayed that beast, tonight we dug into the world of data analysis and visualization. You know what that means, right? Excel. In all its glory. Microsoft Excel, whose replacement has been the motivation for hundreds of SaaS startups, still rules the day when it comes to analyzing data.  In fact, just today, I retweeted this gem:

That’s right. #4 behind three kinds of software gurus is the person who is most adept at making sense of all that data. I got my first promotion out of B-school because I could make an Excel spreadsheet sing with pre-IPO numbers. Remember: marketing is all about the numbers that go into the top of the funnel and the percentage that make it out the bottom of the marketing funnel and into the loyalty loop.

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