Use design thinking in growth marketing

As a junior staff when I started my consulting career, my bosses expected me to sell and develop our services. It has therefore become part and parcel of my career development to build and develop business at an early stage of my career.

Maybe I was naive and am still an infant in sales and marketing. The disruption caused by the pandemic was another wake-up call to me. I need to transform my approach to sales and marketing. I saw how exponential technologies are disrupting businesses and industries, and hence the need for organizations to transform their sales and marketing in the last ten years.

When I was running Genovasi, I learned the need to develop and execute marketing strategies that aim to create awareness and convert the opportunity to sign-up for our courses. Creating awareness and impression that is long-lasting is essential to build loyalty and communities of influencers.

At that time, we have tried and tested many approaches to reach out to our target audience. We used social media channels and traditional channels such as printed media and radio broadcasts. Besides reaching out to the young fresh graduates and working professionals and entrepreneurs, we developed market messaging aim at their parents or guardians, as well as the employers.

We did not have any defined tool to assess the effectiveness of the various channels - we did not have any marketing automation tool nor marketing analytics/dashboards to track and measure the results. We measure the results based on actual sales (or signups) converted. Simple signups league table.

After I left Genovasi, I had the opportunity to learn about various aspects of growth marketing: data-driven marketing campaign, structured digital marketing, unique selling propositions, customer engagement programs, branding. I learned that having the right and relevant market messaging is critical to generate the market results required. It is important to collect and analyze market data results so that market messaging can be quickly tweaked.

I was intrigued by how I could apply the design thinking methodology in growth marketing. I have presented below an illustration of how to create market messaging to deliver a product's unique value proposition using the design thinking methodology.

After all, the design thinking process provides a structured creative problem-solving approach.