In Dec 2018, Growth Marketer Academy has organised the 1st growth marketing conference in HK at Tencent Westart. It gathered speakers from eBay, KKDay, SCMP, FoodPanda, Lalamove, MoneySmart etc. to share their growth tactics & experience with 150+ marketers & founders from startups & corporates. The attendees not only gained insights about growth marketing by sitting in front of the screen, but also had chances to interact with the 8 growth experts after their sharing. Growth Marketing Academy has summarised their valuable insights into 3 articles for your reference. Want to get hands dirty and learn actionable growth tactics? Come get more details of our intensive boot camp!
How Foodpanda’s Head of Marketing Think
Established its presence in HK 4 years ago, one of the world’s largest food marketplace, foodpanda, has been showing promising growth in its business in HK. Talking about the cheat sheet to terrific user growth, Alex Law, the Head of Marketing of foodpanda, attributes the above to their “Multiple-channel Marketing Strategy”. As the steerer of such growth, he defines his role as below: A lead of growth should enable everyone to drive growth on every aspect.
Formulate Fittest Strategy with the Old-but-gold Funnel
“Doing marketing in start-up is ultimately to achieve behavioral change. The way that works for Coca-Cola and P&G does not work for us. We have got less resources and the consumers are unfamiliar with our products. But the perk of a startup lies in that we’ve got a flat structure, which enables units to cooperate more seamlessly, and this is what I mean by driving growth on every aspect.”
The action points of “old-but-gold funnel” is identified as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, and Advocacy. As in the below flow chart, listing out the actions do-able in different stages of the funnel can make what-can-be-do and who-to-do crystal clear. The growth can be scientific, traceable, and significant if we are clear about what can be done in different touch points in a user journey.
The Next Step after Identifying Action Points – Setting Priorities!
Having listed out so many action points, do we really need all of them at the moment? Surely not, and it all depends on the condition of your business. For instance, when we were really in the very preliminary stage of our business, we have to raise awareness by different kinds of ads and offline promotions, be it to customers or to riders. Now that the market is starting to embrace the concept of food delivery, what we have to focus now is the overall user journey, such as food delivery time, loyalty program, and even the UX of our website.
Half a year ago, foodpanda launched its service in the Southern Island District. What foodpanda has done before rolling out the marketing campaign for this launch is that it identified the aspects that they should work on, and then prioritised them. In such case, obviously they can rule out “loyalty” and “advocacy” as they just started to serve South Island District. Another aspect that they can be lighthearted is “awareness” as foodpanda and food delivery were already not something new in HK. The only kind of “awareness” that they have to raise was that they would launch services in these new places, and this is why they have made efforts in social media and offline roadshow. It ended up focusing on “consideration” and “purchases” – giving vouchers such as free delivery for the district. In a nutshell, the funnel is just a model, the gist of foodpanda’s terrific growth lies in identifying all action points in the user journey, subsequently prioritising them as per the company’s status quo.
How Relatable is the Funnel to MoneySmart?
MoneySmart is a platform that aggregates and consolidates financial product’s information for consumers, helping them make better financial decisions. Based in Singapore, it started its plan to expand to Hong Kong last year. Ranking 5th in the market means that it is not easy at all for them to stand out from its crowds of competitors. Elizabeth Kwong, its head of content, achieved the overall traffic growth of 570.09%, organic search traffic growth of 7,626.07% and CPA volume growth of 8,185.96% in 4 months. Sounds fancy right? But how?
If we adopt the old-but-gold funnel to MoneySmart, probably the stage that concerns MoneySmart most is “awareness”, given their rank as the 5th competitor in the field. Elizabeth said that content undoubtedly is the key driver of their “awareness”. But except content, the recipe that differentiates them from their 4 competitors lies in 3 ingredients, namely, good brand values, data integration, and good user journey.
Brand Values and Content Strategy of MoneySmart
MoneySmart’s most distinguished image is that it provides customer-centric recommendation on consumers’ financial decision. This is based on their survey on credit card in 2018, the 3 most influential ways of communication are comparison site, friends’ recommendation, and online articles.
Dissection of Its Content Funnel
Elizabeth said the content of MoneySmart can be primarily divided into 2 kinds: One for engagement and one for actions. Engagement-driving content would target wider audience by writing on hottest topics. By working on keywords statistics and backlink SEO, MoneySmart writes content that covers wide audience. However, this does not mean that all of its contents are indistinguishably for all of its audience. On the contrary, MoneySmart does attempt to segment their audience. For example, the company would write on tips to Asia Miles to both the young professional and mature adult since the two groups would probably have different lifestyle and financial status.
After preliminary engagement, MoneySmart would show action-driving articles which provide more personalised recommendation to visitors in order to convert them to retentions and even to users. This requires the support of the result of segmentation done above, plus the help of technology, e.g. data management platform (DMP).
Cooperation between IT team and Growth Team
“SEO and Content are not standalones”, said Elizabeth. “They require support from DMP which provides insight of their blog visitors, plus other technological efforts as well.” Another strategy would be their attempt to improve UX of MoneySmart. In response to HKMA’s new policy to open its API, MoneySmart will develop a new user experience which does not require users to leave MoneySmart’s page when applying for financial products after getting recommendation from them. The initial test in Singapore has won 38% growth in conversion rate. The reason that contributes to MoneySmart’s hypergrowth lies not only in its careful design of content funnel, but also technologies of data management platform and its ever-improving user journey, i.e. a comprehensive approach of marketing within the funnel.
foodpanda and MoneySmart have got very different background, industry, and scale of business. However, both of their lead of growth place heavy emphasis on growing on every aspect and customers’ overall user journey. Plus, both of their success can be modelled by the old-but-gold funnel.