Aka Why We’re Fired Up After the Alberta Growth Marketing Symposium
Earlier this week we were fortunate to be part of the inaugural Alberta Growth Marketing Symposium put on by Alberta Innovates. Featuring growth marketing leaders from Unbounce, GrowthHackers and MailShake as well as homegrown success story panelists from Jobber, Solium and Benevity, the event was notable for the palpable tech tingliness of the audience. People were learning in real-time, sharing ideas with their tablemates and getting advice to accelerate growth at their day jobs. All this traction talk has us pretty fired up. Following are a few of our key takeaways and (hey, it’s growth marketing, right!) our CTA* for the Alberta growth marketing community. (*Call to Action)
- Traction: There’s No Silver Bullet
Sujan Patel of MailShake shared an amazing amount of key insights on creating and approach and mindset for growth marketing. One key insight that stood out for us was this: there is no one traction channel that will be your silver bullet for growth; you need to test, iterate and be prepared to capitalize on multiple traction channels to get to growth.
- Landing Pages & Campaigns: We Go Together
Oli Gardner of Unbounce gave a super informative (and super funny) talk on landing pages rehab. So many pro-tips. (On this, check out John Pitchko’s recap to see his excellent summary of this session and more). The top idea that stands out from Oli’s talk was NSAMCWADLP (Never Start a Marketing Campaign without a Dedicated Landing Page). Boom!
- Alignment and Culture Fuels Growth Hacking
Next up was Dani Hart of GrowthHackers (full disclosure: we are Raving Fans of Growth Hackers!) Again, to be on trend, there were heaps of insights, anecdotes and ideas for eager marketers to glean from this part of the program. We may be biased, since we have a bent toward the power of intertwining Sales, Marketing, People and Product as the four areas that drive growth, but one of the key takeaways we took from Dani’s talk was the slide that stated the importance of alignment, or as she put it: “No individual or one team can outperform a company where everyone is mobilized to accelerate growth.” Yeah, what, Dani said! (To build on that, she also outlined 10 key ways that companies can create growth cultures. Swoon).
- Growth Marketing: We CAN Do it Here
Sadly, we didn’t get to hear the keynote Alberta success stories in Edmonton but we were lucky enough to hear James Thomas of Solium and Sona Khosla of Benevity speak on Wednesday afternoon in Calgary to share their respective company growth stories. Both spoke of the adventures, learnings along the way and the importance of a culture and mindset. The growth stories of these two scale ups differ but the takeaway for us from this session is shared: Yes, Alberta, we CAN do growth marketing that builds companies here. Too often we hear about the reasons why we can’t (don’t get us wrong, it’s hard and there are challenges to face, for sure) but these two Alberta scale ups show that as a province, that we can. Which leads us to…
- CTA for Alberta Growth Marketers: Let’s Do This!
As touched on above, the Growth Marketing Symposium was abuzz with marketers geeking out (in a great way) on new ideas, sharing advice and making new connections key kickstarting a community. So what’s next? Well, that’s where we all come in. What’s next is what we make of it and the time is now for Alberta Growth Marketers to take these ideas and excitement and get into action mode. In the whirlwind of early stage company adventures, it’s terribly easy to get into a mode where busy days blur together and in a blink some serious time has passed without taking action. So grab your North Star Metric, dive into some marketing experiments, test, iterate and keep the conversation going with other Alberta growth marketers. Let’s do this!