Growth marketing has acquired rockstar status in recent years. It’s hailed as the long-sought secret for producing explosive business growth in surprisingly short times on slim budgets. When Instagram was bought by Facebook for a head-spinning 1 billion dollars after just two years in business, growth marketing was the magic behind it.
But growth marketing is not a walk in the park or a skill to be mastered overnight. This approach is unique from traditional marketing as it is intensely data-based. It tests and experiments with novel strategies and ideas and then quickly executes them and quantifies the outcomes. It also focuses on the whole sales funnel, unlike conventional marketing, which focuses on the top. Growth marketing is a revolutionary strategy that can transform your way of doing business.
Who should use growth marketing?
Growth marketing isn’t for everybody. It embraces a trial and error mindset which may unsettle some. This experimental style values failures as steps leading to success — even at the risk of crashing and burning. If you are not inclined to analyze your campaign results, growth marketing may seem like groping in the dark.
Because it aims to succeed even on very slim budgets, growth marketing is favored for early-stage startups.
Benefits of growth marketing
- SEO benefits
You can discover high-performing keywords which can be used for your social media and website content. This is from data that is obtained, especially if you are running a PPC campaign and social media.
Your brand can connect better with your customers if it addresses their pain points or needs. You can do this by engaging with your audience via your social media platforms. Provide helpful information and answers to burning customer issues and go beyond what your competition does.
- Prevent PPC overload
PPC is effective but only to a point. Overdoing it can expend too many of your resources and competitors will finally match your funding and eliminate the ROI benefits. Growth marketing gives you more diversification which keeps your PPC within reasonable limits.
Building a growth marketing strategy
Coming up with a growth marketing strategy requires an original, clever, and innovative approach. It can be a mix of many methods such as SEO, A/B testing, viral marketing, or reverse engineering.
Common marketing strategies
- Leverage social media
Social media with its potential for generating viral communication and sharing can be used to generate massive growth. Powerful lead magnets such as resourceful webinars, or ebooks can be excerpted in social media can help convert your social media followers into customers.
- Start a blog
A blog is a powerful way to build authority and credibility. Crafting content that ranks high for your keywords, can also rank high with search engines. This can make your site easily found by visitors — leading to growth.
- Maximize search engine optimization (SEO)
In today’s intensely competitive 24/7 internet era, ranking is important. Without appearing at the top search engine results, you might as well not exist. This can also render all your growth efforts futile. SEO maximization provides the tools to keep you in the game and grow your business fast.
- Create a call to action (CTA)
A call to action is the part of your marketing message that directs your target market to do something. Never leave your audience guessing about what to do next after you have conveyed your promotional message. Often they needed to be prompted about the next step. A CTA is just what is needed for this situation. An effectively crafted and worded CTA should be clear, specific, and compelling. It can make a significant impact on your growth
- Engage influencers
In a business environment where customers are less trusting of brands, customers can be more trusting and receptive to people they trust. Word-of-mouth marketing through the use of influencers can work wonders to overcome mistrust and build a brand. An example is when you use celebrities such as the Kardashians or LeBron James in TV commercials to promote headphones. This type of marketing can help to reach a bigger audience, get more leads, drive traffic and sales.
- Build a mailing list
Building an email list is a great way to connect with your target market. You can speak directly with your prospects and because they have opted in, it signals interest and potential for conversions. This type of communication helps to humanize your business and also establish authority and credibility towards your audience.
- Create an affiliate program
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to achieve fantastic growth. It’s essentially the same as outsourced marketing, where you engage and pay affiliates for bringing customers to you. These customers are visitors who visit the affiliates’ websites. If your affiliates convert any of these visitors into customers, you pay them a commission for each conversion.
- Engage customers with chat
A live chat feature makes you more engaging with your customers than leaving them to browse your site entirely on their own. It is also unintrusive and therefore, more inviting. By attending promptly to visitors’ inquiries in this gentle, unobtrusive way, customers feel cared for, which can generate more conversions.
- Host webinars
Webinars give you the unique opportunity for engaging your audience directly for hours. It helps you to present yourself as an expert in your audiences’ eyes. It also focuses on soft selling so that you don’t have to resort to hard selling. The former is more appealing and feels less abrasive to your audience. Webinar content can be effective in overcoming objections and delivering value without overwhelming your audience.
- Develop customer personas
A buyer persona is a proxy for your target audience. It’s a fictional person that shares the same characteristic as your potential customers. Creating this customer persona gives you a profile of your ideal customer, detailing who they are, their dislikes, challenges, and habits. With this, you can easily tailor your buyer acquisition tactics to the buyer’s needs.