If you have managed a business for some time, one thing you must have realised is that setting up the business is just the first step. Many more steps are required to get it from being that new venture into your dream enterprise. One of such vital steps involves planning and executing a growth marketing strategy. For most businesses, the question that comes to mind include –
- What is growth marketing?
- How does it compare to regular/traditional marketing?
- What set of skills are required to execute a growth marketing strategy effectively?
To shed more light on this increasingly popular area of interest, we will answer the questions listed above. Then share some essential tips for growth marketers to leverage in 2021.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is data-driven, full-funnel marketing; it is based on rapid experimentation. It involves combining resources from multiple teams within the business, including marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams, to meet the customer’s needs across multiple touchpoints.
Effective growth marketing optimises the product for the highest percentage of its customers by dissolving the line between marketing and the product. Then leverage test data to identify the best combination of medium and messaging for customer retention.
Growth Marketing VS Traditional marketing
Marketing involves putting your products and services in front of the ideal audience willing to pay your set price tag to utilise the value offered. This description is for marketing in the traditional sense. It is focused on making users aware of the product offerings with the hope that they make purchases.
Marketing is constantly evolving. These days we can properly craft an end-to-end customer journey. We can also define the brand’s communication and engagement path on each customer, with a lot more certainty based on available data. Designing ways to collect and leverage these data to grow the customer base of the business is what differentiates growth marketing and traditional marketing.
Skills required for effective Growth Marketing
● Data collection, analysis, and testing.
● Creative Marketing (Traditional & Digital).
● Behavioural psychology.
● Coding and automation.
11 Essential Tips For Growth Marketers
1. Focus on the whole customer engagement pipeline:
Every opportunity to engage with the customer is important. More so, how each step links with the next to ensure a seamless experience across each user’s journey.
2. Understand brand relevance:
Beyond your products, consumers are getting more conscious of your brand’s socio-cultural and ethical positioning. How potential customers perceive your brand is a key determinant of how successful you will be. Therefore it is important to ensure that your marketing systems are ethical and focused on giving, more than taking value.
3. Pay attention to customer retention and LTV:
Your goal as a growth marketer goes beyond growing the number of new customers. You are required also to explore ways to redefine customer engagements for long-term retention. A satisfied customer is likely to repeat their purchase and refer others.
4. Interdependence among multiple departments:
As a growth marketer, you are required to understand how different teams in the business function. This gives insight into how each role complements the other to keep customers fulfilled. It then helps you to identify points for data collection and optimisation.
5. Measure everything and always focus on data:
The value of your work can only be shown through an upward growth curve in key areas of interest for the business. It is, therefore, important to keep track of all key performance indices at all times.
6. Prepare to work fast:
Developing an agile framework is key for your role. The more experiments you can run through, the more likely you will discover the right channel to message combination that works for the business.
7. Find the most important metrics and grow them:
The key is to focus on the data points that are directly tied to the organization’s goals. This will ensure that resources are channelled towards the most productive outcomes.
8. Optimize processes:
With critical analysis, you begin to realise that most systems, funnels, or processes can be done better. You are responsible for making sure that they are.
9. Prioritize relationships:
Building relevant relationships both within and outside the business, ensure that vital resources are easily accessible to you when needed. These relationships should be healthy and mutually beneficial. It also helps establish them long before any need to leverage them arises, to foster trust and transparency.
10. Outperform the competition:
As a marketer, your role is to position the businesses as a preferred choice over its competitors, in the heart of customers. Then keep increasing the number of people who agree with this belief.
11. Leverage automation:
Luckily, an increasing number of tools are designed to simplify parts of the growth marketer’s workflow. These may range from planning and execution to tracking tools. Discover and leverage them to make your work easier.