Marketers have struggled to avoid severe growth marketing pitfalls over the past few years. Many businesses have followed tried-and-tested formulas for spreading brand awareness and client acquisition. For instance, creating engaging content, running eye-catching ads, and utilizing social media – lather, rinse, repeat. The problem is that growth marketers today have the same tools and tactics at their disposal.
What are the dangers of focusing too much on growth marketing techniques?
Here are the top dangers of over-investing in growth marketing efforts and ignoring the marketing’s creative aspects. Avoid these to increase your chances of preventing growth marketing pitfalls.
Poor project planning and workflow setup
While adapting to a fast-paced environment has become a top priority for businesses to drive significant growth, focusing only on growth leads to poor internal workflows that lead to bottlenecks, missing deadlines, and overspending.
Moreover, many marketing managers think spending more money on growth marketing will help the business grow faster. Unfortunately, there always come unavoidable diminishing returns as you scale. Growing isn’t enough if you can’t retain the clients. Therefore, it’s essential to implement efficiency-improving strategies to make the most out of your investment.
Unplanned testing will destroy financial budgets
A growth marketer’s prime focus is “continual testing.” But, testing must be paired with a proper budget strategy. Your short-term account performance can suffer if you only concentrate on testing without considering your budget. It takes effort, planning, and research to build successful campaigns. If you go broke first or obliterate your profit margins, you won’t succeed in the long run. Here are some crucial online marketing performance metrics you must track.
Besides that, unplanned testing can’t always predict success. Products that sell in several markets or locally might not do well in other geographical areas. For instance, customers may have brand loyalty in various areas of the country. Hence, the results you get may not necessarily be projectable.
Following the trends blindly can harm business growth
Strategizing the marketing campaign that aligns with current trends can give businesses the highest probability of success. That’s because you can determine which interactions are gaining steam and shift your campaign’s course in that direction. Conversely, when shooting blind regarding trends, growth marketers run the risk of accidental tone-deaf or irrelevancy.
Understanding niche trends definitely help businesses to stay in tune with the target audience. But, drilling down to psychographic layers and demographic data will help create a well-rounded understanding of customers. When you’ve a rich understanding of potential audiences against the backdrop of emerging trends, you’ll get a winning formula for sustained success.
Now that we’ve discussed the dangers of focusing too much on growth marketing let’s delve into when growth marketing strategies stop working for a business.
For businesses struggling to scale, growth marketing seems like a panacea that is worth doubling down on. But implementing growth marketing only to drive traffic instead of understanding how to interact with the target audience may give impressive results in the early stage, but that’ll only be skin deep. Unqualified traffic never delivers ROI.
Furthermore, growth marketing does not work when:
Your marketing solely focuses on your offering instead of customer needs
Internet users want personalized experiences, and when they see a brand’s salesy content, they ensure to unfollow it, so your promotional content doesn’t come their way. To avoid this growth marketing mistake, use the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content needs to be informative and engaging, while only 20% should promote your offerings. You can use storytelling to connect with the audience emotionally and get them to read until the end.
Poor campaign outreach
Another reason why your growth marketing has stopped working is that you’re utilizing the wrong platforms. You must analyze your audience’s online behavior to identify the platforms they spend their time on.
Facebook, which has the most mature audience, is where most brands go to advertise their campaigns. Whereas, TikTok attracts the younger crowds. How you’re best positioned to promote yourself and how your business operates will have a significant impact on how you should approach marketing. For instance, a new line of green cleaning goods is more likely to succeed on Facebook, while a teen clothes brand will probably make more progress on TikTok and Instagram.
Your offering itself isn’t stellar
The growth marketing aim is to catalyze organic customer buzz around your offering. However, if your offering doesn’t live up to the hype you’re trying to build, your growth will suffer. If you’re analyzing metrics and wondering why your growth marketing tactics aren’t working, consider whether your product/service is as best as it can be. A great product can sell itself, but competition plays an important part. For instance, higher competition among sellers leads to the lower product price. Manufacturers know that the customers can get the product somewhere else. So, they drop prices to gain a competitive edge. However, sometimes it’s not just about the product prices and benefits; it’s about helping buyers make the right decision with a non-resistant offer.
What are the typical mistakes of growth marketing you must avoid?
Sticking to one strategy
It’s harmful to businesses to stay complacent and stick with their growth marketing strategy. Consumer demands are constantly changing. Sticking to one strategy gives rivals a competitive advantage of initiating a marketing strategy that can challenge a brand’s market position.
Moreover, some extraneous outside factors such as new laws, government, changing technologies, and limited resources also force businesses to change their marketing tactics. For instance, a new packaging law may force a frozen dinners manufacturer to change its packaging. The brand may require including more nutritional details. Changing technologies may force some products’ obsolescence. A brand may need to create more products to remain in business. Besides that, consumers’ media preferences also change, which may force brands to adjust their media combinations and advertising mixes to market their products/services.
Now it’s evident that using one strategy in growth marketing will bring significant adverse impacts. However, how can marketers decide when to pivot or stick to the plan? When to blink or seize a new opportunity. When to stride off in a bold direction or hold to the course.
Here are the 5 signs demonstrating it’s the right time to change the growth marketing strategy.
1. Your strategy is more than 2 years old
If your strategy is old, think back and analyze how your business has changed since then. You may have had different technologies, goals, and employees. These factors determine it’s time to switch to the new strategy.
2. Your marketing budget has changed
It’s unlikely for a business’s marketing budget to remain the same over a long period. Factors such as capital investment, bills, wages, turnover, and sales affect how much to spend on marketing. When you create the first successful strategy, you may be tight on budget. But when your business grows and expands, it’s time to allocate more budget to changing a marketing strategy.
3. Poor lead generation
Lead generation is a long-term goal of a growth marketing strategy. Have you efficiently utilized your website’s backlinks? Because it’s the best way to generate inbound leads. Consider hosting guest posts and adding a blog section to bring in fresh eyeballs. If your brand has stopped bringing in new traffic, your strategy needs a refresh.
4. You’ve something new to offer
If you have not updated your growth marketing strategy for the past few years, it may not accurately showcase your offering. Sometimes products themselves become outdated, and new editions get issued. Your strategy must reflect this.
5. Your website/social media content needs an upgrade
When was the last time you audited your content? Your website/social media is a shop window to the potential audience. Whether you’re providing information or selling products directly to customers, your content is the cornerstone for branding and growth marketing strategy. If your content lacks mixed media and is outdated, rebuild or tweak your strategy immediately.
Trying to generate leads in a market not ready
Poor product-market fit is another growth marketing mistake that many marketing managers overlook. Before investing tons of money in growth marketing efforts to generate potential leads, determine if your offering satisfies the target market. Moreover, purchasing contact lists seems tempting to many brands when they struggle to find leads. But, they end up doing long-term damage to their brand.
When buying or generating leads without proper marketing analysis, you’ll waste time and money making random cold calls or emails that never attract the right customers.
Many brands burn through their cash reserves on generating leads before determining whether their offering has genuinely scalable appeal. You can build the best growth marketing strategy in the world, but if you’re targeting a market that is not ready, the ROI will be fatally and prohibitively low.
Putting it all together
Growth marketing is a dynamic field. Faster than we’d want to acknowledge, truths can turn into myths. The most scalable way to stay on the cutting edge is to be humble, transparent, and curious.
Moreover, businesses aiming for high growth should be creative and unique in their marketing techniques by adapting to new tactics. Still, they can’t entirely ignore the usual tried-and-true approaches. While novel strategies should be researched, some fundamentals, such as email marketing and SEO/SEM, just cannot be disregarded.
By the end of 2023, email marketing revenue is expected to reach $11 billion, according to Statista, and 50% of consumers make at least one monthly purchase, as reported by Salecycle. Even though email marketing and SEO/SEM may seem less vital tactics, you must include a line item for them in your marketing budget.
Lightning-fast growth is every company’s goal – and it’s simple to get distracted by emerging shiny trends. Therefore, we recommend you keep an eye on the prize and avoid the above-mentioned growth marketing pitfalls.
