In today’s tech-driven world, if your business is not growing constantly, it isn’t sustainable. Using growth marketing strategies, businesses of all sizes can reach new heights or sustainable growth. To find appropriate solutions for every situation, it’s crucial to experiment with new ideas, processes, and methods. Growth marketing strategies are data-driven; you can experiment and optimize the strategy efficiently, which helps you make growth-enabling decisions.
Benefits of growth marketing
The days of submitting our ads to the Yellow Pages are long gone. Businesses don’t want a simple ad. They want an ad with engaging content and to be present on all the channels where their target audience is. As the environment is getting fast-paced, many marketers feel insecure about getting lost in the dust if they don’t constantly work toward growth every nanosecond. There isn’t any one-size-fits-all growth marketing strategy, so it’s not unusual to see a lack of results if the wrong strategy is chosen.
However, the benefits of growth marketing are remarkable if you stick with it. Read on to learn how growth marketing will help you scale your business in the long run.
Fast growth
Growth marketing strategies don’t take months to show results. You can quickly determine which channels and tactics work best for a particular audience through iteration and rapid testing. Unlike offline marketing, where you launch a campaign and can’t alter it while it’s running, and typical online marketing, where the focus is somewhat more long-term and typically only focused on one channel, growth marketing strategies allow you to monitor the campaign consistently and optimize it accordingly.
Moreover, growth marketing is not restricted by geography. This means it enables even small local businesses to reach an international audience without costing them an arm and a leg. There’re multiple strategies, such as SEO, SEM, conversion optimization, web analytics, content marketing, strategic knowledge development, marketing automation, etc., that help businesses achieve desired growth in less time.
Provide rich data
Suppose you place an advertisement on a billboard, a TV, or a magazine. You’ve little to no control over who views the ad. You can measure specific demographics – including the demographic of a specific neighbourhood or the magazine’s usual readership. However, it’s still a shot in the dark.
But, a growth marketing strategy provides a start-to-finish view of all the important metrics such as impressions, views, clicks, shares, etc. Anytime a potential client wants to know about your offering, you’ll have rich data to point the audience in the right direction (your website/online store). You can also use the data to give the audience a gentle push through value-laden email marketing.
Besides, a growth marketing strategy gives the exact data and insights to determine the number of people who’ve viewed your campaign. This intelligence help marketers prioritize which channels to spend less or more time. For instance, if the organic search is driving only 15% of the traffic, you know that you now need to invest in SEO to increase the percentage.
You can also determine trends and patterns in customers’ behavior before they reach the final stage of their buying journey. Ultimately, you can make informed decisions for attracting clients and influencing their buying behavior.
Better market insights
For any business to thrive, it’s essential to determine and learn from what competitors are doing. Therefore, a growth marketing strategy helps marketers answer the following:
- What kind of content do competitors use?
- Do they promote visual content like videos?
- What makes their brand unique?
- How do they engage with potential customers?
- What makes them unique?
This market insight help marketers get an idea of what’s working and what’s not. The main aim of market insight is to discover the penetrating truth about customers, their motivations, and aspirations which can ultimately be used to generate increased profits and growth. With better market insights, marketers can:
- Discover new revenue sources
- Develop pricing strategies and cost-effective marketing campaigns
- Measure current business performance against market potential
- Utilize previous buying behaviors or patterns to predict future actions or offer customized interactions
- Ensure messaging is clear and reaching the ideal customers
Adaptation
Successful businesses have to adapt constantly to the evolving marketplace. For instance, Blockbuster, which was once a dominating power in the video rental industry, didn’t adapt to the change when Netflix offered the streaming service; it filed for bankruptcy in 2010. MySpace is another example of a popular social media platform that Facebook eventually overtook.
Adaptation in business helps deliver the best possible user experience, optimize your workflow, and make the best use of available resources. When it comes to adaptation, it can be as simple as changing the packaging or tweaking the logo or may involve developing new financing models best suited for the local economy. To adapt to change, tracking every customer’s behavior, interests, preferences, and previous buying history takes a lot of capacity.
However, a growth marketing strategy helps marketers segment the audience by geographic regions, product/service purchases, age, etc., to personalize the customers and prospects. When you clearly understand your buyer personas, you can adapt to fit their needs and demands.
Better ROI
Better ROI begins with better business objectives based on the customer buying journey. Better objectives shape better metrics. As growth marketing is data-driven, it guarantees every dollar you invest will have a higher chance of bringing better ROI. Besides that, consistent optimization minimizes growth marketing costs.
Furthermore, different growth marketing strategies, such as a/b testing, which involves modifying one element of an ad campaign to compare its results with the previous campaign, allow you to optimize your marketing efforts efficiently. Survey sampling and experimentation is another test-and-learn growth marketing approach that provides valuable insights to drive increased ROI.
What are the qualities of a successful growth marketing strategy?
Data-driven and creative
A successful growth marketing strategy dives deep into the data to determine what approaches work well. A successful strategy is always creative since marketers never think, “it’s never been done, why we should try?”
If Airbnb had thought the same, they never would have provided free professional photography services to every person listing on the website. What people thought unnecessary turned out to be the dominant force driving their growth.
Product Focused
The sales world’s axiom is that you can’t sell something you don’t understand. A successful growth marketing strategy doesn’t trick customers into buying a product they don’t want but rather elucidates a valuable product’s many benefits that will truly help people.
Besides that, street cred is a fickle friend. When you have a thin website that contains barely any information, don’t expect potential customers or investors to think you’re an authority in your industry. Therefore, a growth marketing strategy becomes successful when it focuses on continual, data-tested additions to keep the business high on the authority meter. Creating informative content that hits on all the stages of a customer’s journey is one of the top priorities of growth marketing.
It can never be a complete failure
A failed experiment is the quickest way to obtain valuable information. Growth marketers are not clairvoyant. The strategy they develop fails sometimes and becomes successful only after several optimization rounds until they hit on things that succeed.
Include storytelling approaches
The data, numbers, and all the insights in the world won’t help you truly connect with your customers. A growth marketing strategy that brings significant results synthesizes both qualitative and quantitative information into a persuasive story that resonates with ideal customers.
Why has growth marketing always been a necessity for businesses?
16 million individuals were using the internet when the first search engine was launched in 1994. In 2019, that number increased to over 4 billion. From local businesses to multinational corporations, the internet has become the world’s arena for promoting products/services and building customer relationships.
With businesses facing immense competition online, scheduling a few Google Ads or posting on social media isn’t enough to scale. That’s where growth marketing comes into play.
Before the internet, marketers would’ve to wait a few weeks to publish an ad in the magazine’s new edition. But today, you can publish a new ad within minutes with an intelligent growth marketing strategy. Marketers can also access sophisticated data about campaigns and customers’ online activities in real time.
Growth marketing is for every business that wants to increase profitability without taking unwanted risks.
Are there any disadvantages of growth marketing?
One of the main disadvantages of growth marketing is that it needs resources. It’s necessary to invest money into creating valuable content and building a brand. It can quickly become costly with a never ending demand for new content.
Moreover, growth marketing gives businesses a global reach, which means you’ll have to handle the global competition. The downside of embracing online growth marketing is that when you encounter technological issues such as slow page loading speed, poor site navigability, crude website design, poor SEO, etc., you lose significant web traffic. There are several advertising mistakes that many marketing managers overlook, which harm overall growth marketing strategy.
It’s time to dive into growth marketing
In a nutshell, a growth marketing strategy must be viewed as an endless cycle of competition. Any decision you take must be aimed at overtaking your potential competitor’s market position. Moreover, businesses need to build a solid marketing foundation that remains beneficial for a long time. Long-term strategies are more flexible for making adjustments because more data analysis is required at the start to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Therefore, in 2023, you should think beyond the short-term gains. Wherever your potential audience is, your brand must be there too. An intelligent growth marketing strategy ensures to keep the brand front and center.
