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Traditional marketing approaches have long been effective in building brand awareness and promoting various initiatives. For decades, it's provided a tried-and-true process that has generated sales and interest. Many retailers take an understandable posture toward marketing (and everything else) that goes something like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

However, in today's hyper-connected marketplace, brands need to learn more about their customers to continue along a growth trajectory. They need to understand customer behaviors exhibited in the past and anticipate future needs. As attention spans shrink, retailers need to be empowered to respond quickly and forecast accurately.

In short, brands need more dynamic, ongoing opportunities to understand, engage, and connect with their existing customers. Enter growth marketing.

Defining Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is a burgeoning strategy focusing on long-term relationships with your existing and potential customers. It's a full-funnel approach that uses quantitative and qualitative data to gain deeper insights and make course corrections in marketing at every stage.

Growth marketing is a comprehensive approach designed to meet your marketing goals. It does not focus on one component, such as lead generation. Instead, it uses objective information to build customer loyalty and trust by providing content that delivers value.

Think of it this way; growth marketing enables brands to grow more than just the bottom line. In addition to more significant revenue, it also facilitates the growth of customer loyalty, overall satisfaction, responsiveness, and trustworthiness.

How is traditional marketing different from growth marketing?

Traditional marketing often focuses on acquiring a customer (revenue) but less on retention (brand loyalty). There is typically little marketing emphasis on what happens to a prospect once online marketing efforts convert them to paying customers.

Another critical component of mastering the growth marketing puzzle is experimentation.

Experimentation is all about testing, refining, and retesting messages until a brand fully understands what works in its niche. This embrace of experimentation takes an upfront commitment of time and resources if you hope to do it correctly.

Why growth marketing?

It's data-driven.

Sometimes marketing is all about what's funny, what looks good, or what people currently think is hot. That's all fine and well. However, growth marketing focuses less on buzz and more on empirical data. What is working? What isn't? Where can our efforts be improved?

Effective growth marketing includes utilizing A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO) data. Growth marketing uses these tools to influence online efforts, focusing on a better overall user experience. In short, growth marketing frees experimentation by using data as its starting point instead of "best guesses" as to what might work.

Growth marketing is a full-funnel strategy focused on trust and loyalty.

Instead of generating leads solely at the top of the funnel, growth marketing focuses on helping customers at every stage.

Growth marketing provides value throughout the journey. Audiences work through content relevant to search intent. These messages provide value, education, and information at each stage of their buyer's journey. Content helps users determine what they need to solve real-world problems rather than leave them to guesswork.

One way to think of it is that you are providing relevant information that helps move a potential customer from uncertainty to confidence as they make their way toward the "Finalize Purchase" button. When that confidence is reinforced through accurate fulfillment, your brand has simultaneously grown its bottom line and customer loyalty.

It's hyper-strategic.

Growth marketing takes a deep dive into what's working and what isn't and aligns that with marketing goals.

By hyper-targeting what needs to change to achieve marketing goals, growth marketing can focus on conversions or top-of-the-funnel traffic, whatever you need most at the moment.

Growth marketing is "people-first."

Growth marketing focuses on people, a.k.a. the customer. Whether that's in SEO, where you are writing for the reader and targeting the keywords they find valuable, or in onsite content written to help answer questions and be a resource, solve your growth marketing puzzle by being helpful.

Strong brands can be confident that an educated audience is far more likely to purchase than those with unresolved questions or other misgivings.

Instilling a Growth Marketing Mindset

To establish a growth marketing mindset in your marketing department, you first need to embrace data as a driver for decision-making.

This process can be more challenging than you think, primarily if past business successes resulted from inspired hunches. There is still a place in the marketing realm for hunches, but with growth marketing, your inspiration springs from empirical sales data and website analytics rather than waiting for a muse to pay a visit.

That does not mean that creativity is not a factor. In fact, creativity is a critical component of effective growth marketing. Art and science are involved in building a growth marketing mindset as you seek to perfect a harmonious blend of SEO, onsite content, and traditional marketing practices. If anything, growth marketing done right requires more creativity, not less.

By focusing on your brand's products and services, being willing to experiment, using objective data as your agreed-upon starting point, and using past results to guide future strategies, you'll be solving your growth marketing puzzle before you know it. In fact, you may start wondering how you ever got along without utilizing a growth marketing strategy.

At Relevance, we help brands build credibility and authority in their industry. Using content strategic planning, custom SEO, and digital PR, we drive more customers and revenue for our clients. To learn more, contact us today about how we can help as your growth marketing agency.

In the wake of the past few years, it's a safe bet that your small- to medium-size business (SMB) is struggling on one or more fronts. The statistics for SMBs that shuttered their operations permanently in the first few years of this decade are sobering, to say the least. The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have permanently closed approximately 200,000 more businesses than had been expected. Across the past few years, roughly 600,000 companies went out of business annually.

Assuming your SMB managed to scratch its way through the office worker diaspora of 2020 and a subsequent near-total loss in foot traffic, it's likely you are looking to rebuild your business model to survive an unpredictable future. Of course, one obvious answer is to move an increasing percentage of your revenue stream into online sales. So your first instinct might be to overhaul your website and call it good.

However, launching and maintaining an SEO-friendly website — as daunting as that can be — is really only the first step.

Online marketing is hotly competitive, as anyone will tell you. Taking a "Field of Dreams" approach isn't nearly enough. You can build it, yes, but there are zero guarantees that anyone will come. Effective PR certainly includes maintaining an SEO-friendly website, but that’s just one piece in an increasingly elaborate puzzle. There's a lot more to PR than just getting a noticeable bump in your website analytics.

Finding a PR Agency That Specializes in Small Business

Competing for eyeballs online, in print, and in the local community can be intimidating for SMB owners new to search engine optimization (SEO) and other tools associated with PR. It might feel a bit like you're trying to launch a small personal aircraft using the same runway as an Airbus A380.

You can relax...that sensation of feeling ill-equipped to compete with larger companies that have deeper pockets is completely normal.

Start with the one thing your SMB brings to the table that global retailers and big-box stores can't. Namely, your local presence and the great reputation for customer service you've built up over the years. A well-rounded small business PR agency should be able to quickly discern what makes your SMB special. They will then optimize the entirety of your PR approach as a solid first step toward leveraging those advantages.

Here's what to look for when you sense you might be getting in over your comfort level.

Punchlist for a Small Business PR Agency

1. Find someone who knows the difference between advertising and PR.

If the agency you interview leaps immediately to putting together a beefed-up budget for advertising, keep looking. Far too many “experts” still, to this day, confuse improved public relations with “strategic media buys.” Yes, that’s definitely another part of the equation, but it’s not the whole enchilada, either.

Instead, a small business PR agency will know, without being told, that your ad budget is probably already stretched to its breaking point. They will want to know what, if any, ROI you received for those expenditures. They’ll be very interested in the specific data points your advertising outlets provided at the end of your campaigns. (You did ask for data-driven accountability from your media outlets, right?)

2. Look for an enthusiastic willingness to work with what you have.

Similarly, the small business PR agency won’t seek to enter your workplace and start flipping over any tables. Be wary of anyone who brings a cookie-cutter approach they’ve developed and seeks to cram what you do into their new, exciting, proprietary mold. Instead, a truly helpful PR agency will look to elevate your strengths and promote widespread awareness of what you are already doing right.

Yes, you might incur some expenditures as your company expands its outreach efforts. Examples might include new signage, the services of a graphic artist, or subscriptions to automation software packages. You might offload some routine tasks associated with chatbots, answering the phone, social media posts, and so forth. These might all be well and good, but any and all expenditures must undergird the promotion of what makes your company special.

3. You want a PR company that underpromises and over-delivers.

Be wary of over-promisers. There’s a delicate balance to be struck between lowering your expectations too far and guaranteeing you’ll knock Amazon out of first place within two years.

For example, small business PR agencies that know their stuff are well aware that the leading search algorithms change frequently. What works well online today might — or might not — work quite as well next week. And besides…your online performance isn’t the only metric a competent PR expert cares about.

Depending on the niche your company occupies, online performance might not even be the most important metric! Of course, you will want to make sure that you can put numbers to performance both before and after implementing recommended changes, but these might include rate of turnover, on-site foot traffic, events hosted, suppliers added or subtracted, and so forth.

4. Ask your PR prospects to share their understanding of the value of relationships.

Your small business is situated within a community. This is true even if you are working out of your basement with no local office space or retail square footage to speak of.

What investments, if any, are you making in its wellbeing? Does your small business enjoy a favorable reputation with other local business leaders, municipalities, and city officials? Sure, your sales and payroll are contributing to the state, federal, and local tax base, but would anyone care if you suddenly uprooted everything and moved to another community?

One of the most recognizable features of a small business PR agency who knows their stuff is asking for your list of local media outlets, yes, but also opening your eyes to other relationship opportunities you may have missed. The PR agency you want to work with will ask about things such as the number of speaking engagements your team has accepted, who you are connected with via the local Chamber of Commerce, whether your suppliers truly enjoy working with you, and so on.

5. Remain open to out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.

Anyone can open up a web browser and come up with a few new ideas about public relations for the small- to medium-sized business owner. Such an approach might indeed prove fruitful — there’s nothing at all wrong with you conducting some regular research.

However, for PR pros this sort of approach is lazy and lacks imagination. Additionally, it does nothing for providing recommendations that are specifically and intentionally fashioned for your small business.

PR agencies who know what they are doing, on the other hand, take a more methodical approach. They will be slow to formulate their recommendations tailored to your actual needs. They will want to spend more time on the front end asking a lot of questions.

Yes, it’s 100% fair for an SMB owner to ask for a best-guess delivery timeline in the context of an initial meeting. After all, if a consultant spouts off several ideas you can find using Google, why are you thinking of hiring them?

6. A focus on long-term reputation management.

Hustlers tend to show up as  “the new sheriff in town” and make extravagant promises. PR professionals tend to show up and provide information about your specific niche, its penetration in the local and online marketplace, and some relevant case studies they use as background information for your initial conversation.

They bring all this and more to the table before you’ve even agreed to cut a check. PR pros aren’t playing for a temporary boost in your sales. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s insufficient.

The PR shop you want to bring into your stable is playing the game for keeps. They want your SMB to thrive this year, yes, but they also want you to still be in business five, 10, and 25 years from now. They know this will only happen when they help you begin moving toward an ever-improving reputation.

Suppose your business does not enjoy a good reputation for customer service, quality products or services at fair prices, and commitment to causes other than the bottom line. In that case, they will fearlessly share that insight. They will also show you what it might look like to reclaim that turf.

Effective PR? Optimize Everything You’re Already Doing Right!

For most SMB owners, public relations is not what motivated the founding of a new company. Any PR efforts should not in any way detract or distract from keeping the main thing the main thing. You want to commit your products and services to continuous improvement, so effective PR is merely that which takes what’s already true about you and makes more people aware of it.

Doubtless, your PR campaign may cause you to reexamine long-standing policies, practices, and operations. That’s OK. It’s part of the deal.

Keep a journal in whatever medium you are most likely to use at a moment’s notice. You might discover issues that need to be addressed immediately, but these are typically rare. Instead, you can expect to find areas for improvement that you can take on at your own pace.

A qualified PR agency will present ideas and options in an agenda-free manner. They will have done their job whether you accept their recommendations or not. You’ll know you’ve found the right PR professionals when you sense that they genuinely delight in your victories as much as you do.

The Guide to Relevance Marketing

Marketing strategies and customer buying behaviors tend to shift and change over time, ushering in new “eras of marketing” and creating a business landscape that pushes companies to adapt to stay relevant.

Based on customer behavior within the last decade, this period of time beginning in 2010 can be termed “the era of loyalty marketing.”

These were the days when consumers bought the same products repeatedly, as long as your business gave them the right incentives, discounts, and promotions. Customers would often stay “loyal” to their favorite brands for many years.

Regrettably, those days are no more.

Beginning in 2020, this coming decade is on track to become “the era of relevance marketing,” where customers make buying decisions based on how relevant a brand is to their particular needs at that specific moment.

When prominent consumer trends like this begin to take hold, it's important to take notice and begin forming a plan to adapt and thrive in these new environments.

In this guide, we will explore what relevance marketing is, how it directly impacts your business, and show you exactly what your company can do to shift from loyalty marketing to relevance marketing as quickly and smoothly as possible.

What is relevance marketing?

Relevance marketing describes a trend in consumer buying behavior that focuses on how relevant a business or brand is to their needs in a particular moment.

In other words, customers have changed their behavior. Before it was that people would exclusively buy products from their favorite brands. It was often based on loyalty and incentives, such as coupons and discount programs. Now, they are becoming increasingly more likely to purchase products that fit their rapidly-changing needs. And they aren’t paying as much attention to the company or brand they’re buying from.

Suppose your current customer retention strategy focuses exclusively on incentive programs such as discounts, rewards, or rebates to “bring back loyal customers.” In that case, it’s time to begin strategizing about making the shift to relevance by bringing in more personalization, experiences, and personality into your products and services.

Why is relevance marketing important today?

Your customer’s needs are constantly changing, requiring your brand and business to change and adapt with them.

Relevance marketing is more important now than ever, as consumers have been thrown into a “whirlwind of change.” It’s now easier than ever to detect which companies and brands are adapting to the changing times and which ones are stuck in the past and unwilling to explore new opportunities.

Your customers are changing before your eyes. How is your business going to stay relevant to your customers and show them you care about their problems and needs as they evolve?

This rapidly shifting landscape is why relevance marketing and a customer-centric approach are absolutely essential for thriving in today’s business environment.

A notable portion of your customers are likely completely different people compared to who they were just a year prior, and they’re looking to your brand for clues that you understand them and are going above and beyond to help them solve these new problems.

You should continue to focus your marketing efforts on solutions to their needs and problems. Simultaneously you should be demonstrating your dedication to providing them resources and relevant answers related to their current unique set of challenges. Businesses that are thriving are often using content marketing to be valuable and relevant for customers.

In simpler terms, your business should begin to “ebb and flow” with your customers to stay relevant. This can only be accomplished by paying close attention to what your customers are saying and understanding which elements are motivating that change.

Relevance is a marketing differentiator

In today’s competitive marketing landscape, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the competition and differentiate your brand from others in your industry.

By incorporating relevance marketing into the digital marketing mix, you’ll be able to compete at a higher level and show customers that you understand their wants, needs, and desires better than all of your competitors.

Most likely, others in your industry aren’t paying close attention to how relevant they are to their customer base. That provides your business with the perfect opportunity to overtake them and attract more of their customers who’ll feel right at home with your brand.

Other brands can continue pushing consumers to where they want them to be. You’ll overtake them by staying relevant and meeting your consumers where they are, joining them on the customer journey.

This is the key differentiator between brands that use relevant content and those that continue to ignore this trending shift in the marketplace.

Staying relevant today is more than just offering the right recommendations and information to your customers. It increasingly involves demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of the challenges your customers face and articulating your desire to support their changing wants and needs.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) of relevance marketing

Understanding the performance of relevance marketing efforts in your business may seem subjective at first glance. However there are a number of key data points your business can use to determine how your relevance is trending over time.

While developing your relevance marketing efforts, your business should always be looking at standard marketing metrics such as:

While these marketing KPIs are the core of any business and can’t be ignored, relevance marketing is a great way to complement and improve your core marketing metrics. It is especially important as customer buying behavior begins to trend toward brand relevance.

Key Aspects for Relevance Marketing

When your business is ready to dive into relevance marketing, there are a few tactics that can help guide you through the process. We’ll discuss how your company can stay relevant by using personalization, tailored experiences, shared values, and establishing buyer confidence.

1. Use Personalization & Tailored Experiences

Do your customers feel their experiences with your company are constantly tailored towards their priorities and needs?

As your customers continue to change and evolve over time, they’re going to expect more personalization and customization with how you deliver your products and services.

In fact, your brand doesn’t even have to go “all-out” when it comes to personalization. Making a few simple tweaks and adjustments, such as including your customer’s name or a brief note where they least expect it, can make a big difference.

If you do this, your customers feel that your brand is adapting, personalizing, and creating tailored experiences where possible. They’ll see your company as relevant to their needs and will be much more likely to spend their hard-earned cash with you.

2. Uphold Purpose & Shared Values

Customers love when brands advance and share their purpose and values. It makes them feel immediately more connected to that brand and more likely to become a customer.

Is your business aware of the purpose and shared values of your customers? If so, are you actively seeking out ways to advance these values and show customers how you’re doing so?

Think about how your business can show your customers that you value what they do, and you’ll instantly begin to become more relevant in their eyes.

3. Understand Partnership & Flow

Do your customers feel that they work well with your company? Do they see your company as a “partner” in their daily lives, helping them with their needs, problems, and struggles?

Brands that work on the customer experience and make each transaction as simple and smooth as possible for their customers will gain relevance and likely experience business growth as a result.

Take a moment to discuss how your brand is interacting with customers and how these interactions can be further improved in order to make your customers consider you an invaluable partner.

4. Ensure Protection & Buying Confidence

Do customers feel safe buying from your brand, and are they confident in their purchase?

To stay relevant, your business must exude a sense of safety, security, and confidence in the presence of your customers.

Implementing security measures is incredibly important, such as authentication and secure browsing for e-commerce purchases. These measures should make your customers feel that doing business with your brand is safe and makes them want to interact with you again in the future.

Offering your customers a sense of protection, security, and buying confidence will help boost your relevance and make it more likely that customers will do business with you in the future.

Create your plan to stay relevant today

The era of relevance marketing is officially here - it’s time to ask yourself how your business is adapting to the shifting sands of the marketplace.

Customers are increasingly making buying decisions based on how relevant a particular brand is to their needs, which requires companies to use relevance as a marketing differentiator.

By using personalization and tailoring custom experiences to your customers, you’ll be able to show them that your company cares for their needs and is willing to adapt. Furthermore, when you show your customers that you share their purpose and values, and make your prospects feel that you have their best interests in mind, you’ll be well on your way to staying relevant in today’s marketplace.

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