Strategies are a critical part of the business process. In marketing, they provide an overall view of your plan to reach consumers and turn them into customers.
Strategies are long-term plans that help you stay focused and make decisions when it comes to various marketing campaigns, techniques, and tactics. But they aren’t permanent. Good marketing strategies should evolve with your company’s needs.
Here is a quick rundown of how to develop an effective marketing strategy, especially when you’re using growth marketing to create sustainable growth for your business.
To properly develop a growth marketing strategy, you need to remember the key differences between growth marketing and other forms of marketing.
Marketing, in general, is a broad term that applies to many forms of promotion. Traditional marketing also focuses on a brand and its offerings.
In comparison, growth marketing starts with the customer journey and then considers how products and services meet their needs. Growth marketing is also highly data-driven. It ditches the gut instinct aspect of old-school marketing and uses clear data analysis to create and then adjust marketing strategies.
At its most basic level, a growth marketing strategy defines how your brand can cultivate long-term, sustainable growth.
As a growth marketer, there are many different types of growth strategy to focus on. Most of these fall into three key areas, which the Relevance team refers to as the three pillars of growth strategy. These are:
These various strategies are part of your growth strategy framework. (That’s the marketing “blueprint” that considers all of your different growth marketing elements.) They help you create a strategic vision to turn those concepts and resources into bonafide marketing activity.
Growth marketing strategies are an essential part of building a brand. Realizing the importance of growth strategy is a good first step. But how do you develop a growth marketing strategy for your brand? Here are a few steps to help you get started:
What are you trying to achieve with your growth marketing? This is ground zero for a good growth marketing strategy. You need this in focus if you’re going to employ the right tactic and set up the right KPIs.
You can’t improve your digital marketing strategy if you don’t understand where it is at the moment. That’s why the next step is to assess what you’ve done before up until now.
What is the state of your current traffic, conversion rate, or other key metrics? Think about what your customer retention rate and customer lifecycle looks like. How does that compare to your competitors? Are you ranking for the right keywords? Is your website content up to date and SEO optimized? Keeping each question in mind will allow you to create an uber-effective growth marketing campaign.
Once you understand your baseline, measure it against your goals. Comparing these two helps you align your strategy.
Where are you coming short? Do you need more content to help you rank for keywords? Should you invest in link acquisition to boost existing content higher in SERPs?
Your baseline is where you’re starting. Your goals are where you want to end. How can you measure your progress along that timeline? Make sure you have clear and detailed metrics in place to track your progress over time.
These four steps can help you develop a comprehensive strategy. They consider where you’re starting, where you’re ending, how you’ll get there, and how you’ll measure your success.
Growth marketing strategies can feel complex and nuanced. However, there are several key principles that apply in every situation. Here are a few of those to keep in mind as you go along.
It’s hard to structure a good growth strategy without a framework to build from.
A framework gives you a starting point. It helps you assess all of your growth marketing options. It presents a clear picture of your customer, data, and marketing goals (all of which are critical to a growth strategy and are detailed below).
A framework helps you find opportunities, like cross channel marketing, that you might not otherwise be aware of as you flesh out your plan. If you want to develop an effective growth marketing strategy, make sure you have a framework in place first.
An emphasis on your customer base is a defining focus of growth marketing. Analyzing the customer journey and data should be at the center of your growth strategy development, too.
Your growth marketing strategy gives you a “big picture” concept of where you’re going and how you can get there. Each existing and potential customer (and their needs and pain points) helps inform that picture and give it a purpose.
and analysis shYou should build a growth strategy around a clear growth objective. This could be to achieve a certain sales volume or reach a new target audience. Consider your company and what OKRs (objectives and key results) make the most sense at the moment.
As you clarify your objectives, consider how the three pillars of growth marketing can help you attain them. You can (and should) use these in conjunction with one another with varying degrees of priority depending on each situation.
For example, when Relevance helped Gabb Wireless develop a growth marketing strategy, we focused on digital PR while including supporting aspects of SEO and content strategies. As growth marketers, we tailor our approach. Each brand we work with has a different combination, depending on their circumstances.
Remember, data is the most important aspect of growth marketing. It’s one of if not the primary factor that sets growth marketing tactics apart from traditional marketing alternatives.
If you want a growth strategy to work, you need to prioritize data. Identify what data is important. Then use that information to develop your initial strategy. From there, return to the data over time to assess if your strategy is working and make adjustments where necessary.
Growth marketing isn’t about a single marketing effort or initiative. It’s a long-term process that seeks to build sustainable growth by using data and prioritizing the customer. If you want to stay on track with your growth marketing efforts over time, you need to have a strategy in place.
As you develop your growth marketing strategy, remember to build from a strong framework, keep the customer in focus, clarify objectives, and use your data. Consider working with a growth marketing agency to help you get a strategy in place. You’ll end up with a powerful plan to effectively put your growth marketing in motion.
