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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
