Growth marketing is all about your long-term strategy, but the term itself can lead to confusion regarding its true meaning.
Because marketing is what’s done to grow a business, shouldn’t all marketing be growth marketing? The answer is no. Growth marketing is a strategy-based, data-driven approach to achieving sustainable success and improving revenue for your business over the long term.
It’s about setting goals and continuously testing and experimenting to hit them, with the ultimate goal being to generate tangible business growth.
Keep in mind that about 45 percent of organizations don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. By considering the approach of growth marketing for your own business, you’re already lightyears ahead of nearly half of other companies.
In growth marketing, you want to focus on all possible touchpoints between your brand and the customer. To put it more simply, it’s less about the purchase itself and more about the customer’s experience after becoming your customer. This means that in growth marketing, you should be looking for opportunities that will make a lasting impact.
Key aspects of growth marketing include:
- Being consumer-centric
- Putting strategy first
- Retention and upselling in addition to traditional acquisition
- Evidence-based decisions rather than opinion-based
- Consistent and regular performance monitoring and testing, such as with A/B testing
For example, if you have an e-commerce business that is not making enough money because your customers only buy one or two products, a growth marketing mindset would focus your marketing efforts on retaining those customers, compelling them to purchase more and more often (through cross-selling and upselling), measuring those efforts regularly and making decisions based on that performance. And these efforts can, of course, involve such tactics as email marketing, SMS text message marketing and so on.
Growth marketing benefits include making better decisions, enhanced brand perception and achieving your business revenue goals.
The following four growth marketing opportunity ideas are intended to inspire you for your own business.
Omnichannel marketing
In growth marketing, it’s not about only optimizing an individual marketing channel. It’s about optimizing multiple channels across the customer journey.
Look at the entire user experience when it comes to your brand. Is it unified and consistent throughout each touchpoint you have with a customer?
This is considered omnichannel marketing, where your goal is a seamless customer journey, whether that’s in a physical store, online or with interactions with any sales or customer service representative in your business.
How can all of your channels work well together to deliver that seamless experience?
Customer loyalty
Customer retention is huge for any business. It means that the customers you acquire will continue purchasing your products or services.
To grow retention, brands must continually earn customer trust by demonstrating that they are more than just a name and a dollar sign.
When exploring a growth marketing mindset, consider a customer loyalty campaign that aims to keep your engaged customers coming back for more.
Perhaps you have a membership program that you can incentivize with exclusive access, sneak previews or tiered status rewards. It’s about making the customer feel special, and that will elevate their perception of your brand.
Customer onboarding
About 40 percent to 60 percent of software users log in once and never return again. Proper customer onboarding can help give you more opportunities to wow new customers and make every touchpoint count.
Never assume that your product or service is obvious to use. Even if it is, what advice can you give customers to make their experience even better?
Is there a way to collect data from customers upfront on how they intend to use your product or service so that you can better serve them with personalized onboarding?
Consider onboarding an opportunity to nurture customers, and it can be as simple as an email drip campaign and/or custom recommendations that include articles and webinars.
Customer referral programs
Customers who are referred by other customers have a higher retention rate and are more likely to refer more customers to your brand.
In growth marketing, a strong referral program can be key. Of course, how yours looks depends entirely on your brand and your products and/or services.
If you already have a customer referral program, is it everything it should be? Does it offer enough of an incentive? Are you promoting it well among your existing customers?
If you don’t yet have a referral program, think through what that should look like for your business. Be sure to make it easy enough for customers to actually do, and that the reward is compelling.
For example, Tesla’s referral program gives customers a referral link that they can share, and that link rewards both the referring customer and the new customer. Instacart does the same thing, too.
Referral programs are essentially all about rewarding customers who believe in your mission.
In conclusion
Remember that a key component of growth marketing is constant testing and experimentation. Go into it with a scientist’s mindset. If I do this, what happens? And if I do that, what happens?
For example, if you do have an existing customer referral program, how is it performing now? If you change one thing, does that increase the referrals within a month or not?
Just keep in mind that you still want to be consistent as a brand no matter what testing and experimenting you’re doing. Strategic planning will help with that.
As you’re exploring growth marketing, consider leveling up your digital marketing process with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.
