Growth Marketing

Marketing is an art in human connection. But no two humans are the same: some folks naturally develop trust in a brand over time, while others are wooed in one fell swoop. The trick to mastering the art of marketing starts with recognizing and applying the right tools to connect with potential customers.

Traditional Marketing vs. Growth Marketing

Traditional marketing focuses on selling products and services in the offline realm — building brand awareness through print, broadcast, direct mail, and outdoor advertising like billboards. Traditional marketing plans are generally more static and require a significant investment in terms of budget.

Growth marketing, in contrast, predominantly happens in the digital realm and takes strategic flexibility to execute using a scrappier budget. No fleeting fad, growth marketing initially gained traction in startup environments but has since permeated the strategies of enterprises worldwide. Its theory is rooted in customer relationship building; its practice in brands providing helpful and trustworthy information, making educated hypotheses based on data, and relying on key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify success.

This article serves as a guide to better understanding growth marketing so you can determine if it’s the right approach for your business.

Testing — One, Two, Three: Growth Marketing Is Data-Driven

When it comes to making marketing decisions, it pays to leverage data. For example, companies utilizing data-driven personalization realize an average of 5-8x ROI on marketing spend. In other words, by testing and reviewing the data before implementing new tactics, growth marketers can develop highly optimized and effective strategies. 

However, for growth marketing to be successful, it’s important to leverage data that clearly supports why you’re shifting course. This should serve as the starting point for how you’d like things to change. 

Therefore, growth marketers follow the scientific method of objectively establishing facts through experimentation. They take a hypothesis, put it to the test, and use the test results to shape a path forward. The tests themselves can be as simple as trying out regionally specific calls-to-action (CTAs) for website visitors or as advanced as using automated personalization options like smart rules to dynamically update email subject lines.

It’s no wonder then that having the right technology is key to data-driven marketing. For this, the team at Mole Street recommends bringing into your growth marketing tech stack one of the top customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in the market today: HubSpot.

4 Signs Growth Marketing is Right for You

1. You appreciate informed decision making

The best data is the type you can act on. By ensuring the customer data you store is clean, accurate, updated, and complete, you will be better equipped to set realistic and measurable goals for your next marketing strategy or individual content piece to accomplish. Plus, when a shift in strategy is required, recommendations supported by concrete data points tend to get faster buy-in from leadership.

The fact is — organizations that invest in extracting the most value from their data make better-informed marketing decisions that are more likely to result in growth. According to a Forrester report, data-driven companies grow at an average of more than 30% annually.

2. You’re open to every marketing channel

Growth marketing is a sound strategy for businesses open to having a presence in every marketing channel that strategically makes sense. If your customers are hanging out on a certain social media platform or subscribing to a specific streaming service, your brand should be right there with them.

In addition, organizations with the most successful growth marketing strategies invest considerable time and resources into developing seamless omnichannel customer journeys. This includes having a universal brand messaging framework in place as well as technology to leverage customer behavior to deliver a personalized experience.

3. You favor a scientific approach

On one hand, publications like the Harvard Business Review advise, “Don’t Trust Your Gut”. On the other, publications like Forbes claim instinctive decision-making can drive marketing success. So, who to believe?

The answer is both. At Mole Street, we’ve seen companies maximize marketing performance by trusting their proverbial guts and ensuring the data backs it up. Intelligent marketing decisions often come from equally smart and intuitive individuals.

Applying the scientific method to ask a question and build a hypothesis around an idea or thought originally created by pure gut feeling is the approach we encourage companies to take with their marketing — and then, let the data decide!

4. You’re never comfortable with the status quo

Apple’s famous “Think Different” campaign reminded everyone that mankind’s greatest geniuses were once “the crazy ones” with little-to-no respect for the status quo. Now, being aware that things can be different doesn’t always mean that they should.

Challenging the status quo also means understanding why it exists to begin with. What’s the sweet spot when challenging it, you ask? It honestly varies from company to company, industry to industry, and niche to niche.

However, if you’re here, and you’ve read this far, chances are that you’re ready to shake things for your business. That’s where our growth marketing best practices come into play.

Top 3 Growth Marketing Best Practices Delivering the Best ROI

1. Driving website traffic

Organic traffic

Taking into account that the inbound methodology (i.e., a HubSpot-coined marketing strategy ideal for attracting organic search traffic) works best when your online presence has an omnichannel approach, your best bet is to direct all incoming traffic towards your website to:

• Enable your audience to contact you by providing easily accessible ways of communicating with your team, like a chatbot, phone number, and email address. What if someone who already knows of your business visits your home page hoping to book a meeting and get things rolling, only to be greeted by a generic Contact Us form and a disheartening “We’ll get back to you in 24 hours” message? Allow the hand-raisers of the world to connect with you!
• Empower the buyer personas you’ve identified by providing them with the necessary information throughout your website about how your offering can help achieve their goals when trying to solve problem X, see growth in scenario Y, or be able to achieve Z. Remember: it’s not so much about you as it is about their needs, and why they came to your site in the first place.
• Set the right expectations. Your products and services are well-explained on your web pages, your pillar pages are looking great, and you’ve enabled your audience to easily connect with you. For this to resonate with your website visitors, it’s important to set truthful expectations in regards to:
  
  
  • How their data is treated when they decide to exchange it for your content offers or when raising their hand to schedule a meeting (after all, it’s their personal information and they trust you to keep it.)
  • How much time they spend interacting with your company, either on a page or with a human being, before their needs are met. This includes making sure all published articles (e.g., blog posts, case studies, FAQs, etc.) show an estimated read time before the reader dives into your content. It also includes providing realistic estimates as to when they’ll hear back from your customer-facing teams.

Related Read: Chatbot Success: Converting and Qualifying Leads

Paid traffic

Thinking about spending some hard-earned money to attract solid leads? Great! Just make sure your value propositions are clear, your CTAs tell people that you’re not out to get them but to help them, and do the following:

• Analyze how your keywords are doing and match them against current industry trends.
• Ensure that the messaging in your paid ads matches the narrative that a visitor will find on your landing page and when navigating through your website.
• Track all traffic generated from your paid ads, and guarantee that you’re getting your money’s worth with each click by helping folks who interact with your ads to either sign up, register, or otherwise identify themselves in a friendly and comfortable way (e.g., through a frictionless form submission).

Referral traffic

Do your teams collaborate on content pieces for other organizations? Has any team member been asked for a testimonial, featured in a podcast, or even written a piece for a digital publication? All of these are potential watering holes for prospects — so go out there and collaborate! 

Don’t shy away from trying to have an article or a quote posted in one of your industry’s leading blogs, or even reaching out to folks for a chance to be featured in a podcast that’s trending in your audiences’ circles to have a conversation about a topic you know you’re able to dominate.

If this last idea struck a chord but you’re unsure where to start, take a peek at listennotes.com, a site that allows you to search for and find podcasts with ease, even when you’re searching for niche or industry-specific terms.

On-site engagement

Can you tell how many visitors began their journeys on your site by entering through a specific page? How about tracking your conversion rate for visitors who choose to book your sales team to chat? Make sure your tech stack enables you to stay on top of the on-site engagement metrics that matter.

Besides coming in handy when presenting this quarter’s marketing efforts, tracking on-site engagement metrics allows you to understand how your site is performing, and how any of the campaigns you run to or on it (e.g., content offers, holiday sales, etc.) can be optimized to improve upon a specific KPI, such as the number of meetings booked from your home page, one of your most-visited pillar pages, or even a landing page A/B test you could be running.

Remember: visitors won’t proactively tell you how they’re liking your site, but the actions they take will — so make sure those actions are translated into metrics you’re able to track in real-time.

Related Read: How Can HubSpot Help with Your Growth Marketing Strategy?

2. Capturing leads and sales

Conversion rate optimization

We encourage all the organizations we work with to iterate on the narratives enticing potential leads to click through and begin a journey with their businesses. If the copy for a certain CTA converts more than another with a different approach, then aligning your online narrative a bit closer to the one that works could keep more visitors on your site navigating to your conversion points.

In addition, user friction can be alleviated by reducing the number of form fields someone has to fill out, and pain points such as, “my visitors just don’t want to download my gated assets,” could be alleviated by adding to the value of what you’re offering in exchange for contact information.

Adding value applies to your products and services, too. Are you providing a service that could turn into a subscription-based offering? Think of anything that could be valuable to your potential customers and would pair well with your minimum viable product or service. If your organization is already offering paid subscriptions, try to come up with a free tier that provides potential buyers with great value and would encourage them to unlock the full power of what you can provide with a paid tier.

However, before making significant changes like adding a subscription model to your product or service offerings, we highly recommend running a pilot with a targeted audience first to evaluate how well things might go if you rolled out the changes to your entire customer base.

Landing page optimization

Less is more, at least for this one. Your landing pages shouldn’t have elements that would otherwise help your visitors navigate away from what you’re offering. Keep them streamlined. You can always direct users to visit other pages of your site after they’ve successfully converted. If any of your landing pages have elements like your navigation menu, now would be a good time to remove that functionality.

Blog/email subscriptions

We all have something to say, that’s for sure. However, if you feel like your audience isn’t connecting with you (e.g., you’re seeing high bounce rates and low times on page), think about switching tactics and posting different kinds of content. 

Varying between thought leadership and how-to articles or changing the way you visually present your content would be great ways to start testing your theory while keeping an eye on your engagement metrics. Remember that testing is an essential part of growth marketing!

As you do this, be sure to make it easily accessible for your visitors to subscribe to your blog and/or email updates. This could mean bumping up your subscription form fields on your blog to capture your readers’ attention while they’re in the midst of reading an article, as opposed to only giving them the opportunity to subscribe at the end or bottom of a content piece.

3. Improving customer retention

Customer churn

Customer churn, also known as attrition, is the rate at which customers stop doing business with you. There are plenty of websites out there that focus on reeling in new customers and funneling them down to make a sale, but you simply cannot afford to neglect your existing customers. Yes, the ones that trusted you and your business enough to already purchase and use your products and services.

Here’s a word that should get thrown around more often: delight! You wouldn’t believe how much value you can add for your customers exclusively related to what you offer. Think of bite-sized explainer videos, an FAQ section covering both basic and in-depth topics, offering continuous support to your customers with a dedicated ticketing system, providing your best clients with sneak peeks or exclusive access to new and exciting offerings you’re looking to beta test, etc. The sky's the limit once it’s clear that providing value shouldn’t stop once a deal is won. The best news is that your customers will prefer you over the competition because of it!

Brand advocacy

Growth marketing and a flywheel approach. When combined, they can easily supercharge an organization by providing a holistic way of taking care of the prospects that will eventually become customers, and even advocates, of your brand. When a customer feels outright nurtured throughout the buyer’s journey, they’ll fall in love with your brand.

Help them enough, and you will quickly become their go-to source for your specific solution lines. This will naturally transcend into brand loyalty, resulting in recurring orders that will positively impact the bottom line of your business. At the same time, that customer will gladly spread the word to others about the amazing customer experience your brand is delivering.

Customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost is calculated by dividing all the costs spent on acquiring more customers (e.g., marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the period the money was spent.

For example, if an organization spends $1,000 on marketing in a year and acquires 500 customers in that same year, the customer acquisition cost is $2.00.

Improving conversion rates, establishing a referral program, and implementing the right CRM technology are some of the most effective ways to make strides in lowering customer acquisition cost.

Customer lifetime value

Lastly, don’t forget to give back to the customers that have stuck with you through thick and thin. Setting up a rewards or loyalty program is often considered a best practice. Lifetime value is increased when a customer spends more on every transaction, and members of loyalty programs have been shown to generate 12% to 18% more revenue than customers who do not participate.

Loyalty rewards can include everything from points, gift cards, discounts, and swag to deals on early subscription renewals. Whatever you offer, keep your buyer personas in mind and start reinforcing the why behind what they purchase.

Growth Marketing and ROI

Successful growth marketing strategies have been employed over the past decade by industry-leading brands like Zapier, Tinder, Canva, and even Aviation Gin. The ROI highlight reels of those brands include such milestones as Canva getting 3,600 daily sign-ups and reaching 2 million users in the first two years of operating and Aviation Gin realizing a 18.5% compound growth rate from 2014 to 2019, the fastest of any spirit in the segment. Therefore, growth marketing has been proven to be the right tool for businesses looking to maximize ROI.