Marketing involves the attempts a brand makes to attract potential customers and clients. The usual strategies focus on the top of the funnel where brands invite people in and sales pitches begin. Of course, it’s vital that you attract a high volume of people here. The more prospects you draw, the better the odds for converting significant numbers into customers.
Growth marketing, on the other hand, aims to entice people down the entire length of the funnel. The ultimate goal isn’t merely to close a sale. Instead, these strategies are designed to build loyal customers who end up becoming ambassadors for your brand. You’re building a long-term relationship, not just a sale.
You know it’s far easier and less expensive to keep customers than it is to interest an audience in becoming one. That’s why you should be setting up your brand for growth, not just initial sales. It’s an enduring process that requires constant care and feeding, but it’s worth the effort. Here are a few tips you can use when building your brand’s growth-oriented marketing strategy.
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Partner for Success
Step one in building a growth-oriented marketing strategy is to task the right people to lay the foundation. Unless you’re a large brand with an in-house team of marketing pros who have done this before, you’ll need help. Find a partner with the right expertise and experience.
Remember, this type of strategy needs to always be a prime focus of your marketing efforts. Having a team that’s dedicated to doing nothing more than creating and executing a smart strategy is key to success. Growth marketing is a long game, not a one-time campaign.
When you’re ready to build your strategy, look for the growth marketing agency that doesn’t just get how growth strategies work. Find the one that aligns what it does with the culture, context, and goals of your brand. A lot is riding on how they do their job.
The growth strategy agency you partner with may not have pros on your internal payroll. But with the right one, you won’t notice a difference. These are the people who are responsible for pulling customers down the funnel. Make sure they’re also pulling for your brand.
Know Your Target Audience Well
Knowing your target audience may seem like an unnecessary tip. After all, brands can’t market to a demographic unless they know enough about them to determine they’re a good fit. Knowing your target audience well, however, is where some brands are missing the mark.
The digital nature of marketing presents unprecedented opportunities to fully understand who your audience is. You need to understand their pain points, their wishes and wants, their ambitions and plans like they were your own. That kind of intimacy is critical to building a successful growth-oriented marketing strategy.
Market research is essential. However, just surveying customers and prospects and even asking questions in focus groups isn’t enough. Audience engagement has become remarkably easy for brands to do. Customers can volunteer a tremendous amount of information in two-way conversations. That dialog should shape your brand’s content, paid advertising, and even the features of your product itself.
Once you’re responding to your customers, you can begin to recognize the best prospects in their reflection. Your messaging becomes relevant and the channels you should be using to disseminate it become obvious. The customers you form relationships with and draw to the bottom of the funnel pave the way for more to follow. And that, after all, is the goal.
Take Ownership of Your Industry
What does it mean to own your industry? If you’re Google, it means holding that 90-plus percent share of the search engine market. For most companies, however, it means being recognized among competitors, customers, and prospects as being authoritative, trustworthy, and adaptable.
Every element of your growth marketing strategy should be designed to bolster your brand’s prominence in its industry. That means each element should aim to position your brand as an industry authority by developing content that’s relevant, instructional, and thought-provoking. Not only will such content raise your search rankings, but it will also inform and delight your customers.
Industry credibility is built with a savvy digital PR strategy that establishes your brand as the go-to source for information. Digital PR puts you into a different arena from more direct marketing efforts. It’s the best marketing money can’t buy. And no matter where people look, they’ll see your brand.
Once you are achieving success with the elements of your growth marketing strategy, your brand will become increasingly more visible. That’s in your SERP results, PPCs, social media clicks, ratings, and reviews, and more. Competitors want to be you. Prospects want to know you. And customers want to maintain that long-term relationship with your brand that you need for continued growth.
Ready, Set, Grow
Marketing is designed to raise awareness of your brand, draw prospects to your website, and initiate contact is vital to your success. But if you want to grow your customer base over time, you have to give them reasons to continue down the sales funnel. That’s where growth-oriented marketing strategies come into play.
Let your marketing efforts plant the seed. Water those customers and give them some light and watch them grow your brand’s success.
