Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

How to Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy

How To Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy

According to 3Q Digital's Growth Marketing Survey Report, less than 1 in 5 marketing leaders have the structure in place to execute an effective growth strategy.

Without a plan to facilitate the continued growth of your company, you will be left vulnerable to changing market dynamics and a volatile customer base.

Having a concrete strategy for growth is the secret to overcoming internal and external barriers and building an effective, scalable growth marketing model that will sustain your business in the long term.

This article will show you how to create a growth-oriented marketing strategy to drive customer acquisition and retention.

Step #1. Define Your Vision

It's not enough to say you want to grow your business. You need to figure out what growth means for your company at the moment.

If you don't have a clear vision for what you want to achieve with growth marketing, you will end up chasing the wrong things, getting distracted, wasting resources, and taking forever to hit milestones.

So you need to decide which target business goals your growth strategy will support within a set timeline. This way, it will be easier to stay on track and measure your progress. For example, your goal might be to:

  • Increase newsletter signups by 10% every month
  • Grow cart value and website conversions by 25% in four months
  • Break into x and z new markets by year's end
  • Generate 30% more revenue every quarter for two years

The more SMART your vision is, the better.

Source: Breeze. A graphic showing that SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Step #2. Establish Success Metrics

Your growth marketing efforts will likely involve both digital marketing and traditional marketing tactics, so there are going to be all kinds of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can track. But not all of them are going to be important to you. 

Your job is to identify the key growth metrics you will use to determine how well you are progressing toward the goals you set earlier. Some examples of metrics you can set for different goals include:

Goal

Metrics

Acquire new customers

Click-Through Rate (CTR) on paid media campaigns, email marketing open/CTR, landing page conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, etc.

Increase revenue

Customer lifetime value, monthly/annual recurring revenue, average revenue per user, customer lifecycle, revenue churn, etc.

Step #3. Research Customers and Competitors

Now that you know what areas of your business you want to grow, it's time to begin gathering data to help you get there. 

Start by understanding who your ideal and existing customers are. Dig into their pain points, behaviors, and entire customer journey. Figure out which customers use your services the most and which ones you generate the most revenue from. What characteristics set them apart?

Look at your competition or businesses in a similar niche that are experiencing tremendous growth and see what you can learn from their strategies. Pay attention to what differentiates your brand from theirs, then leverage that to blaze past the competition.

The information you glean from your research will help you shape your growth marketing plan, identify market gaps that you can fill, find ways you can better serve your customers, and position your brand to claim a bigger market share.

Step #4. Brainstorm Potential Strategies

Growth strategies aren't going to fall into your lap; you have to come up with ideas for how to connect with your customers, improve your speed to lead time, and make your brand a market leader.

Don't limit the strategy brainstorming process to your growth marketing team alone. Source for ideas from people across the organization. Additionally, use social listening to discover what your target audience is saying about your product and competitors, then harvest their suggestions or build on interesting ideas.

Step #5. Choose Tactics in Line With Your Goals

All the strategies you came up with in the last step won't be winners, and you probably won't have the time or resources to try them all out, even if you want to. 

Your energies should be focused on the tactics that align with the objectives you have set and are equipped to drive the business growth you want within the timeline you are working with.

Once you identify your top-performing strategies and channels, double down on your efforts and focus on optimizing them.

Step #6. Budget, Execute, and Evaluate 

When creating a budget for your growth marketing efforts, don't get too hung up on what it will cost. Instead, consider the value that it will generate for your brand and factor that into your calculations. Don't forget to factor in the cost of whatever growth marketing platform you will use — e.g., Hubspot.

Once you have allocated the amount of money you can afford and intend to spend to implement your growth plan, all that's left is to put it into action and start reaping the rewards.

As you execute your growth marketing strategy, diligently monitor the results you are getting so you can pinpoint new trends and know what's working for you, what needs to be adjusted, and the tactics to move away from.

Want to Jump Start Your Growth Marketing? Connect With Matter Made

Devising, executing, and tracking the performance of a sustainable growth strategy is key to building a successful business that is constantly growing and beating the competition.

Matter Made helped Productboard achieve deeper market penetration for their product and 99% month-on-month enterprise lead growth using a five-point omnichannel integrated campaign.

Want to turn your marketing initiatives into a similar relentless growth engine? Let's talk.

Blog Post

Growth

Demand Generation

Blog Post

How To Leverage Growth Marketing

Traditional marketing is where brands broadcast a one-size-fits-all marketing message describing the product’s features. It is expensive, broad, and doesn’t consider the unique requirements of the customer.

This doesn’t work well for budding businesses that are targeting a particular niche and have a limited marketing budget.

Enter growth marketing

Growth marketing focuses on sending personalized customer-centric messages to the target audience explaining how the product will give them the value they are looking for.

In this article, you’ll learn what makes growth marketing unique, its strategy and characteristics, and how you can leverage it.

Growth Marketing Vs. Regular Marketing

Growth marketing attracts prospects, keeps them hooked, and turns them into loyal buyers. With techniques such as content marketing and lead nurturing, customers are nudged through the funnel until they make a purchase. 

Various marketing channels are auto-optimized through the latest tools and data-backed processes for sustainable growth. The primary advantage of growth marketing is that it nurtures customer relationships and increases your average customer lifetime value.

Traditional marketing approaches include ideation of marketing operations, publishing the ad copy and design, implementing Call-To-Actions (CTAs), outlining the ad spend for the campaign, and so on. 

All these efforts follow a traditional “set it and forget it” strategy. This strategy is great for increasing brand awareness by focusing on the top of the sales funnel.

The image below highlights the difference between traditional and growth marketing.

Source: Mondial Trends. A graphic showing the differences between traditional and growth marketing.

What a Growth Marketing Strategy Includes

Market Penetration

Growth marketers exclusively focus on the niche where you offer products/services or look for potential customers in your competitors' niche to penetrate the market better.

This growth hacking technique pushes brands to look for differentiators. Here, growth marketers answer two specific questions:

  1. What sets you apart from your competition?
  2. What are the specific areas you are better than your rivals?

Strategic Collaborations and Partnerships

Growth marketing teams facilitate rapid growth by finding and teaming up with other brands that offer products your target audience uses — for instance, telecom providers partnering with smartphone manufacturers.

Apart from keeping customer acquisition costs low, this strategy could get you lots of new customers and result in sustainable growth. Sometimes, you might have to create new products or services to form a partnership.

Market Development

This strategy involves running growth marketing campaigns where you advertise the products or services to new markets to facilitate demand generation. It is done in two ways:

  1. Targeting new niches and buyer personas.
  2. Moving to new geographic regions.

Product Development

Your product development growth strategy has to be tailored to your brand’s specific needs. To attain rapid growth, you should diversify your marketing efforts to find creative solutions in the following ways:

  • Product Updates. Build on what you have (this is also great for customer retention). 
  • New Products. A great way to enter new markets and target different user personas.

Characteristics of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Data-driven

Before growth marketers invest in a new marketing tactic aiming for rapid growth, the idea has to be backed by data. As growth marketing tactics involve taking risks, intuitions and “do this because competitors are too” have no place.

Read: “How to Create a Successful Growth Marketing Strategy.”

Product Focused

Your business needs to consistently improve its product to remain competitive in the market. Whether it is adding more features or functionalities, your product needs to evolve with the changing needs of your target audience. 

Growth marketing facilitates this by collecting data that can guide this product development and keep your target audience updated about the values you offer.

Limited fear of failure

Apart from being data-driven, the high success rate of growth marketing can be attributed to the diversification of efforts. With multiple marketing strategies at play at once, the best growth marketers keep a close eye on the numbers and scale up the efforts that have the highest marketing ROI.

Storytelling

Considering our endless appetites for stories, growth marketers use a story where a person with similar problems to the target audience gets their problem solved with their product. This makes the brand’s message more realistic and relatable, motivating more prospects to make a purchase.

Retargeting

Retargeting reminds your website visitors, prospects, leads, and customers about the value your product offers. This also keeps the customer acquisition costs low.

Should You Hire a Growth Hacker or Outsource Growth Marketing to an Agency?

Having an in-house growth marketer has the following pros:

  1. They will be familiar with your product and processes completely.
  2. 100% dedication towards your brand growth.
  3. You can gain a lot of insights into your industry.

However, it is challenging for the following reasons:

  1. It's expensive to hire new professionals, get new tools, and set up new growth marketing strategies.
  2. After some time, they could run out of ideas by falling into a "creative rut".
  3. You still have to pay your growth marketing team even if you pause your strategy. 

Growing brands with a limited budget risk a lot in this scenario.

In these instances, outsourcing growth marketing to an established agency such as Matter Made is ideal because:

  1. You get experienced, accountable professionals.
  2. It’s cost-efficient; pay until you are leveraging their services.
  3. You will be kept in the loop at every stage through timely reports.
  4. You can reinvest the saved resources elsewhere.
  5. You get expertise from successful growth marketers. 

Growth Hacking, Demand Generation, and Matter Made

Matter Made has helped product-led companies like Dropbox and Loom achieve hypergrowth through demand generation, product-led growth, and bespoke growth strategies

Our seasoned marketing team can help your brand achieve similar results.

Interested in knowing what a growth marketing strategy brings to the table for your brand? Let’s talk.

Ready to drive efficient demand?

LET’S TALK
© 2024
Sign up for our email newsletter to receive the latest marketing insights and news.