You’ve invested endless hours in your startup. But without a plan to grow what you’ve built, streamline it, and take it to the next phase, that labor is in vain. Growth marketing is a crucial piece of the success puzzle for any business. It focuses on agility and leveraging analytics to make more data-driven decisions.
Ultimately, the goal is to develop scalable systems that grow with you — not hold you back.
However, the truth is: that’s easier said than done—many people struggle to achieve this scalable efficiency. You have to get the most out of your growth marketing strategy to get there. Optimization isn’t a stretch goal; it’s a must. This article walks you through several ways to optimize your growth marketing strategy.
1. Know Growth Marketing Isn’t Growth Hacking
“Growth hacking” — it’s a catchy term made for social media. And it’s a valid approach to growth. With that said, it’s distinctly different from growth marketing. And this difference matters when you’re focusing on optimization and growth.
Growth hacking sets its sites primarily on feeding the top of the funnel as fast as you can. You want to generate rapid growth in the least time possible — often at any cost. But growth hacking alone can lead to lost customer trust. Your company struggles to keep up with the demand generated so quickly. You don’t have the infrastructure or the agility to get the most out of these new customers.
One of our partners is a growth marketing agency that consistently advertises that when it comes to growth there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all strategy. Projects need to be focused on results for that particular company. That way, it can build and execute effective strategies around them. This requires experimentation, testing, analytics, and willingness to pivot with industry trends and customer preferences.
The end result is a stronger relationship with customers that pays off in dividends. This bond translates to a firmer foundation on which to increase customer lifetime value, generate promoter activity, and grow, grow, grow.
2. Identify Who You’re Losing
It may seem counterintuitive to focus on customers who are not converting. But this is a critical step to optimization. And it can change over time. Utilize your metrics-based data to identify what percentage of visitors become potential customers. Which visitors are you losing right out of the gate?
It’s essential to evaluate this at every stage of your marketing funnel. It all starts with that initial, casual engagement when you’re trying to build brand awareness. And it progresses through to customer retention rates and beyond. Each of these stages provides you with a golden opportunity to increase your number of customers and how much they spend. Optimizing at each stage is how you maximize your return on investment as a whole.
Of course, you want to focus on the customers you’re winning over. But you also need to know where those other visitors are going.
Sure, some of them are coming back. They may be back several times before they take the next step. However, others are not finding what they’re looking for and they’re going to the competition. Yet others will never become customers. This may lead you to speculate if your marketing attracts people who aren’t your target audience.
If you are attracting the wrong audience, you’re likely wasting precious budget on it! Reaffirm who it is you want to reach. What does the data say about their challenges, goals, and preferences? Re-focus your marketing efforts on that ideal audience.
3. Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
An optimized growth marketing strategy knows what it plans to accomplish. But it also has the means to measure that success. This comes in the form of key performance indicators (KPI). These are those objectives that most closely track to business success.
The truth is that growth marketing includes many digital marketing practices. You’ll find so much you want to track and do to grow. This can drag you and your team down quickly if you haven’t taken the time to identify the most important metrics.
Once you’ve established these KPIs, create a specific plan to improve each one. Track the change in that key measure over time. Experiment to see what moves that measure in what direction. Note how that number correlates to big business goals like revenues, profits, and cutting customer acquisition costs.
Above all, if it doesn’t track to business success, reevaluate if that’s a KPI in the first place.
4. Try New Innovative Strategies
There are a lot of new marketing and advertising tactics happening everyday. For example, if you are a consumer brand manager then check out newer ways to advertise your product in retail stores. Cooler Screens is an innovative company that reimagines the shopper’s retail experience through visual screens on the coolers at brick and mortar stores.
This is one example of a newer strategy that brand managers are using to connect with their customers. Although we are moving to a more digital world, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t big opportunities to innovate with unique shopping experiences in person.
To be successful at growth marketing, you have to think about ways where your brand will stand out above others. Trends are taking us towards a more visual and interactive world so don’t miss out on these new opportunities to get your brand ahead of others.
5. Make A/B Testing a Way of Life
Test. Scale. Test. Scale. Make it a part of everything you do. A/B testing isn’t just for ads. Consistent A/B testing helps you get where you want to go faster. It leaves little question about why a certain email, post, or page worked — or didn’t.
A/B testing involves changing one thing on a content asset while controlling for other variables. That’s just good science. See which performs better and then take that knowledge to scale your efforts.
To optimize for growth, A/B test things like:
- Button colors and shapes
- Headlines
- Ways of communicating the same message
- Your Call to Action (CTA) wording
- Your value proposition (Why should people buy from you or buy now?)
- Traffic sources
- Social proof elements (e.g., TrustPilot Logo, Twitter Follower Plug-in, Google Rating)
6. Streamline Across Marketing Channels
In marketing, the numbers matter. But at the end of the day, you’re in the people business, not the numbers business. Omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing that builds a community of loyal, engaged, and active customers and fans.
Your customers will see you and interact in multiple places. But they’ll only do so if you build a presence across channels where they hang out. Omnichannel marketing is the act of creating a uniform brand presence across many channels like display ads, Facebook, TikTok, and email.
By doing so, you create more opportunities for people to engage. You further their personalized customer journey with your brand.
Now, omnichannel may sound overwhelming. How can you possibly be everywhere at once? The truth: you can’t.
But keep in mind the many ways to optimize for growth discussed thus far. For starters, marketing automation and A/B testing help you streamline your processes so you can get the most out of every piece of content across channels. Again, you’re doing more with less and winning at growth.
7. Invest in Customer Retention
On average, repeat customers spend 33% more on subsequent purchases. It’s no wonder retention by a meager five percent can increase profits by 25 to 95%.
Keeping customers is the key to growth. But how do you keep a customer?
Invest in their customer experience across channels. Create helpful content your audience needs and wants from you. Marketing is never just about selling a product or service. Instead, build a brand community your audience wants to be a part of. Take stock of your current content inventory and find the areas where you can optimize your existing content, or create new relevant content to fit the needs of your customers.
Make sure you’re attracting the right audience from the start by evaluating how people respond. Align your marketing, sales, and service messages with a quality product to delight customers again and again. Keep them coming back. If they’re getting what they’re looking for here, why would they go anywhere else?
8. Actively Create Promoters
This increased value comes in the form of added spending by one customer and the power that the customer has to influence others. As long as the bulk of your revenues relies on new customers and, to a lesser extent, returning customers, you’ll struggle to grow.
It’s similar to Robert Kiyosaki’s statement about investing from his book Rich Dad Poor Dad. As he points out, a rich person doesn’t work for money. They make money work for them. Similarly, the real profit and growth potential is not in acquiring customers. It’s in turning those customers into your brand ambassadors. You’re making them work for you.
But this isn’t free labor by any means. Growing companies accomplish this by providing value through helpful content. Know who your customers are. And employ analytics to track how they respond to your content. Together, these allow you to optimize your growth marketing content.
Optimizing for Growth Starts Here
If you’re not growing, you’re not reaching your full potential. Growth marketing is vital to make that happen. It focuses on achieving an outcome. This certainly involves delighting customers to increase retention, lifetime value, and brand ambassador activity.
To optimize your strategy, you must define and track the right KPIs. Engage in A/B testing. And build a consistent presence across marketing channels. Automate wherever you can to get more from your marketing efforts.
What other ways have you found to optimize your marketing strategies for growth? Comment below.
